Haggard shows her range in ‘Life’
Daisy Haggard’s main acting duty on the Matt LeBlanc comedy “Episodes” was to make negative facial expressions, when she was happy, sad, confused or just getting a snack.
The English actor and writer still isn’t certain if it is good to be so well remembered or bad because it’s such an unpleasant look.
Haggard has made certain she’s going to play a host of expressions in the new Showtime comedy “Back to Life.”
She not only stars in the series, but also created and co-wrote the series with Laura Solon. The first of the six episodes debuts Sunday.
Haggard stresses that even with a single look to play, she loved working on “Episodes.”
“It was such a great show, such a great part,” Haggard says. “And then, at the same time, it’s really lovely to be doing something so different and people seeing another side of what you can do. So I just feel lucky on both counts, really.”
The new Showtime series has Haggard playing Miri Matteson, who returns to the coastal town she called home before spending 18 years in prison.
It is a difficult homecoming because plenty of people in the small town would have been happier if Miri had selected any other city.
Miri tries to return to a normal life during her first
“(‘Back to Life’) doesn’t sound like a comedy, but we took it to the extreme, because extremes are quite fun, aren’t they?”
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few weeks out of prison, but old relationships are not the same, new connections are difficult to make and even finding a job proves a major task.
It doesn’t help that her only really supporters are her sexually frustrated mother, Caroline (Geraldine James), and her environmentalist father, Oscar (Richard Durden).
“We wanted to make it as hard for her as humanly possible,” says Haggard. “And by putting a woman in her late 30s back in her hometown where she did the worst thing that’s ever happened in that town and she’s got no job, no friends and a whole town that hates her, we thought it presented the most amount of challenges. It doesn’t sound like a comedy, but we took it to the extreme, because extremes are quite fun, aren’t they?”
That even Haggard realizes the series sounds like it leans more toward drama is for a reason. They didn’t want to create a show about the wacky adventures of an ex-con but to show Miri as someone who is lucky despite the time she spent in prison.
Haggard points out that people leave prison and have nowhere to go.
“Back to Life” has been written to show how a young woman of privilege is lucky to have a family who still cares for her and lets her come home. And Miri is not depicted as someone who has just given up on life.
“I share a lot with Miri in the sense that I am a relentless optimist who every time I fall down, I go and get back up again. Keep on trying,” Haggard says.