It’s not often that we watch something and are as instantly bowled over by the sheer creative honesty,comedic virtuosity and stark pathos that PhoebeWaller-Bridge displayed as writer/ lead in last year’s BBC sensation Fleabag. Phoebe, classically trained at RADA and with a background in theatre, originally brought Fleabag into the world on stage in 2013 at the Underbelly in Edinburgh’s Cowgate. Her subject matter, however, owes at least something to the bawdy, no-holds-barred-till-we-get-to-the-truth tradition of Chaucer or even the scurrilous late Romans Petronius or Juvenal. For one thing, you will never think of Barack Obama in quite the same way afterwards. British with a capital ‘B’, it’s nonetheless clear that Phoebe is set for huge things across the pond both as an actor and writer/director. A much-anticipated second series of Fleabag is on its way, as well as a role in everyone’s favourite blue-chip,big-screen franchise StarWars.Helming a first full feature is surely round the corner and we just can’t wait. Coming towards the end of a frenetic few weeks in LA producing this issue, it was real treat to spend a couple of days shooting and interviewing Phoebe as she is one of the most charming, funny and naughty people we’ve had the good fortune to come across.

JW: Can you speak a little about the timing of when the play was commissioned into a TV show?You mentioned you felt that the timing of the show made the conversation with the BBC reasonably simple. To what degree do you think that the success of shows like Girls helped chart a course for women showrunners? Do you thing Fleabag would have been made, say, ten years ago?

PW-B: I like to think it would have been. I think the speed at which it was picked up definitely had to do with that wave of feminism suddenly becoming trendy and people having a funny take on it. Lena Dunham’s take on the conversation, through Girls, was really unique and there was really an appetite for it. People were responding in a way that felt like it was relevant now. I was so worried that 2014 was the year that Fleabag was meant to hit. I was worried that by the time the show had come out it would be passé, but it wasn’t – in fact it was even more relevant.

JW: Sex generally plays a big part in the show, most obviously with Fleabag’s constant use of it as a tool of self-affirmation.When the move from stage to screen came about, and the material was now going to be living in a completely different world with a significantly bigger audience, to what degree did you consciously decide to provoke and/or shock in a clutching-pearls kind of way that television audiences might not necessarily be accustomed to?

PW-B: It had to be either really funny or really true. I had absolutely no interest in saying things just to get a pearl clutched. I was really excited by the idea that there was a frisson with the character and the audience – when she knows that what she’s saying is a little bit naughty, but that she trusts you with it and she’s trying to make you laugh.As long as the relationship felt connected with the audience. I think if she’s just running around saying outrageous things to any old fucker then that’s a different kind of character.The idea of someone looking in your eye and saying, “I’m going to say something that’s going to make you feel something and it’s just for you because it’s going to make you laugh,” that was what I was kind of aiming for. Her sexual candour is her armour and her power, and the fact that she can say something with such confidence about sex, about her body or about the experience she’s having is a really powerful thing to play with an audience.

JW: And yet it’s not really the act that she’s that interested in. It’s kind of the idea of it, it’s this constant obsession about it and what that says about her, in so thinking about sex as that thing.

PW-B:Yes. It’s not even the chase, it’s being desired that she’s addicted to. I feel like a lot of my friends can relate to that and when you actually boil it down, is it literally the act or is it the sum of lots of extraordinary parts that makes it exciting? For her, it’s the cold and calculating sense that it’s the moment she sees somebody want her in her eyes then she can relax and she’s OK.There’s a line where she says, “I can’t think of anything worse than somebody who doesn’t wanna fuck me.” I feel like especially for women in their early twenties, especially me in my early twenties, I felt like that was kind of a currency and it was so important to be fuckable. As an actress you’re reading all the parts and most of them are binary: either the main guy wants to fuck you or he doesn’t.

JW: The inherent tension between comedy and tragedy is one that I found really interesting. It’s almost Greek.

PW-B:Yes! I was aiming for Greek.

JW: There’s unhappiness, yes, there’s denial, but ultimately the thrust of it is comedic to begin with, or at least the viewers think that it is although there are these signifiers along the way. The disembodied statue being stolen is symbolic but I’m curious as to whether there was a reveal moment in your mind:“Now I’m going to hit them at this point and they will then realise, if they hadn’t known all along, that the subtext – the reason Fleabag is the way she is – is because of this thing that happened to her.

PW-B:There was a eureka moment working withVicky on the play when I realised she’s sad; she’s obsessed with sex; she feels like sex ruins everything; she’s really funny and she’s lost her best friend because her best friend’s boyfriend fucked someone else. Where’s the link? The moment, I remember I was outside having a cigarette, two days to go before we went to Edinburgh, and I sat outside muttering what is it, what is it? Then I just turned to Jenny and said,“She fucked Boo’s boyfriend.”Vicky was so upset: “No, she would never do that, she would never do that.”We were screaming at each other on the side of the street. She thought it was too upsetting but that meant it had to go in.Then it all came together. Knowing you have that reveal makes writing the rest of it so much more fun.

JW: It must have been such a relief to have found that lynchpin of the way the story is told.

PW-B:That’s always what she’s hiding, what’s behind the eyes, and the more specific that can be, the better. One of the reasons I’ve decided to do the second series, having originally decided not to, was that she had a real life after the first season. She still had to get up and get on with shit.What happens to a character like that after the biggest thing in their life has been revealed and they’ve dealt with it? She doesn’t know, and I don’t really know. Writing at the moment is exciting because she’s saying, “Why am I interesting now?”

JW: On that note of ‘that’s so dark, we can’t put it in but we have to obviously’. People have said that she’s unlikeable in some ways; you’ve said you love the character.Were you at all concerned about the fact that people might perceive her to be unsympathetic?

PW-B: No, because I feel like you get so much from making people laugh. If a character can make you laugh, then I think you can’t help but fall in love with them. That’s my main responsibility, and Fleabag’s main responsibility was to make people laugh and then you always come back to her. Because she has so much pain, she’s clearly fighting something.You see her struggling, you see her working so hard to make your experience entertaining, but you can get a sense that there is something else going on underneath. I think if you can see somebody struggle, you’re immediately endeared to them. I think if you couldn’t see the mask slip she’d just seem like an arrogant, dismissive, cold-hearted sex fiend, and then fine, I wouldn’t be as interested in playing that or watching that. I think seeing her battling and in pain is crucial to the success of the part.

JW: Breaking the fourth wall as a writer’s convention is interesting. I wasn’t fortunate enough to see the play but was that a necessary part of it then or was that a device when it was adapted to TV? To make the audience complicit with this unreliable narrator?

PW-B: It’s meant to make you feel something rather than understand everything entirely. The relationship with the audience was always paramount, for the play as well. I knew it was always going to be ‘direct address’ because I couldn’t afford another actor [laughs]. No, because it started on that stand-up storytelling night and I realised the power of that kind of fuckery with the audience, it was too much fun. But I knew that for the audience to be really taken on a ride, they have to invest in someone; then have their heart broken by someone, rather than have their heart broken by a story that I’m telling them. I wanted to be the character that broke their hearts the moment of the great reveal:‘We fucking invested in you and now you did that terrible thing.’ I was also trying to fuck with the idea of comedy and how powerful comedy can be. If Fleabag’s a joke a fucking second, you’re laughing then suddenly she’s like tickle, tickle, SLAP. Funny, funny, funny, MY SOUL IS DYING.

JW: Must have been so fun to write. It’s self- contained because its characters live in one world but there’s also a parallel world with an outward-facing ‘direct address’. It liberates you in lots of fun, creative ways.

PW-B: So fun. Especially when you can really eyeball them when you’ve got something specific to do. In traditional Restoration plays it’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that before. Usually what happens on stage is all bullshit but when the character turns to the audience they tell you the truth. I wanted to do the opposite of that. It’s the real world. What if you subverted that convention and the lie is everything she’s telling you and the real world is trying to tell you the truth of what’s going on with her, but she’s trying to hide it.We’ve got real walking, talking people who she cannot control, yet she’s trying to control everything. Even in the first episode she edits and cuts out people’s sentences before they finish. Only she doesn’t want you to see that.The idea was that she’s got such rigorous control over the telling of the story at the beginning, then slowly she starts to lose control and suddenly the camera’s lingering and she’s a bit like,“Can you fuck off?”

JW: There are six twenty-minute episodes that have a resolution. It’s not finite exactly but I’m imagining you didn’t envisage a second season? If you did, did you have any idea of how you leap off of that reasonably tight episodic structure into a second series?

PW-B: No, I had no idea how to do it and in fact I was pretty resolute that it was the end of the story. I went through a whole conversation of there being more artistic integrity leaving something that ‘works’. I had worked so hard to tie everything I needed to tie up, and also to make sure that some things were still left messy because they just are sometimes. In the end though, the character resonated so much with people. If I do it again and I fuck it up, at least I’ve tried. If I’d had the opportunity and said no, I’d always regret it.There is so much more I want to say.

JW: People can empathise with the repressed thoughts, feelings, internal motivations and monologues, but also a father, step mother and sister being a certain way – real family relationships. Obviously it’s heightened, but in a very base way, we know those people or versions of them.

PW-B:That’s the best.The sister relationship, so many people are like,‘That’s me and my sister.’ It’s trying to make something very specific and universal at the same time.

JW: Similar to what you said about ‘neat’ and ‘unresolved’. It is a very difficult skill to be able to realise two such polarised things. Relatable, heightened, neat and messy. I can’t begin to imagine how to do that.

PW-B: Well you’re doing the same thing with photos.You’re so precise about a little accent of a flower being just in the corner. My mum said something about the most spontaneous feeling parties always being the most organised. I think that’s the same thing with work. I feel like I need rigour in storytelling – I need it as an audience and I need it as an artist – and the blurring of the lines and actually improvising when you get that moment of magic out of it, is sublime and you can’t beat it.

JW:Was there any of that in Fleabag? PW-B: No. But, very, very last minute changes, as ever. Actually Jamie Demetriou

who played the bus rodent, he does a bit in episode one where he’s talking about blowing glass and he’s talking about his sister – that was him improvising. He is a genius. He would say something like: “My colour’s mainly the season of brown but I wouldn’t say no to a maroon.” It was hard to choose from what he was coming out with.

JW: You have been talking about your experience as creator, writer, actor in something you’ve had almost complete control over and then ‘the machine’ kind of kicks-in and you find yourself having opportunities you never thought would come your way, like Star Wars. How do you feel, after having controlled material so tightly, being a component part; an actress in a juggernaut? Do you relish it?

PW-B: I loved it.You’ve just got one job. You’ve just got to really nail that one job Everyone cares so much about StarWars and about those characters. There were times when I’d just be talking to a massive blob which has six people inside of it talking about what they had for breakfast. Then you meet people like Donald Glover, who’s amazing and his work is amazing. Atlanta came out the same season as Fleabag, so we’d kind of bumped into each other a little bit and I saw his show and I was completely blown away. Then meeting him on Star Wars and hearing what his creative process was around it.We’d both made these really personal half-hour comedy drama shows around the same time. His profile was huge before then but it had taken him into a different realm of success.

JW: Both Fleabag and Atlanta are narratively and formally different, kind of paradigm- shifting. Presumably Donald’s a great puppet master and controls it very tightly.

PW-B: He has a very clear idea of what he wants. He’s someone who trusts his instincts but then is so open minded about what might influence him. He’s a really curious and investigative person. Loves having people around him who will have those kinds of conversations with him. Sitting in the Falcon with Donald Glover we’d be talking about the future of AI all of a sudden and he’d be really philosophical in the space of about three minutes. In a green sock. No one recognised me at the wrap party because I was just always in a green sock on set.

Photographer:JamesWright;PhotoAssistants:JohnnyTergo & HanahYoung;Stylist:Liz McClean;
Stylist Assistant: Brigid Moore; Make-up:Tamah Krinsky @ The Wall Group; Hair: Dennis Gots @ The Wall Group; Manicure: Denise Bourne using Deborah Lippmann; Producer: Photobomb Productions; Magazine: Christopher Ramsay