‘I was so cut off from everything around me and lacking in emotion – I could never live like that again’
It’s exactly two decades since The Office first arrived on our screens and it’s still the role Maesteg-born Rachel Isaac is most recognised for. But the childhood sexual abuse she suffered has cast a long shadow over both her career and life as a whole. She speaks to Laura Clements...
FROM the moment she walks into the pub to the moment we part ways three hours later, I feel like I’ve known Rachel Isaac all my life. To spend even the briefest time in Rachel’s company is like being picked up by a whirlwind, swept along by her ready smile, a rich and sonorous voice and an infectious laugh.
For those who know her as Trudy in the second series of the BBC comedy hit The Office, she has barely changed in appearance. If anything, she looks even younger than when she starred next to Ricky Gervais two decades ago.
Later, she tells me everything has, in fact, changed. Firstly, because her health “fell off a cliff”. Secondly, because of a very public revelation of years of sexual abuse as a child. Seemingly unconnected, both of these facts are actually intertwined in a way that not even the medical experts fully understand and which continue to affect her to this day.
Sitting in the back of the Old House 1147 pub in Maesteg, the town where she was born and raised, her voice resonates through the low-beamed rooms.
She used to work as a waitress at the pub in her teens, but Maesteg is no longer home for the 45-year-old actress – her life has been resolutely in London ever since she landed in the capital in her early 20s looking for work, fame and a good time.
It was early days in a seemingly successful career: “I was busy in my personal life and had a very active social life,” she said of her raucous days rubbing shoulders and working with the likes of Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan and Bob Mortimer. She “always brought the party”, she laughed, something she has always done ever since she was a schoolgirl.
“But I fell off my cliff after seven or eight years,” she said with a smile on her face but sadness in her eyes. She has barely been able to work since 2007.
Before we get into her personal life, we talk about The Office and how this summer marked 20 years since it first hit our screens. The brainchild of Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais, The Office premiered on July 9, 2001, to an initial lukewarm reception. The comedy centred around a hopelessly oblivious boss from hell, David Brent, and forever changed what audiences expected from sitcoms. Rachel joined in the second series, which saw the show go from cult status to mainstream.
It was probably one of the first flyon-the-wall mockumentary-style series to be made, Rachel said. “The Office changed the way we did comedy,” she said. “It made it more realistic and real people-orientated rather than gag-orientated.”
Shooting for the faux-documentary series was in a real office block in Teddington which gave it that genuine feel, Rachel added. Even the film crew itself was a documentary crew to make it as authentic as possible.
Rachel can remember there was even a working office next door: “They were all there, typing letters, and we were on the other side of the wall pretending to type letters,” she said.
Rachel played the office flirt, Trudy, who stood out as the only character who would challenge her boss to his face. There were parallels between the real-life Rachel and her fictional character in that Trudy was “a bit of a party girl and full of fun”. And that spilled over into filming, too: “We were having a laugh but we were also working,” she recalled.
With its iconic characters and classic lines, The Office became a beloved part of British TV and produced some hilarious cringe-comedy moments that are still favourites two decades later. None more so than the famous David Brent dance: “None of us knew what the dance would look like,” Rachel said. “There was no practice – it was a proper on-camera first take. I must admit, when it started, I actually couldn’t keep a straight face – so I’m less in that scene than I should’ve been because there was a lot of laughing going on.”
Most of the cast and crew were early on in their careers and lives. For Rachel, The Office was what really helped to cement her in the minds of the viewing public.
Having trained for three years to be an actor at the Manchester Metropolitan School of Acting, Rachel was picked up by an agent at a college showcase which brought film roles her way – firstly 1999’s Very Annie Mary with Ioan Gruffudd and Rachel Griffiths and then an arthouse film called The Lowdown where she met Sherlock actor Martin Freeman, who she went on to work with again in The Office. She also appeared alongside Faye Ripley and fellow Welsh actor Paul Rhys in ITV’s romance drama I Saw You, which she says was a “real boon” to her burgeoning career. After that, she was offered the job on The Office, which remains the “most iconic job” she’s done in her career and one she still gets recognised for, although not as much as she used to. It’s her voice, with its strong Welsh lilt, that makes people do a double-take, she said.
“They say, ‘I know that voice, that’s the girl from The Office,’” It happened a lot back in her heyday when she was a frequent and enthusiastic face in the bars and clubs of Soho. “I go through a phase where I think I’m anonymous again and then you get reminded that you’re not,” she said resignedly.
“I’ve taken so much time off I forget I even worked,” she added, only halfjoking.
After The Office, Rachel turned her hand to theatre, landing a job on Broadway and touring the US and Paris with the Greek tragedy Medea. Some stage and screen work followed before an invite to come back to Wales to work with Simon Harris in Ghost City, which saw another tour, this time around the UK and New York. This led to a stint on the Welsh-language TV drama Caerdydd with Hinterland’s creator Ed Thomas and then, in 2006, a run in Carrie’s War in the West End.
But appearing in Theatre Clwyd’s Two Princes in 2007 would be her last job. By then, the first signs of ME chronic fatigue syndrome were starting to show, although Rachel had no idea at the time.
Now she knows the ME, which manifests itself as debilitating chronic fatigue, is directly related to the three years of abuse that started when she was an eight-year-old schoolgirl. It’s hard to believe that while living the seemingly dream life of a comedic actress, Rachel was hiding a secret so terrible, she’d barely told a soul – she’d been systematically abused by the man married to her mother’s best friend.
While still in junior school, Rachel used to be looked after by her mother’s friend, a schoolteacher, on a Saturday morning after tap-dancing lessons. She should have been safe in their home, but Michael Batten exploited any opportunity to abuse Rachel when his wife left the room. The predatory paedophile slowly turned what was normal adult behaviour with a child into slightly sexual grooming stuff over time, Rachel said.
Finally, it culminated in repeated acts of sexual abuse. It was terrifying and it was so damaging. She never told a soul at the time. After decades of keeping it hidden, it finally caught up with her in her adult years.
As the ME took hold and details of the abuse slowly emerged, Rachel was referred to a cognitive analyst who specialised in the link between childhood sexual abuse and ME. At the time, flashbacks to the abuse were very real. Yet even as she told her therapist of the childhood abuse, she was still convinced it had nothing to do with her physical symptoms, she said.
But she slowly realised just how much the abuse had robbed her of her childhood and began to fully grasp how it had broken not just her spirit but her confidence too. She could no longer deny that the burden of carrying such a horrendous experience for two decades had made her ill.
The case ended up in court and, in December 2013, Batten, then aged 70, was convicted of indecent assault and gross indecency and jailed for 30
months. If the court case was supposed to bring closure, then it failed spectacularly.
“Facing up to the abuse, accepting the reality and the impact of the abuse, telling my family and allowing the police to handle the matter and then giving evidence in a crown court, I really thought that it would help put some kind of end to it,” Rachel said. Part of that acceptance included writing a 10-page letter to her abuser and receiving only his paltry apology in response.
“But it really didn’t,” she continued. “The pressure to draw a line under it and move on was intense. It doesn’t get better. It’s really hard to see the 10-year-old in the story. People assume time heals. But it’s too complicated for such an intellectual process of a court case to impact on the deep complex psyche that the abuse lives in.”
In essence, she’d been living with symptoms of PTSD ever since the abuse ended when she was 11. Quite simply, because of her age at the time, the abuse is wrapped up within the many layers of her persona: “I developed my character around it,” she explains, which was perhaps one of the reasons why she was always very desperate to be liked in her teenage years and early adulthood.
Outwardly, she was seemingly happy, outgoing, carefree – but inwardly her body was flooded with stress chemicals, working in overdrive to keep up appearances and, perhaps saddest of all, merely survive. It was inevitable it would fail at some point, her therapist told her in 2012, adding that most people would have crumbled sooner.
“He told me I’d had a pretty good run,” she said with an ironic laugh. She’d been stuck in a “high-alert mode” as her developing nervous system grew around the constant threat of abuse, Rachel said, until “it all fell apart 20 years later”.
“I started looking at the abuse from an adult point of view,” she explained. “Before it was a very childish view. I’d been tricked and threatened, but I began to realise the detail around the abuse.” She realised just how monstrous Batten had been. And, even more harrowing, she would still see him on Christmas Day and he even showed up at her father’s funeral in 2008.
The shame she had felt for so long gave way to the realisation she was keeping his secret for a reason she could no longer justify. She thought her silence had been protecting herself, but it dawned on her that she was only protecting her abuser and it was killing her.
“Keeping it hidden was no longer an option, the PTSD just blew up,” she said. “It was coming out in its own way.”
The therapist gave her “a really big key” to unlock the link between her trauma and her ME: “Initially, it’s very hard to accept you are stuck on your couch, unable to even put a cup of tea to your lips because 20 years earlier you were abused,” she said. “But my nervous system had finally given up the ghost after years of overdrive.”
She repeats a quote from a ME expert who told her “psychology is neurology in waiting”. It’s stuck with her throughout her quest to get better.
Rachel is fluent and authoritative when it comes to ME – not surprising given her 13-year struggle to get to grips with the illness. She’s been to numerous consultants, doctors and therapists and finally understands the link between her past trauma and her physical symptoms. It’s difficult to explain, she apologises, but I tell her that, actually, it makes perfect sense. There’s only so long you can live life at 110mph.
When she looks back to her early career, does she recognise that person in The Office?
“For me now, it does represent a time when things were a bit easier for me in my life and I was able to work and achieve things and have a semisuccessful personal life,” she said. “It was difficult living like that, I was living outside myself, unable to really feel anything. I don’t hanker after that because it’s not a good way to live, but this is harder.” When she says “this”, she means ME.
“ME is the pits – you can’t feel anything emotionally or physically and there are scary episodes where you’re just so weak you can’t move at all.”
Perhaps, surprisingly, she ranks ME as harder than both PTSD and depression: “When you’re suffering with PTSD I was manic and hyperactive, which is far from ideal but does mean I could get stuff done,” she said. “And with depression, you might be feeling low but at least you’re feeling something.
“It’s very difficult for people to understand how difficult it is, but when you’re unable to get off your couch – nobody sees that bit.” For someone who’s known as the person “sparkling in the room” and dancing on the tables, even she barely understands it herself.
For Rachel, it means she just takes each day as it comes: “These days I’m trying to live a full life in half the time,” she continued. “Nobody gets to see the really bad bits because I’m so locked away when I experience the worse symptoms. But even when I’m just about managing to get out and about I still work really hard to hide it. Because I’m really embarrassed that I’m ill.
“And, despite years of determination and effort, I can’t seem to fight it off or be better.”
She has become a strong advocate for those with the condition, which is often described as the “silent illness”. She is incredulous there is no ME specialist consultant in Wales.
She added: “The ‘putting on a show’ thing is also exacerbated by the wishes of others. Friends and family really don’t want any of this to be true for you. And they definitely want a different reality for you, for very good reasons of course. But I feel a real pressure to be okay, at least some of the time, because nobody can cope with the full-on grimness.”
Rachel gives herself to everything she does, right down to this interview. She listens intently to my questions, leaning forward slightly and looking directly at me through her striking blue eyes. Her answers are considered, weighted, honest and, at times, uncomfortably raw. Often she goes off on a tangent, but only to provide context and to give me a deeper understanding of her lived experience. There are many hilarious anecdotes. But she always comes back to the original point with an emphatic conclusion.
She tries to marry the seemingly contradictory idea of being able to feel nothing and give everything at the same time: “I was so cut off from everything around me and lacking in emotion – I could never live like that again,” she said. “I was so scared of feeling something, so if I was awake I had to be doing something really active.”
But acting was different in that she was merely the vessel for portraying others’ emotion and feeling. The work was already done for you, she said: “You can say the lines from something like Shakespeare and it will automatically sound emotional,” she said.
For the past five years, she’s not really known who she is, Rachel added – the first time she’s sounded unsure about anything during our chat. And even though she’s had the therapy and the treatment, the abuse and the illness still haunts her.
For someone who based her life on being outgoing, chatty and outwardly self-assured, it’s understandably hard.
Does she still think she’s a talented actress, I ask?
She pauses, thinking long and deep, before saying: “Yes, talented, maybe, but not able.” She clarifies what she means: “Because of the ME.”
Has getting to grips with the ME been cathartic, an epiphany even, that has allowed her to move on even a little bit? And is there any way she can come out of all this at peace with herself?
“There is sadness, loss and grief of my former life and all I missed out on the meaning of that life,” she said thoughtfully. “I can’t say I lived a superficial life, because I wasn’t a superficial person, but I would’ve liked to have noticed more and felt more. Looking back, I can see I wasn’t really in the room, I was just by the door, looking in.”
It was an innate survival strategy and, while it made her tough, it meant she was cut off from her emotions. It’s only now she’s recognised her body’s attempt to protect her from any more hurt and pain.
The ME still overwhelms her but she is now able to feel a range of emotions: “I can feel myself in the room now and connect with people and absorb other people’s energies and stories,” she added, which seems poignant for someone who has always brought so much energy to a room herself.
Perhaps determined to keep up appearances, despite what she’s said, Rachel doesn’t want to dwell on the negatives. She is “one of the lucky ones”, she said, having somehow managed to survive with “far less suffering than most in my shoes”.
“I think the secret ingredient is receiving the abundant love of my parents throughout my childhood,” she added.
It’s this generosity of spirit coupled with her frank sincerity – “if it’s in my mind, it’s out my mouth” – that makes me feel like we’ve known each other since before our longer-than-planned pub lunch.
It’s hard to marry the bubbly person in front of me with the wretchedness of ME, which Rachel explains so vividly. In 2016, after eight years away from acting and some intensive treatment, she seemed to have regained her health and Rachel made a concerted effort to get back to some semblance of her former life. For two “blissful years” she was able to work, travel and socialise just like she used to, until it slipped from her grasp.
“I was able to give it a go, but I did two years and then had a relapse,” she said. “I’m just coming out of that relapse now. I really thought I had cracked it after 2015, but the pressures of life and work and holding myself together so hard just resulted in a relapse.”