My husband and I are in the same industry – but he gets paid more
Good screen roles for women and working motherhood remain a challenge for ‘Mum’ star Lisa Mcgrillis, she tells Rosa Silverman
As television sitcoms go, Mum has been quite the slow-burner. After making a quiet entrance on to BBC Two three years ago, it grew in renown and critical acclaim until, this spring, it found itself the bearer of three Bafta nominations.
A subtly drawn and surprisingly tender picture of family life in the suburbs (Chingford, specifically), its genius lies in the sharp, Mike Leighlike observations of character by its creator Stefan Golaszewski. Lesley Manville stars as the titular mum, Cathy, and Peter Mullan as Michael, her late husband’s best friend.
With this will-they-won’t-they couple, it’s all about the looks on their faces; the things that are left unsaid. And little is left unsaid by Kelly, either. The brashest, dimmest and most overtly comical of the bunch, she is the girlfriend of Cathy’s gormless son Jason (Sam Swainsbury). Her stock-in-trade is daft prattle, inappropriate if wellmeaning remarks, and foot-in-mouth faux pas. In short, she is tremendous good fun.
The role has been “an absolute gift” for Lisa Mcgrillis, who plays her. “Mum was … oh my gosh!” she exclaims, briefly and unusually lost for words; she is the first to admit she likes to talk. “Mum has been the dream job. Kelly is a sweetheart, really. Some people think: ‘God, she’s so irritating or annoying.’ But then you see a side to her, or meet her mother, and it explains why she’s so damaged and vulnerable and desperate to be loved.”
Mcgrillis, 36, had never believed a career in acting would be possible. Even speaking to her now, in the bar of a central London hotel, I get the impression she still finds it incredible she has made it this far. Growing up in Carlisle (she swapped her soft northern accent for an Essex drawl in Mum), she did not excel at state school. The youngest of four children to a special needs teacher
mother and accountant father, she “used to get into a lot of trouble”, though insists she was not a bad kid – just distracted.
She found drama at a young age, studying it up to A-level and then at Northumbria University (“I don’t know if I really learnt much – I just got drunk for three years”). She imagined she’d work in drama therapy or become a travel agent. “I didn’t think anyone would want to pay me to be an actor. I just didn’t think it was possible for me.”
All the same, she signed with an agent in Newcastle, who told her she could get work in adverts, or possibly a line in Emmerdale. “I was like, ‘Really? I could be on telly?’”
Some theatre in education and community theatre work followed, until eventually a play she was in
– The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall – transferred to the National Theatre and then Broadway. Television roles trickled in after that (Vicki in Hebburn, Rachel Coles in Inspector George Gently). In 2016, came Mum – and also the birth of her first child, with husband Stuart Martin, an actor.
Joshy, now two and a half, arrived between series one and two, and Mcgrillis returned to work when he was eight and a half weeks old. “When I think about the first year of Joshy’s life, it was kind of crazy because I worked so much that year,” she says. “Off the back of Mum, I was suddenly being offered jobs but was also trying to look after a newborn baby and do the night feeds.”
At first, she held it all together. But two weeks before filming of Mum series two finished, she hit a wall. Commuting for two hours from her home in Leyton, east London, to the set in Hayes, west London, she barely saw her five-month-old son at all during the week.
“I remember just crying. I was like: ‘I can’t stop these tears, they won’t stop.’ It was obviously the hormones. I thought: ‘I can’t go and pretend to be Kelly because I can’t stop crying.’ I had this mini-meltdown where I was like: ‘I’m physically and emotionally exhausted and I can’t get through these next two weeks.’” Help arrived in the form of the “absolute saint” Manville, who moved Mcgrillis and her parents, who were caring for Joshy, into her home near the studio to make life easier for her co-star.
“It made it really bearable, so I got through it,” she says. “My first year of having Joshy is such mixed emotions. I had guilt because I wasn’t with him all the time, because, as an actor, I very much felt: ‘I can’t stop. If I stop working, I won’t be able to continue working, so this is something I need to do.’ I just didn’t get the balance right.”
It was Manville who advised her to stick with it.
“She said: ‘Don’t stop working. As difficult as it will be, keep on pushing through because you’re doing it for Joshy. This is all for him, to give him the best life possible, and when he starts school, if you’ve decided not to work, you’ll want to work again and you’ll not be able to.’”
It’s a familiar dilemma for many a working mother, but one that is particularly pronounced for those in the creative arts, whose contracts are short term and precarious, and for whom a year’s maternity leave, with your job awaiting you on your return, is an alien concept.
But if progress in supporting parents lags behind that made in other industries, Mcgrillis believes things are slowly changing in hers. She’s become an ambassador for PIPA – Parents and Carers in Performing Arts – an organisation set up to promote best-practice employment and support for parents and carers in the profession.
“What they’re trying to do is work with production companies, theatres, and just help mothers, fathers, people who are looking after children, and try to encourage theatres, for example, to have a schedule that will support them. It’s not always going to be the case that they’re able to do that, especially in TV, because budgets in TV now are half what they were probably 10 years ago. The knock-on effect is that scripts are really late, casting is really late, and it’s really difficult to accommodate everything. But people are talking about it and saying: ‘How can we change things?’”
Juggling motherhood with acting work is only one of the challenges women in the industry face. There’s also the problem of roles. “I feel there are loads more parts for women when you’re in your twenties,” says Mcgrillis. “I remember feeling if I wasn’t established enough, if I didn’t have TV and theatre credits by the time I was 30, I would find it really difficult because the way television is now, often parts are just offered to names.”
Then there’s the gender pay gap in acting, so memorably illustrated by the revelation that Claire Foy was being paid less than Matt Smith, her co-star in The Crown. “I know that my husband gets paid a lot more than I do,” says Mcgrillis. “And we’re the same age. But then I think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s because he’s doing productions that have bigger budgets.’ But he’s definitely earning more than I am, and we’ve both probably got a similar body of work. So there we are.”
Martin, who plays Silas Sharrow in Jamestown, has had to spend a lot of time away, filming in Budapest. “Sometimes, we say it keeps the spark there. I think that’s the key to a really good marriage: just not see them for six months a year!” But, she admits to it being hard – not least when you throw the demands of co-parenting into the mix.
Still, Mcgrillis, flush with the success of Mum, is far too upbeat and chirpy to dwell on that right now. Armed with a reliable, flexible childminder, she is riding a wave of interest generated by her breakthrough role.
A few minutes later, she is joking about whether she could swing from the hotel’s chandelier for her photo shoot.
“I couldn’t be a full-time mum,” she reflects. “But I hope one day my son feels really proud of me.” The final episode of Mum is on BBC Two next Wednesday at 9pm. All three series are available on BBC iplayer
‘Lesley Manville is an absolute saint. She got me through my mini‑meltdown’
‘Filming apart keeps the spark there. It’s the key to a really good marriage’