‘Downton had me hooked’
that she’s still in her pyjamas. A selfconfessed Pollyanna, Fisher is a glasshalf-full kind of gal (‘I like to see life with rose-coloured glasses’). And whether it’s Trump’s toxic America or the Covid pandemic that’s triggered the apparent relocation of her family from LA to Australia, she will likely view it as a blessed homecoming.
Born in Oman to Scottish parents, Fisher moved to Oz aged six. A budding actress, she did her time on Home And Away before meeting Baron Cohen (below) at a party in 2002 and swishing off to Hollywood. As such, she’s adept at accents but Blithe Spirit presented her toughest challenge yet.
‘As an Aussie, doing a posh British accent while still trying to access the emotional life of the character was a nervewracking experience, terrifying,’ she admits.
‘Every day I spent an hour in my trailer just warming up my jaw because Australian comes from really far in the back of the throat and you open your mouth quite wide but with the English accent you push your lips forward and your tongue comes right out to the tip of your teeth.’
To crack 1930s poshospeak she studied Downton Abbey.
‘I watched some ahead of the shoot, then got hooked like everyone else and went completely down the rabbit hole and became obsessed,’ she says.
Her greatest compliment came when Downton’s Dan Stevens, who plays her husband in Blithe Spirit, told her that her dialect was ‘fine’.
‘It meant a lot as he comes from that world and I come from Summer Bay,’ she says. Much more impressively, she nailed Coward’s tricky comic timing. And if some of the spookier goings on during the shoot – doors mysteriously swinging open, power flickering on and off – led some to believe Coward’s ghost was haunting the set, he was surely pleased with Fisher’s turn.
She is, of course, a writer herself. Her best-selling
Marge In Charge children’s series is being made into a Nickelodeon series and she’s now working on another kids’ book ‘in honour of our late dog’.
Even so, she insists with what one suspects is typical modesty that ‘I am not a writer. I just do it for fun. I don’t graft at it for my living.’
Joyful Fisher likes to wear life lightly, a gift we could all do with right now. I ask if she will leave Metro with her favourite joke. Most comics hate being put on the spot with that one but she bounces up to the plate.
‘What do you call a teacher that farts a lot? A private toot-er!’ she guffaws. ‘It’s so stupid but I do love puerile humour and it always makes my family laugh.’
Blithe Spirit is out now on Sky Cinema