‘There was no way that I could write a happy book’
Comedian and ex-‘harry Potter’ actress Jessie Cave tells Susannah Goldsborough of the true grief behind her debut novel
Halfway through writing her first novel, Jessie Cave had a minor meltdown. “I just kept thinking, whatever it turns out to be, even if it’s the most serious, eloquent prose, the headline will be ‘Harry Potter actress writes chick-lit.’”
It turns out that when your first high-profile job, at the age of 20, is a recurring role in one of the biggest film franchises of all time, it follows you around forever. Although Cave, 34, has in the intervening years become a cult internet sensation for her doodles about love and neurosis, has written and performed three critically acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe comedy shows, and has had acting roles in television dramas including Call the Midwife, Black Mirror and Industry, to many she will forever be Ron Weasley’s girlfriend, Lavender Brown.
That’s partly because she was such a scene-stealer. Sporting two enormous blonde plaits that are still her signature look, her pouty, baby-voiced embodiment of the obsessive side of teenage girldom turned a minor character into one of those performances that everyone remembers.
But Cave is not Lavender, and Sunset is certainly not chick-lit. It’s the story of twentysomething drifter Ruth, the kind of Fleabag-esque antiheroine who doesn’t own a Hoover, and, within the first 20 pages, is shockingly and horribly bereaved. The novel that follows is about grief, but stripped of any of its tired artistic tropes. Ruth’s loss reveals herself in what she eats and drinks and who she sleeps with; it’s messy and mundane and often a bit gross.
Not a breezy summer read, then; but Cave is happy to let the illusion lie. Her distinctive personal style – today, when we meet in a coffee shop near her home in White City, she’s wearing her signature oversized glasses and messy bun – is part of that illusion. “I seem like a different person to what my work is. I might look sweet, I might sound sweet, I might draw sweetly. But that isn’t what I’m making.” She smiles. “But I’m happy to trick them into buying it.”
Comments such as that give an occasional window into Cave’s inner steeliness. It is partly the result of the real-life tragedy that inspired Sunset. In 2019, Cave’s 27-year-old brother, Ben Haddon-cave, was killed in an accident. She was in the middle of a run of her third show, Sunrise, at Soho, when she heard the news.
“I did the show for a whole other week and a half. They would have absolutely said, ‘Don’t do it’, but it saved me. For an hour each night, I could pretend that it wasn’t real.”
Writing provided another kind of catharsis, if indirectly. “I didn’t set out to write about grief at all,” she tells me. “But it would have been impossible for me to write a happy book. It would have been impossible for me to write about anything other than death.”
It also provided a fantasy. “I lived vicariously through Ruth. I would have benefitted a lot from being able to be a wreck for a bit but I didn’t have that luxury because I had two very young children.”
Writing was also her way of proving to herself, and the world, that she was still capable of doing good work. “That’s what’s just so difficult to explain to people who haven’t had some kind of huge loss. They look at you and they think you’re ruined. You meet a friend for coffee who you haven’t seen for six months and they think you’re going to be on the floor. But it’s not true. You can still get up in the morning and you can still do good work.”
Sunset exhibits the same kind of sometimes painful honesty as Cave’s previous work. Her first Edinburgh show, Bookworm (2012), a gentle send-up of Harry Potter superfans, cleverly leaned into, rather than fled from, the glare of Potter fame. Her next, I Loved Her (2015), told the boldly confessional story of how her onenight stand with comedian Alfie Brown turned into a baby and her first serious relationship. Sunrise, meanwhile, is about the heartbreak that followed their subsequent (if temporary: they’ve been back together for years) break-up and her life as a single mother.
I fell in love with Sunrise when I saw Cave perform it at the Soho in 2019: not because it was funny (it was: compulsively and rib-crackingly) but because it was frank. The laughter that followed her stories of calling up Brown, and demanding to know whether he’d yet made toast after sex for his new girlfriend, crashed through the taboos that surround the real grief that comes with a break-up and the ugly misogynistic trope of the “psycho” ex-girlfriend.
These days, Cave still has to battle the judgment of which she finds herself at the receiving end because of the unconventional chronology of hers and Brown’s relationship. “Even though we’ve got three kids, even though we are obviously together, people still ask me: ‘When are you going to get engaged?’ As if our relationship isn’t valid because we’re not married. It’s like, until I get a ring on my finger that we can’t even afford, we’re not a real couple.”
But Cave has never been one for convention, which is what makes her writing so good. She took up acting on a whim after dropping out of Manchester University: “My mum
‘I worried that all the headlines would say “Potter actress writes chick-lit”’
‘People who haven’t had a huge loss think you must be ruined by it. But you aren’t’
was like, ‘You’re very thin’ – because I was stressed from uni – ‘we can do something with this!’” At her audition for a children’s casting agent, she chose to recite a Carol Ann Duffy poem about suicide. Within months, she was in Harry Potter.
She loved her time on the films, and is quick to emphasise that “they completely changed my life”. But she remains sceptical of how she got there: “Looking back at the industry as it was then, it was about being thin. It was about being pretty. I was blonde, I was thin, I wore quite eccentric clothes, so I was different enough that I lucked out.”
I point out she’s extremely self-effacing for someone so successful. “I’ve just had really bad experiences with powerful people in the creative industries, right from the beginning. All the confidence or hope that I had has just been obliterated over the years because of it.”
The harsh words of criticism she received as a young actress have stayed with her. “This person said I was no good, this person said my work was awful, this person rejected me… It means that selfdeprecation oozes out of me when I talk about my work, because I just feel like a complete fraud.”
Whether driven by imposter syndrome or not, Cave, one of life’s natural hustlers, is already on to her next project. She’s working on a novel for young adults – “It’s an idea I’ve had since art school, but I’ve never given myself the time to write it” – and perhaps, I float hopefully, she’s considering a return to the stage?
She laughs. “I’m really hoping that I don’t have a reason to write a one-woman show in the next five years. If I could just have a nice time…”
Sunset is published by Welbeck at £12.99 on June 24