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The job of England manager has often been labelled as a poison chalice by those in football and the media such is the weight of expectation placed on the role.
But for acclaimed stage and screen actor Joseph Fiennes the job of playing the England manager, first on stage and now on television, was quite the opposite.
Fiennes first played Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s play Dear England at The National Theatre in London in 2023 and takes up the role again as that stage production is being transferred into a four-part series on the BBC.
In one of the opening scenes outgoing manager Sam Allardyce describes the job of leading the England team in less than favourable terms, but Fiennes thoroughly enjoyed playing Southgate on stage and now screen.
“Oh no, it’s a godsend and a gift,” Fiennes tells FourFourTwo. “It's a blessing and I'm full of gratitude for it.”
Dear England covers the time from Southgate taking the England job in 2016, through the 2018 World Cup in Russia, onto the Euros final in 2021 and finally the quarterfinal exit at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and then finishes in Berlin at the Euro 2024 final.
But while set in the world of Southgate, England and football, the story also tackles the topical subjects of national identity, racism and toxic masculinity.
And when Fiennes first got the call from his agent to go and discuss a new project with The National Theatre, playing Gareth Southgate was the furthest thing from his mind.
“When my agent rang me up and said The National wanted me for a project, I did think it was going to be Shakespeare or Chekhov or some classic epic,” Fiennes said.
“I rolled up and I got given a script about Gareth Southgate and I was surprised.
“But there is that Shakespearean sense, a bit like Henry V, there's the sort of the ageing corps, the kind of bringing the troops together. You could say there's elements of that in this.”
Fiennes is no stranger to playing real life characters, having played William Shakespeare in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love and more recently Richard Ratcliffe in 2025’s BBC drama Prisoner 951 about the story of Nazanin Zaghari, the British-Iranian who was imprisoned on spying charges for six years in Iran between 2016 and 2022.
So does playing a real life character bring its own pressures to the role?
Fiennes said: “You want to do justice to people that have got, who have very real, vivid, painful stories, and so there's a responsibility.
“As there is a responsibility to Gareth and a responsibility to a football loving nation and audience, so there are those pressures that you want to get right.
“But James's play is a fictitious account of the FA and behind closed doors, so while there's a conceit of these players, we are saying this is our version of what we think might happen behind closed doors.
“But that is built on good research and knowledge and as an actor there is this little sense of freedom where we're going to get to our sense of a truth, an authentic emotional truth through fantasy, just as much as through fact.”
The challenge of taking a very successful and popular play and transforming it into a mini-series is something that was not lost on Fiennes either.
Although he believes the BBC is the right home for Dear England rather than on a streaming platform.
He added: “There was that sense of nervousness about how to calibrate it into a different medium.
“The theatre was at times very broad and it's comical at times, of course it reflected on all the subjects that are really important and we still maintain in the drama.
“I was nervous about the close up of the camera and for everyone at home to feel like they were watching a good version of Gareth in order to get them over the line.
“Then cogitate on the bigger themes beyond just football and Gareth, which is the high pressure for elite athletes, racism, toxic masculinity, national identity, what it is for young players that may be second generation that represent their flag, their country, about what that flag actually means to them.
“I was nervous, but we use a lot of archive which is great, so bedding in a lot of archive footage really helped, and, I think I tempered the performance from the play to fit the medium of film and television.
“When it was commissioned the writer James Graham brilliantly went to the BBC and didn't sell off to Netflix, which we're all happy about, because it feels like the right place and the right home for Dear England.”
Joseph Fiennes and Jodie Whittaker star in James Graham’s ‘Dear England' which is on BBC One and iPlayer from Sunday, May 24
