‘When this is over, my first stop is definitely Botox’
Comic Katherine Ryan’s penchant for glamour isn’t dimmed by lockdown, she tells
One of lockdown’s favourite social media games has been to “choose your quarantine house”, where you’re presented with several combinations of famous people and must decide with whom you could stand to isolate. If Katherine Ryan, her 11-year-old daughter Violet and husband Bobby Kootstra were an option, it sounds like it would be a pretty great house.
“I have heard from friends that the default child care still falls on the women. That’s not the case in my household,” says Ryan, over Zoom.
“My husband is a retired athlete and he’s a lot tidier than I am. He doesn’t leave it all to me. I hate to hear that [domestic chores] still fall on the female partner. More households need to feel like mine. Plus, the child is mine, so I really should be the one doing all the educating, but I’m not, he pitches right in.”
Not that there is too much pitching in to be done. Fans of Ryan, 36, will be familiar with Violet’s preternaturally grown-up attitude; an essential element of Canadian Ryan’s comedy routine is impersonating her daughter’s observations in a British accent. She also appears on her mother’s new podcast Telling Everybody Everything, which topped the charts in the first week of its release in April, handing out sensible relationship advice to adult listeners. Now, she’s taken charge of her own home-schooling, too.
“At first, I was excited because finally I was getting a proper education. I was looking forward to all the assignments, and I was learning fractions,” explains Ryan, whose acerbic, feminist brand of wit has made her one of the UK’S favourite female comics. “And then I’ve had to take a back seat because my daughter was like, ‘I’m getting on a lot better without you’.”
Parents should relax about homeschooling, Ryan believes. “A lot of my friends are stressed out, they’re breathing over their children’s shoulders and trying to juggle their own work with home-schooling. But, I mean, how far is this really going to set them back? If I was the parent of a four-year-old I would just let them play outside. Because I’m a parent of an 11-year-old, I just think she can get on with it herself.”
It’s a take that epitomises her sanguine approach to lockdown in general.
“I have pretty rock solid mental health and I actually worry, is my anxiety too low?” she muses.
Ryan was born in Ontario to an Irish engineer father and IT consultant mother. She moved to the UK after studying in Toronto, where she had also worked at Hooters – the chain which combines slap-up food with waitresses in hot pants. It was Hooters that brought her here, in fact, when she came over to help open its UK outpost in Nottingham. Looking your best was a prerequisite, and even as her comedy career has skyrocketed – she’s now a regular on Have I Got News For You and 8 out of 10 Cats – Ryan has become a cheerleader for looking glamorous, too. Recently, though, she’s had to go DIY.
“I have a shellac gel nail light, so I do my own manicures and pedicures. I can do waxing at home – with all the gymnastics required. I’ve dyed my eyebrows,” she tells me. If there’s anyone equipped to advise on how to “Groom for Zoom” then it’s Ryan. It’s a skill she’ll be deploying tonight, when she takes part in the “Gousto’s Table for 1 Million” virtual dining event, where she’ll be joined by Nick Grimshaw, Paloma Faith and David Haye for an evening which aims to virtually entertain up to a million guests online.
“It will definitely be my first chance to go full glam,” says Ryan. “It makes you feel better even to have a shower and put some make-up on, I’m just going to wear the most glamorous thing that still fits”.
She was a late adopter of Zoom, but has loved using it during lockdown. “I’ve been away from my friends and family for so many years, it’s annoying to know that I could have been having virtual drinks and dinner parties all along. We’re doing loads now. It’s brought me closer to my family, not further away.” Beauty-wise, the only thing she hasn’t yet resorted to is self-administering Botox and fillers, as some women have reportedly been doing, against professional advice. She’s getting desperate though, as she had stopped having the treatments ahead of filming her new Netflix sitcom, The Duchess, in which she stars as a “fashionably disruptive single mum”, which surely takes plenty of inspiration from her own experience bringing up Violet. “I stopped having Botox and fillers a year before filming my sitcom because I understand that an actress needs to move her face,” says Ryan, who has been described as millennial Joan Rivers. “I thought, ‘Oh easy, all I’ll have to do is stop getting Botox’. And now I’ve done it, I think Olivia Colman is actually quite talented. Acting is hard. When this is over, my first stop is definitely going to be the Botox and fillers, because it’s a lovely little treat.”
In 2018, she rekindled her teenage romance with Kootstra – who she dated aged 15 – when she was back in Canada filming for the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? and the pair met at a bar. Last year, they entered into a civil partnership in Denmark. “We didn’t have a wedding, I didn’t need to put on a white dress and pretend to be a virgin, that ship has sailed,” she told Jonathan Ross in December.
Such openness is an art that Ryan has perfected. Indeed, in one particularly heartbreaking episode of her podcast, she discusses the tragedy of pregnancy loss (a term she prefers to miscarriage) which she experienced earlier this year.
“I have learnt how to tell my truth without infringing on anyone else’s privacy,” she explains. “There are some things that I chose to share as I wanted to help people, I feel like once you share something the cat’s really out of the bag and you’re quite vulnerable to judgment. But I’ve never really had a big investment in my own ego. I really am blessed that I don’t really care what people think – all the noise on social media, I’m really good at tuning it out.”
As for coming out of lockdown, Ryan is easygoing about Violet’s return to school. “I think it’s great as long as they’re going to do it in a careful and calculated way,” she says. “If it can be done safely then I’m all for it. I will miss her though, I like having her home.”
Then there’s her own work. “My worry is that I’ll never be productive again,” she admits. “Now we know all those meetings could have been emails, as I’ve been saying all along.” And she’s concerned about the challenges facing stand-up comedy “Stand-up requires a live audience. Maybe we’ll sell one seat and then an empty seat. I’d be very disappointed if it was sidelined for too long.”
Join Katherine Ryan and three dream celebrity dinner guests at ‘Gousto’s Table for 1 Million’ tonight at 8pm at tablefor1million.com
‘I’ve never had a big investment in my own ego. I don’t really care what people think’