A POSH (AND OBSCENELY TALENTED) POTTY MOUTH!
She’s the privately educated descendant of TWO baronets who’s behind TV’s cult hits Fleabag and Killing Eve — just nominated for 14 Baftas. So how many of her own foibles does Phoebe Waller-Bridge write into her very risque characters?
PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE has always had an uncanny ability to make people laugh. Two years ago, when accepting her first Bafta award for her performance in BBC3’s darkly comic hit series Fleabag (a show the multitalented star also wrote), the willowy brunette had the Royal Festival Hall audience in stitches with her acceptance speech.
‘Most of all, I want to say thank you to my mother, who said to me: “Darling, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you’re outrageous.” ’
Her mother, Teresa, in the audience, lowered her head to her hands in embarrassment, but one senses Mrs Waller-Bridge, whose father was a baronet, is well-accustomed to her talented daughter’s rare gift both for riding roughshod over polite sensibilities and raising a laugh. At 33, the younger Waller-Bridge is rapidly developing the golden touch when it comes to dramatic success.
She acts, she writes; big screen, small screen, UK, America. Stellar names such as Olivia Colman and Fiona Shaw queue to read her lines. She’s currently earning plaudits on stage in New York with her one-woman stage version of Fleabag, which also happens to be midway through its second season on the BBC.
Meanwhile, her other criticallyacclaimed hit Killing Eve, this week emerged as the favourite to run away with all the prizes at this year’s Bafta awards when it scooped 14 nominations — more than any other programme.
Canadian actress Sandra Oh and Brit Jodie Comer are both up for best actress for the BBC America drama, which is about to return for its second season.
But the reason the show has been such a runaway success with both critics and viewers is Waller-Bridge, who was tasked with bringing Luke Jennings’s Codename Villanelle novella series to the small screen.
So just who is Phoebe WallerBridge, and — for those who haven’t seen her two best-known hits — has she adhered to her mother’s advice? Given that she once revealed her mother referred to her work as ‘Phoebe’s porn’, we perhaps don’t have to look too far for answers.
Fleabag is provocative, to say the least. It’s not one, perhaps, to watch with the parents. But fans have loved it, drawn to a character who is flawed, anarchic and tinged by sadness.
As for Killing Eve, the shock factor is fractionally lower, but with its two strong female leads, a psychopathic assassin and an intelligence operative who are locked in a curiously romantic game of cat and mouse, it’s an unconventional hit.
But then there always seems to have been an unconventional edge to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, despite her well-heeled antecedents (there’s a baronet on her father’s side too).
Father Michael co- founded Tradepoint, the first fully electronic stock market and mother Teresa works for the Ironmongers’ Company, in the City. The couple are divorced. Raised in Ealing, West London, she’s the middle of three children.
Older sister Isobel is a composer in film and television and younger brother Jasper, a music manager. The sisters, who rent a flat together in East London, would create radio plays, staging them in a cupboard.
Waller-Bridge, who stands at nearly 6ft and cuts a very elegant, decidedly feminine figure, had a childish spell of dressing like a boy — and calling herself Alex — but insists it was ‘never an issue’ for her parents.
The thoroughly middle- class family dinner table was her first platform, where she sharpened her wit — ‘every dinner was all about sharing stories and jokes and points of view,’ she recalled.
Shocking people was her childhood trademark, practising on her Christian, buttoned-up — and adored — grandmother.
Academically bright, she went to an independent Catholic girls school in Ealing. She turned down a place to read English at Trinity College Dublin to go to Rada, where contemporaries included Tom Hiddleston.
If television viewers associate Waller-Bridge with writing strong female characters, it may owe something to her Rada days. ‘The girls didn’t get many decent parts because not that many plays have them,’ Waller-Bridge recalled. ‘I was always crying or pointing at things.’
Having graduated from the prestigious drama school ‘assuming I would be fine because being posh with curly hair basically equals a Shakespearean career’, she struggled to find acting work or even an audition for almost two years and did ‘a lot’ of temping, before a fortuitous meeting with her creative partner and friend Vicky Jones.
Jones was directing a play in which Waller-Bridge won a part, but got the sack for meddling with the script. In an act of solidarity, Waller-Bridge left, too.
Drowning their sorrows over a bottle of wine in a nearby pub, the two forged a bond which led to the creation of their own theatre company, DryWhite.
The duo would put on short plays in a room they could use for free above a pub in London’s Docklands. Since then, WallerBridge has proved herself a very multi- talented star. She has appeared in the second series of f Broadchurch, as a barrister, r, wrote Channel 4 comedy series Crashing and had a part in film The Iron Lady, during which she e met Olivia Colman.
At the time, she confided in n Colman she was thinking about starting to write and recalled how the older actress told her, r, ‘let me know if you ever write e anything I could be in’ — which, h, as fans of Fleabag will know, was s to prove a very useful connection when it came to casting the eponymous character’s passiveaggressive future stepmother.
Fleabag started life as a tenminute stand-up routine, which was expanded into a one-hour, one-woman show for the 2013 Edinburgh Festival.
‘She came out of the depths of me,’ Waller-Bridge said this year, citing the humiliating but hilarious experiences she and girlfriends had experienced being single in the city as inspiration. ‘If we can laugh about those things we can survive,’ she said.
Another influence was dad Michael, who Waller-Bridge cites as the person who encouraged her writing and credits with teaching her about feminism. Fleabag (she insists it is ‘ very personal’ but not autobiographical) the television show came about after the Edinburgh production transferred to London’s Soho Theatre and the controller of BBC Comedy saw it.
The last few years, have, it seems, been rather a whirlwind (the first season of Fleabag was made while she developed Killing Eve), but she still found time to marry documentary maker Conor Woodman, who asked her out after watching her perform in a play which required her to spend most of the performance naked in a bath.
They married in a chateau in France, Waller-Bridge in a sexy, silvery dress. That relationship, however, was short-lived. They announced their divorce in 2017 and she is now in a relationship with playwright, screenwriter and director Martin McDonagh.
As for the sexually frank nature of some of the material she writes, she insists it is the emotional scenes that are far more exposing. She was unfazed by the thought of her parents watching Fleabag, which features a very, very rude, post-coital, opening monologue: they saw an early cut, as did brother Jasper, who apparently ‘turned white’ with shock.
‘I think you’re going to scare a lot of men with this show. It’s going to freak them out,’ he said. ‘ It’s about bloody time,’ responded Waller-Bridge.
She practised shocks on her grandmother
‘You’ll scare a lot of men,’ her brother said