Meditation helped me cope with success of Fleabag
ON TV she’s the prickly uptight older sister of Fleabag. But in real life Sian Clifford has learned how to ‘celebrate a softer’ side.
The 37-year-old actress, who plays Claire in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge sitcom, has revealed that she launched her own wellness website after having a breakdown.
And she says it later helped her to cope with the ‘overwhelming’ success of the cult BBC comedy.
‘ I started running meditation classes in London,’ she told Porter magazine. ‘But also, I had a breakdown, because I had three jobs: One for the money and two for love. And
‘It could have been overwhelming’
I gave myself six weeks to create, launch and brand this whole thing.’
Miss Clifford launched Still Space in 2015 in an effort to ‘ destroy the delusion that business and burnout equal success’.
She said she had been inspired by watching Star Wars. ‘I took myself to see Star Wars and I swear to God that it saved my life, the energy it gave me,’ she said.
‘I was doing absolutely nothing. And that was the true reason that Still Space existed. I wrote the name Still Space at the top of the page and it felt like a gift. It’s not until you find yourself on the floor, and you can’t get up, that you deal with it.’
Addressing the success of Fleabag, she said: ‘If I hadn’t been in that place, it could have been extremely unsettling and overwhelming, because we never could have anticipated what happened to Fleabag last year.’
She said she wants to continue collaborating with Miss Waller-Bridge, who won a Golden Globe for the comedy, ‘because it is so easy and fluid’ and they have an ‘implicit trust’.
Miss Clifford will next be seen playing Diana Ingram in ITV series Quiz, a dramatisation of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? coughing scandal.