Keeping up with the Waller-bridges
Composer Isobel Waller-bridge, who scored the music for ‘Fleabag’, tells Eleanor Steafel about living and working with sister Phoebe
Isobel Waller-bridge can tell what her sister Phoebe is thinking by looking at the back of her head. It’s a skill that proved useful, she says, during the edit of Fleabag’s second series, when for weeks on end the pair would stay up until the wee hours with the show’s editor, director and producer, often working until 4am to get an episode finished. “With siblings, you can tell what kind of mood they’re in and what they’re going to say. She can tell if I’m not into or not convinced by something. But there’s never a need for pussyfooting.
“It’s just really easy. We grew up together and our whole family shares such a similar sense of humour, so you have a shorthand.”
Waller-bridge, 34 – a soundtrack
composer who has had an integral role on both series of her sister’s wildly successful show, and in the past year has written the music for hit BBC drama The Split and ITV’S Vanity Fair, among others – was central to
Fleabag’s stratospheric impact. Her work scoring the show was particularly key in this latest series, in which scenes were punctuated by a powerful chorus of voices singing part of the Kyrie – a Greek prayer meaning “Lord have mercy”.
“The character had become a more sophisticated version of herself, who was exploring new territory emotionally,” she explains. Fleabag’s family, meanwhile, “felt quite Greek, with everything happening on that scale where everything is about to kick off ”. They arrived at the idea of having a choir; a kind of chorus commenting on the action. “We’d been listening to lots of classical music – loads of Prokofiev and Bach… And then it did become this kind of ‘Go Greek or go home’ thing.”
What a motto, I joke. “Yeah, I literally live by it,” she deadpans, her face breaking into that familiar, broad Waller-bridge smile that could give Julia Roberts a run for her money.
We meet at a trendy restaurant on Columbia Road in East London – her choice; a stone’s throw from the house she shares with her sister. She gives me a warm hug, introducing herself as “Izzo” with a deep, sunshiny voice that always sounds as if she is midway through a joke. If I close my eyes, it could be Fleabag herself ordering an Americano. It’s a strange thing, to be known for the success of your younger sister, who is very much the name and face of 2019. But the elder (by one year) Waller-bridge wears it at once lightly and with great pride. Working with Phoebe – first on the music for the Edinburgh Festival run of her onewoman show, and then on the TV series that followed – has been, she says, both a hugely important collaboration for her professionally, and “the happiest two months of our entire lives”.
“It’s just so exciting to get to do that with your sibling. I love it so much. Because we were working together and living together, we were basically staying up until two o’clock in the morning, drinking wine and making work. It was like, ‘F---, this is so great.’ And then people liked it. It was just… it makes me feel very emotional. It was a real privilege.”
For most, working so closely with a sibling would be quite a big ask, but you get the sense that, for both of them, working intensively at something they love comes naturally. In person, Waller-bridge comes across as both brilliant fun and terribly earnest; someone who can be a little “obsessive compulsive” work-wise, often disappearing into a piece of music for hours at a time. She began composing in her teens, and was the only female composer on her undergraduate and post-grad courses. But her piano playing began even earlier, at four: falling in love with the “discipline and rigour” and often practising in her room for 10 hours at a time as a teenager.
“As soon as you start talking about it I feel my whole body start tingling,” she says, beaming. “I like being around people, I really do… But there is something about that relationship that I have with music… It’s just never lonely. It’s a person in my life… or something,” she laughs, suddenly embarrassed. It’s something I’ve seen Phoebe do before in interviews, too – she’ll say something profound about how Fleabag is a manifestation of what we’re all really searching for beneath the bravado: true connection and love. And then she’ll look to the side, just as her character does and raise her eyebrows. That’s the crucial thing to know about these women: they take their work very seriously, though not themselves.
Their upbringing must surely have had a hand in their success, though not, she says, through any kind of expectation imposed – rather because their parents were very good at stepping back and letting them find their own way. It meant the three siblings (there is also a younger brother, Jasper, a music manager) were allowed to disappear “into our own pods”. Whether she was off composing for hours on end, or Phoebe was busy dressing up as a boy and having everyone call her Alex (as she divulged this week in an interview, a memory that makes her older sister chuckle), their parents remained relaxed and supportive.
“More and more, I’m starting to understand that there was no pressure, they just gave and gave to make sure that we felt we could express ourselves in basically whatever way we wanted to, which are really crucial tools if you’re someone who is going into working in a creative industry. There is a sort of confidence in your own work that you do really need.”
Waller-bridge describes her childhood in west London as “noisy”, “happy” and “honest”. It was her mother, Teresa, who taught her children how to do pranks, such as putting cling film over the loo seat and honey on the door handle. Her father, Michael, is a physicist and guitar nut with “a musical brain, so we talk loads about bands. He’s wicked, Dad,” she says, chuckling as she recalls his tendency to retweet complimentary articles about his children on Twitter. “He’s proud.”
She is quick to assure me none of the family bear any resemblance to characters in Fleabag. She is certainly nothing like uptight Claire, nor is Olivia Colman’s stepmother in any way based on her own (her parents divorced when she was in her late teens). “[The characters] are really a combination of all sorts of different experiences and all kinds of people through time. It’s definitely not rooted in anything specific.”
She is about to work with her brother Jasper on a “solo project”, which she can’t divulge details of, but says is giving her “the most amount of pleasure”. Her music will next appear on our screens in the new series of Black Mirror, for which she wrote the score – a job she loved for the “tilted tone” of the show. “It was really appealing to try to musically represent that.” Then there’s the West End run of Phoebe’s original onewoman show of Fleabag, for which she did the sound design. Then a concert at the Royal Court.
She feels “lucky and excited” that good, diverse work keeps flooding in, though she has resolved to attempt a better work-life balance, partly in order to spend more time with her girlfriend, the playwright Ella Hickson, whose play, Anna, she is leaving to go and watch on its opening night at the National.
“My working hours have ordinarily been from 10pm to 4am. Because of the way I work, you just dive in and you know you’re going to come out the other end and the number of hours that happen in the middle are sort of irrelevant.
“I get a real thrill from that.” Watching her face light up as she talks about the “magic” of what she gets to do on a daily basis, I have a feeling she might find cutting down her hours rather difficult. That teenage girl, sitting in her bedroom playing the piano for 10 hours straight, doesn’t seem so far away after all.
‘We were working together and living together, basically staying up until two o’ clock, drinking wine and making work. It was so great’