I’ve worked my Ash off to become leading lady
After years taking on the sidekick roles, Ashley Jensen has thrown off the support shackles to forge a career centre stage
ASHLEY Jensen is musing over her transition from sidekick to leading lady. It’s a shift earned, she feels. She said: “I think because I started at the bottom, I was the day player who came in for the day, so I’ve done all that. “I feel as if I’ve very much served an apprenticeship.” Jensen, who first made her mark as Maggie Jacobs in Ricky Gervais’s Extras more than a decade ago, added: “I know how to conduct myself and I feel that a job should be a collaborative thing. “I just happen to be the person who is, I suppose, in all day every day. And that’s fine. I feel ready for it. I think.” She is being modest, of course. In the last year, she shone in the title role in Agatha Raisin, the Sky One comedy based on the much-loved books by MC Beaton about a glossy London publicist who turns amateur detective in the Cotswolds. “Desperate Housewives crossed with Midsomer Murders” is how she described it at the time – a welcome change for the actress who admitted she’s made “an entire career playing people’s best friends” in such TV hits as Catastrophe and Ugly Betty.
But fast forward nearly 18 months and Jensen, 48, is set to flex her dramatic muscles as the star of the show in new drama Love, Lies & Records.
Penned by Kay Mellor (the Bafta award-winning writer behind such hits as Fat Friends and In the Club), the BBC1 series follows Kate Dickenson (Jensen), a town hall registrar who, like many of us, is torn between her home and work life. In her case, it’s a partner and demanding teenagers versus the daily dramas of births, marriages and deaths.
“It’s the working mum thing, isn’t it?” said Jensen, who has an eight-year-old son, Frankie, with her husband,
fellow actor Terence Beesley.
Jensen said: “It’s the whole, ‘I’m doing a job and I want to do it to the best of my ability but I’m also someone’s mum and I’m also someone’s wife’, which a lot of women do. It’s a reflection on society.
“Somebody asked me the other day about reality television – I don’t watch it – but they said, ‘Don’t you think it is a reflection of the society we live in?’ And I said, ‘I don’t really, because I think quite a lot of it seems contrived and a little bit forced.’”
She added: “But that’s what I think good British drama does. When it’s written as brilliantly as the stuff that Kay writes, it’s holding up a mirror to society and hopefully people can tap into that and understand it rather than I’m A Celeb, Here’s My A**e.” In the same vein, Jensen praises Mellor for scratching beneath the surface when it comes to people and their passions, stating: “There’s no baddies and no goodies, it’s just about truth.
“It’s pertinent to the world we live in, with people from different cultures, transgender, families on second marriages and families with stepchildren.”
Those are all themes that resonate between the cast, which includes Adrian Bower, Kenny Doughty, Rebecca Front and Mark Stanley.
Jensen said: “In some ways, it’s all quite messy. But people’s lives are a little bit messy. I think everybody aspires to perfection but if we dig deeper, everybody is floundering a bit.
“But looking at people’s Instagram pages, everyone is living a perfect life.
“I don’t do Instagram, Twitter, Facebook … I’m a Luddite, I take myself away from it.”
Jensen, who grew up in Annan, always longed to act, spending a few weeks in London with the National Youth Theatre aged 14 and later studying drama at Queen Margaret University in Musselburgh.
From landing her first big TV break in the 1993 drama Down Among the Big Boys to spending a sixyear stretch in LA for Ugly Betty, and stripping off in front of Colin Farrell for dystopian film, The Lobster, Jensen is indeed committed to her craft.
When learning her “fair few” lines for Love, Lies & Records, she confessed to “living like a nun”.
Jensen said: “I would go home, have my little bowl of soup, read my lines, and then put my lines under the pillow thinking they would go in by osmosis.”
Praising the registrars she met in preparation for the part, she added: “I suppose, like Kate, I would get involved with everybody’s story [if I did her job].
“To be honest, I’m kind of exhausted. At the end of the week, I’d feel spent, I felt as if I’d been through the wringer with all these people’s journeys. It’s quite emotional and a lot of it is quite high-octane stuff.” Love, Lies & Records is on BBC1 on Thursday,
I would read my lines, then put them under my pillow, thinking they’d go in by osmosis