I’ve never been through what David and Victoria went through. I tried to put myself in David’s head. I felt at times I was going through what he went through. I wanted the audience to feel what he felt. I hope that comes through.” Wherever I went, I got abused every day,” he said. “To walk down the street and see people look at you a certain way, spit at you, abuse you, come up to your face and say some of the things that they said, that’s difficult. I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I was a mess.” What Stevens didn’t realise when he took the gig was what a diverting cast of characters he had at his disposal. Not just the perma-surly Keane, but French philosopher Eric Cantona and Manc motormouth turned wannabe Labour MP Gary Neville. “I wish I could have made 20 episodes, there’s so much great stuff. I mean, some of those guys. Paul Scholes – what an absolute dude.” That is a sentence I never expected to hear. In an interview with ITV in 2006, he said he could not stop acting on his compulsions despite having tried.

Because of the Hollywood writers’ strike, Stevens hasn’t been able to take acting gigs. Not that he hasn’t been busy. He’s beaten Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had two kids with his wife, the film-maker Alexis Bloom whom he married in 2017, and is currently executive producing her upcoming documentary about 60s It Girl Anita Pallenberg. It was “public bullying on another level,” Victoria said, saying that it left her husband “clinically depressed” and “broken.” The third reason is most telling. Stevens isn’t just some mug who doesn’t know the beautiful game. Although the Chicago-born Stevens will be a fan of the Cubs (baseball) and Bears (American football) until he dies, he also has something in his wardrobe that marks him out as a soccer stan: a collection of Ivory Coast football shirts. “I went to Stamford Bridge [home of Chelsea FC] and fell in love with Didier Drogba.” What were you doing there? “The first documentary I produced was Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos in 2006. At the time I didn’t know football. Then the producer, John [Battsek], takes me to see Chelsea play and, well, I fell in love. Stevens learned that Brian Cox, the Scottish actor who played Logan Roy, is friends with Ferguson and used that relationship to get on the good side of the famously irascible football manager. “Brian signed a copy of Fergie’s book which had just come out and I gave it to Sir Alex. That helped get more time with him. And he knew our show. He asked me ‘Why aren’t you going to do a fifth season?’ I told him because it’s over, man.” Hold on. Fergie? But isn’t the former Manchester United manager an avatar of Succession’s Logan Roy? “You’ve got him all wrong,” says Stevens. “I was really scared to meet him. But I came to love the guy.”

People think he’s this beautiful guy, that everything was handed to him. Not true. He worked his way up and he could have been crushed by what happened to him in 1998 – but he wasn’t. He’s one of the strongest people I know.” Both of them recall their first meeting and the early days of their fledgling relationship, meeting in car parks and kissing in cars in an attempt to keep it a secret. “It’s less seedy than it sounds,” Victoria quips. Coming full circle, the four-part documentary ends with him cooking with his family in a sunroom, a place where he “potters around” on a Saturday, spending the day grilling while watching football on his iPad. I clip the candle wax, I clean the glass, that’s my pet hate, the smoke around the inside of a candle,” he says. “I know, it’s weird.” For her part, Victoria says that “it was the hardest period” in their marriage because “it felt like the world was against us… and we were against each other.”

So how did it come to pass, with all due respect, that a know-nothing American was the right fit to tell the life story of England’s leading twinkle-toed pretty boy? Three reasons. First, Stevens is not just an actor, whose CV includes a notorious and regretted brown face performance in the 1986 film Short Circuit but also regular turns in Wes Anderson movies (most recently as Detective #1 in Asteroid City). He’s also a documentary-maker. His 2009 film about dolphin hunting in Japan, The Cove, won an Oscar. In 2010, he collaborated with DiCaprio on the climate crisis documentary Before the Flood.