A MOTHER OF A SHOW
Breeders star admits parenting is ‘maddening and constantly funny’
Breeders
Mondays, FX Canada
Daisy Haggard can’t deny it: she’s a coronavirus prepper. “Oh God, yeah,” the actress says, “the delivery arrived and my husband thought I’d gone completely mad. But I’ve just taken this whole thing as an excuse to have a big shop. I always like to have the house ready for a party at any time.”
What could we find in her COVID-19 bunker? “Well, quite a lot of wine, which I think is always helpful in an apocalypse, then tins of beans, a bit of pasta, some nappies and Frazzles (a bacon-flavour corn-based snack). Loads of Frazzles. Honestly, if we’re all forced indoors, just come around and we’ll have a party ... You don’t need to bring anything.”
Haggard, 41, is open, cheery and lightning quick to laugh — mainly at herself. We’re meeting in a hotel library in central London, where she carefully pours two cups of ginger tea (“this’ll protect us for the day”). But at the moment she is spending the majority of her time at home where she can be found writing, looking after her daughters — Elsie, 5, and Wendy, 2.
Shortly after Wendy’s birth, Haggard was at home when she was asked to audition for a new sitcom. She couldn’t think of anything worse. “I thought, ‘I’ve just had a baby, I’ve got big milky boobs and I’m so tired. Why would I get it?’”
That why isn’t too tricky to fathom. Apart from being a fine television comedy actor (as displayed in dozens of credits, from the Showtime series Episodes to last year’s British comedy Back to Life, which she co-wrote), her situation was perfect: the part in question was a tired and grumpy mother of young children in London.
Reluctantly, Haggard had her husband, the musician Joe Wilson, hold up the lines, and she just read them — tiredly, grumpily, barely acting — aloud to a camera. She got the role.
Breeders follows the lives of Paul, played by Martin Freeman, and Haggard’s Ally, as they cope with juggling two young children, full-time careers, aging parents, a mortgage and their own relationship. Like Motherland (streaming on Amazon Prime and Sundance Now) and Catastrophe (streaming on Amazon Prime), it shows the realities of parenting with a darkly comic honesty.
Written by The Thick of It’s Simon Blackwell and Chris Addison, it’s even edgier than its recent forebears. Postnatal depression is covered, there is what the show calls “grief sex,” and a lot of swearing.
After watching it, you might not be quite sure you want children ... “Yes well, I call it the ‘condom show,’” Haggard says, cheerfully. “I love it because it shows parenting fails, rather than Instagram parenting.
“Those shots of people doing yoga with a baby balanced on their cervix while they sip detox tea ... you think, ‘How did you do that? You have a flat stomach but it’s only three months? How come your baby never cries?’ That’s everywhere. So it’s nice to see the other thing.”
For Haggard, real parenting is “joyful, maddening and constantly funny — I’d recommend it.” It’s also been surprisingly productive. In her 20s, she’d tell herself that she couldn’t possibly write because she had to see friends or go out for drinks.
“It wasn’t an immediate thing. When you have your first child you wander around for six months going, ‘Who am I again?’ But then it kicked in that if I didn’t want to be away from them — and I didn’t — I had to just get things done.”
It’s no coincidence, she says, that she wrote Back to Life — about a prisoner freed after 18 years and attempting to integrate back into her old life — after becoming a mother, and she is plowing through scripts for a second season already. “I almost had too much time before, I didn’t know how to focus it. Now it’s like, got an hour? Do it in an hour.”
Haggard is the youngest of six, her parents the television director Piers Haggard and the Australian glass artist Anna Sklovsky. She was the only of her siblings to go into acting when she auditioned for The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, directed by her father, at 17.
“He didn’t actually want me to be in it, but was auditioning people at the house and I just read along. The producer asked me to, and Dad gave in,” she says. He didn’t go easy on his daughter, making her do 95 takes of one scene, and banning her from taking any more roles until she’d finished school. They both had anxieties about nepotism.
Haggard’s parents still live nearby, and help with child care. Wilson’s father is also local, but his mother, Sandy, died in 2016. Eight weeks earlier, aged 66, she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and given three months to live.
She chose to end her life at Dignitas, the Swiss assisted dying clinic. Wilson accompanied her, and later wrote an album celebrating her life.
The children, she says, played a key role in breaking the tension of the death.
“We were laughing. The day Joe came home (from Switzerland), our one-and-a-half-yearold pulled down her pants in the kitchen and just did a poo on the floor. It was strangely liberating.”