10 hot stories, including the rise of Phoebe Waller-bridge
As fans flock to her final show, Alice Jones reveals how Phoebe Waller-bridge is conquering Hollywood – by refusing to play by the rules
7pm last tuesday, and Leicester Square tube station is thronged with fake Fleabags dressed in Breton stripe T-shirts and dungarees, clutching cans of M&S gin and tonic. One woman is in tears, having been surprised with tickets by a friend.
It’s the opening night of Fleabag’s triumphant final fling , a West End run of the 65-minute one-woman show by Phoebe Waller-bridge that spawned a cultural phenomenon. All 30 nights at Wyndham’s Theatre sold out the day they went on sale, with fans waiting for hours online to buy tickets costing up to £152.50. On resale sites, they are now going for over £600. A daily queue for the handful of standing tickets begins at 5am.
‘As soon as we found out this was happening, we knew we had to get tickets,’ says Kathy, 27, who bought tickets with three friends. ‘We were all on the site at the same time, updating each other via Whatsapp on where we were in the queue.’
‘Fleabag was the first woman on television who seemed on my wavelength,’ says Amy, 32, of the lovable hot mess. ‘I couldn’t not be here to say goodbye properly.’
This hysteria is a long way from where it all began – on 1 August 2013 in a damp vault under the George IV Bridge in Edinburgh. Then, the set was a bar stool and a lightbulb. Waller-bridge’s costume: jeans, a black top and ballet flats. She told the hilarious, outrageous, tragic story of one young woman’s life, from appalling job interviews to even worse sexual encounters, via guinea pigs and porn. Fleabag was born.
It wasn’t an easy birth. Having graduated from RADA in 2006 and frustrated with the parts on offer to young actresses, Waller-bridge began writing her own short plays. In November 2012 she performed a 12-minute skit at the London Storytelling Festival. ‘I remember the line, “Three nights ago, I ordered myself a very slutty pizza,”’ theatre producer Francesca Moody tells Grazia. And, together with the director Vicky Jones, the three women decided to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Cut to summer 2013 and Waller-bridge was finishing writing Fleabag on the train up to Edinburgh. For the first week, they had to give away tickets to fill the 60-seater room. But, eventually, it became one of the most talked-about shows of the festival, and led to a run at London’s Soho Theatre, where it was seen by Shane Allen, controller of BBC comedy commissioning. ‘It was one of those handful of times where you fall head over heels in love with someone’s talent,’ he remembers today. ‘It was daring and outrageous but also had tenderness, vulnerability and heart. I green-lit the script for a pilot that night.’
The first series was a slow-burn hit in 2016 and won two BAFTAS. The second series, which aired earlier this year, saw Fleabag find religion in her own inimitable way (through an affair with a hot priest, played by Andrew Scott) and was credited with everything from a boom in sales of M&S tinnies to upping searches for priests on Pornhub. It has been nominated for 11 Emmys.
If that were all that had happened since 2013, that would be enough, but Wallerbridge’s rise has been relentless. Female assassin drama Killing Eve, for which Waller-bridge wrote the first season, won Best Television Series at the Golden Globes. And she has also been snapped up by cinema’s two most venerable franchises, having played a droid in a Star Wars film, and been brought in to work on the script of No Time To Die, the next James Bond
movie. Recruited at the wish of star Daniel Craig to ‘polish’ the script, she is only the second woman in the 57-year history of 007 to get a writing credit. Her reward? A rumoured $2 million pay cheque and knowledge that the female members of the cast will be well-served.
‘I want to make sure that, when they get those pages through, Lashana [Lynch], Léa [Seydoux] and Ana [de Armas] open them and go: “I can’t wait to do that,”’ Waller-bridge told Deadline when news of her role emerged. ‘As an actress, I very rarely had that feeling early in my career. That brings me much pleasure, knowing I’m giving that to someone.’
She is now also working on a film that she plans to direct, and the entertainment industry is at her feet. ‘Nothing would make us happier than to have her bring another season of Fleabag,’ said Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios last month. ‘Or anything else she wants to do.’
And yet, despite an extraordinary six years, Waller-bridge remains as fun, polite, enthusiastic and sweary as when she was flyering at the Fringe. She flatly refuses to play by celebrity rules. She isn’t on Instagram. She takes the tube. She has been in a relationship with the writer Martin Mcdonagh (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) since early 2018, having divorced director Conor Woodman earlier that year. She doesn’t talk about their relationship, other than admitting they share a creative sensibility, both being interested in ‘the line between adorability and monstrosity’. It is testament to the fascination with her work that her personal life rarely makes headlines. And yet, nevertheless, her fans feel they know her intimately.
That’s because she writes so brilliantly about being a woman – and crucially not the primped, plucked and sanitised version that was preferred by the entertainment industry before Waller-bridge turned it on its head.
‘Fleabag is as sex-obsessed as any Don Draper, as self-obsessed as any Tony Soprano and as thrilled with her own transgressions as any Walter White,’ says comedian and feminist writer Deborah Frances-white. ‘She is the human deep inside each woman, when the burdensome luggage of gendered expectations is stripped away.’
She also writes brilliantly about women’s interactions with other women. It’s a hymn to the sisterhood, with Kristin Scott Thomas’s speech in Fleabag about the joy of the menopause at its heart.
Waller-bridge has never forgotten her own female allies, either. Once a month, she still makes sure she meets up with her gang – all women in film and television, including actors Jessica Knappett and Aisling Bea – to eat mac ’n’ cheese, drink wine and talk about life ‘until 4am’. ‘It’s one of those really lovely, trusted groups where you can just go, “Am I crazy or...?”’ she’s said.
She cast Sian Clifford, her old friend from RADA, as Fleabag’s uptight sister Claire after they made a pact that whoever became successful would help the other out. Next, Waller-bridge will appear in (and executive produce) Run, an HBO comedy drama about a woman who goes on a journey with an old flame. It’s written by Vicky Jones, her best friend, whom Waller-bridge describes as ‘the love of my life’. Fleabag partly grew out of a drinking game they used to play called ‘truth songs’, where Waller-bridge would play the ukulele and they would both make up songs in which every lyric had to be the absolute truth.
‘I’ve found a creative family in making this show,’ she told Grazia earlier this year. ‘And I can’t wait for us to come back together on something else.’ First, the original team have reunited to bring Fleabag back to where it began – the stage. It looks no different than it did six years ago in that damp Edinburgh vault – a stool and a single lightbulb. Except this time it is performed by a superstar.