Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden on incels, addiction and fatherhood

“I think I might be an incel.”

It’s the first line Jack Lowden speaks in The Fifth Step, a two-hander play that focuses on the relationship between a recovering alcoholic and his sponsor.

“The line is a bomb – a hot button thing that’s really funny,” says Martin Freeman, who stars alongside Lowden.

From the opening line, audiences may think they know what kind of show they are about to see, but what follows in the 90-minute play isn’t a social lecture, rather a darkly funny conversation between two men – one seeking redemption, the other offering it.

“The incel line doesn’t sum the play up at all,” says Freeman. “It might touch on that, but it has a lot of other components too.”

Lowden agrees, describing it as a “current and easy label” that risks simplifying a piece about shame, honesty and the need to be understood.

Written by David Ireland and directed by Finn den Hertog, The Fifth Step sees Lowden play Luka, a newcomer to Alcoholics Anonymous, while Freeman is an older sponsor guiding him through the 12-step recovery programme.

The play was met with rave reviews by critics during its West End run earlier this year and it is now being released in cinemas.

“It’s actually very TV and camera friendly,” Lowden explains. “It’s just two actors in an open space and there’s no complicated staging.”

“Really the only thing that was different was that we had mics on,” adds Freeman. “The cameras are so well hidden that it’s not intrusive at all.”

Both actors were drawn to the project for the writing’s precision and nerve.

Freeman says he wasn’t in the market to do a play when he received the script just before Christmas but it was “so enjoyable and some things come along that are too good not to do, and this was one of those”.

Lowden, best known for Slow Horses and The Gold, has long admired Ireland’s work and says it’s “purposefully very shocking and funny”.

“That’s what I love to go to the theatre for, I get quite bored unless a show is one of those two things.”

We talk about how the play explores the confusion around modern masculinity and fatherhood, something both actors are acutely aware of – Freeman shares a teenage son and daughter with his ex-wife Amanda Abbington, while Lowden has just welcomed his first child with Saoirse Ronan.

“I think about the messages young people are getting all the time,” Freeman says. “There’s so much that’s very positive and hopeful in the world but there’s also so much that’s trash, awful and frightening.

“It can feel like a minefield sometimes and I’m very alive to those things, but I try not to lose my mind over it.”

Given how many topics the play touches upon, it’s impossible for the actors to give it one neat label or find one overarching theme.

“I don’t think this play is about the male experience of anything – it explores the relationship between an older and a younger man, but if you take ‘man’ out of that, it’s just a generational exploration of shame,” Lowden says.

In fact, the 35-year-old actor says he finds it “reductive how society pigeonholes a piece of art straight away”, referencing how some people have focused too much on the incel culture aspect of the play rather than “seeing it as two people talking very openly”.

The Fifth Step is Lowden’s first play since 2018 and critic reviews from the theatrical run praised his performance – The Times said he was “staggeringly good as a young loner, Luka, all jitters and tics and swear words, who is trying to pull himself out of an alcoholic spiral”.

Similarly, The I’s Isobel Lewis said Lowden’s greatest triumph is that “despite Luka’s propensity for violence, extreme misogyny and casual homophobia, he’s still ultimately empathetic, someone you come to understand as a product of his environment”.

A four-star review from The FT summarised the play as “interweaving serious questions with crisply funny dialogue and combining the absurd with the profound”.

Freeman says it’s that balance of darkness and humour that makes The Fifth Step so unique.

“It’s shocking and violent, and people say things to each other that are horrible and funny in the same beat.”

Ultimately, the Sherlock actor wants “people to take enjoyment out of it” and doesn’t want an audience to see this as a play that’s good for them, but one that’s interesting and enlightening.

He tells me that every evening during the play’s run at @sohoplace, the audiences would “let out an enjoyable sigh, as if someone had just had a really good meal”.

Now, as The Fifth Step makes its way from the stage to cinema screens, Freeman and Lowden are hoping for that same collective sigh after each screening.

The Fifth Step will be in cinemas globally from 27 November – with select preview screenings across the UK on 18 November.