Insider Extra Donal O’Donoghue chats to the funnywoman Aisling Bea about her new Netflix series, and the success of female screenwriters
“I’m fascinated by people,” says Aisling Bea, comedian, writer, actor, story collector and people person. “My mother would talk to anyone and get their stories out of them. Just like my sister, Sinéad, and my aunt Maura, who is also a story collector. She is a nun and talks to people of all backgrounds all the time. I remember one time I brought a boyfriend to meet her. She was like, ‘You’re from Dublin aren’t you?’ and he nervously said ‘Yeah but I was born in Limerick’. And she said: ‘And who was your mother’s gynaecologist?’ He was like ‘I don’t know who my mother’s gynaecologist was!’ The thing is my grand-uncle was a gynaecologist in Limerick and my aunt was wondering if it was him!”
We talk by phone. There’s a two second delay which can make for a stilted set-up, but Bea, all chat and charisma, makes it seem like we’re shaking hands down the line. She calls her recent Channel 4 hit This Way Up – which she created, wrote and starred in – her baby. Yet Living with Yourself, with its global Netflix audience, has the potential to be much bigger, a calling card for the US. She plays Kate, the It has been some year for Aisling Bea. Following her acclaimed Channel 4 series, This Way Up, she makes her Netflix comedy-drama debut in Living with Yourself. Donal O’Donoghue talks with her wife of Paul Rudd’s Miles Elliot, a man who has only gone out and inadvertently cloned himself. Can she imagine living with a copy of herself? “I can’t imagine anything worse,” says Aisling and laughs. “I already feel sorry for the people who have to go out with me and live with me, my own family.”
Bea was raised by women: her mother, Helen and her eight aunts in rural county Kildare. “I grew up surrounded by women, went to an all-female school and never thought that women weren’t supposed to be funny. It was only when I was let out of the cage and into the broader world that I thought ‘ What!? This is awful!’ But the positive impact was already there, where I thought I was brilliant! So life could only knock me about so much.” Yet life had already knocked her about a bit, long before she went to study French and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin or move further afield to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) or won the So You Think You’re Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2012.
Aisling was three years old when her father died. Ten years later, on the anniversary of his death, her mother, Helen, told Aisling and her younger sister Sinead that their father had taken his own life. Aisling was angry. “I now hated him,” she wrote in a piece in the Guardian newspaper in 2017, a touching, sometimes funny tribute to the father she never really knew. Just after her 30th birthday, the family were given a box of their father’s things, photographs (many of Aisling) and memories. “That exploded something in me about empathy and also that I really didn’t know anybody,” she says of that discovery and how much she was loved by her father. “And the loneliest thing is to think that you’re alone or a weirdo in some way.”
Aisling Bea wrote that Guardian article for herself and for others who might be suffering. But the reaction was overwhelming: from strangers, from friends of her father, from people feeling suicidal. “There is a lot of stigma around a parent taking their own life,” she says. “There is the belief that the ultimate act for a woman is to give everything up for their child, that that is the most natural thing in the world. So the idea of a parent taking their own life is seen as the ultimate selfish act. But no one knows the mess of people’s minds, what they are going through. In one year’s time, I will be the same age my dad was when he took his own life and I probably have thousands more words to describe my feelings than him. And he was an educated man.”
So it’s not surprising that she doesn’t see life, and people, as black and white but in many shades of grey. “What I love about people is their complexity,” she says. “Comedy is like food. There isn’t just one type and you never know what is going to tick someone’s boxes. People’s own stories, what they have gone through, can be fascinating and everyone has complexities. People should be shown with all their complexities and not be defined by one feature, whether that is gender or race or religion or age or your physical ability to do something. I get more wanderlust about people than places. Life has definitely made me a more empathetic person so I can’t say definitively that someone is this or that, except maybe Boris Johnson.”
For now, Aisling Bea can do no wrong. Earlier this summer Delilah, the show she co-wrote with Sharon Horgan, was sold to HBO Max in the US and she is quietly confident of getting a second season of This Way Up. “If it happens, I’d like to explore the class divide in the UK and the varying privilege of immigrants, like the difference in being from Ireland and being from France.” Ask her why some of the best TV of recent times has been created and written by women and she has a ready reply. “It’s because (women) had bigger fish to fry,” she says. “In 1980s Ireland, it was not illegal to rape your wife. So we had a lot of other stuff to deal with other than writing TV shows. But I hope the next generation of women will think it’s just the way things are.”