Gleebag! Phoebe’s firm makes £7m in a year
PHOEBE Waller-Bridge has gone from Fleabag to moneybags after making almost £7million last year.
The writer and actress is reaping huge rewards eight years after creating Fleabag as a one-woman show for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
By 2016, she was starring in Fleabag the hit BBC comedy, which became one of Britain’s most talked-about shows with a frank focus on a young single woman’s sex life.
It quickly won a second season and she went on to write the hit series Killing Eve for the BBC and was even hired to help jazz up the script for Daniel Craig’s new James Bond film No Time To Die, now delayed by the Covid pandemic.
Newly published accounts for her company PMWB Ltd – she is the sole director and shareholder – show that in the financial year to April 2020 she generated more than £8million.
More than half was paid into the firm’s bank account and she was owed almost £4million more.
After debts were paid, she made close to £7million in a single year and the £600,000 she had in bank a year earlier had rocketed to £4.87million.
Despite her wealth, Miss WallerBridge, 35, has not forgotten the plight of struggling actors. Last year she helped raise £800,000 for theatres stricken by lockdown by streaming her one-woman Fleabag show online. The actress, who went to an Catholic girls’ school in west London, won a place at Trinity College, Dublin, but turned it down to go to acting school RADA, where Tom Hiddleston was among her year.
At first she struggled to get auditions, let alone work. Now, among other garlands, she has won a Bafta award for best female in a comedy for Fleabag’s first series, and three Emmys in America. And she was said two years ago to have signed a deal with Amazon TV which is potentially worth tens of millions. After divorcing documentary-maker Conor Woodman in 2017 and she began a relationship with writer and director Martin McDonagh, 50.