S5 E7: Adjoa Andoh, actress

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:44Hello friends, I'm in my kitchen, as ever, counting down the minutes until my next guest arrives. Doing that thing, when you're a little bit nervous, you start overthinking what you wear. I should have shaved my ankles. Do you ever get that? I look like Teen Wolf but just from behind the knee. I'm not taking this dress off though it is an absolute banger hairy legs or not and it is just right for my guest the wonderful Adjoa Ando who plays Lady Danbury in the cheeky lusty mega hit show Bridgerton. Look I know it's only acting but I actually feel like an aristocrat in a swishy gown is about to ring my doorbell.

1:27Now, what better last minute pep me up snack than a bag of pickled onion monster munch? I've just unearthed them from behind a box of cuppa soups in the cupboard above the toaster.

1:44It's just the smell. The smell is 1983 vending machine at Carlisle swimming bath. I love a crisp that hurts you. On stage, Adjur has played lead roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. You'll recognise her off the telly from Casualty and EastEnders. And she made her Hollywood debut, starring as Nelson Mandela's chief of staff opposite Morgan Freeman in Clint Eastwood's film Invictus. She's been described by the Guardian's theatre critic as extraordinarily expressive. She once lived in a squat, making ends meet by cleaning loos and being a life-drawing model. But now her life is red carpets and adulation.

2:42So I'm desperate to know what she turns to these days for sustenance and comfort. When the curtain's down, the crowds have gone home and she's having a little me time. I know what I turn to.

2:58Ow. Really get stuck in your teeth.

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3:46Adjo and O. Welcome to Comfort Eating. Grace Dent, thank you very much for having me. Before we started, you said that you have not got a scrap of makeup on. I have not a scrap of makeup. But you are sitting in front of me, a picture of understated, chic. You look wonderful. You have worn some stunning costumes as an actress. So I'm going to say, as my first question, what is your go-to fancy dress? I like a three-piece tailored suit with a good shirt. Okay. Some good loafers. Do you ever go anywhere just dressed as a bottle of ketchup on Halloween? Do you know what? The thing is, because I have to wear a fancy dress for my day job, do you know what I mean?

4:30I'm like, oh, no, I can't be doing that. In my real life, no. Yeah. I've turned into Mrs. Comfy Kex. But when you get that invitation and it comes through the door and it's a really good friend's birthday, but then at the bottom you realise actual fancy dress, do you sigh and pretend you didn't get the invite? totally no actually I wouldn't even sign pretend I'd just ring them up and go mate it's me I'm not coming to a fancy dress happy birthday I'll take you out for dinner I respect that I respect that so much you see I just pretend I didn't get the invite every week my guest shares with me their ultimate comfort snack it is a platter of joy that makes their heart glow when life seems like a tepid radiator in need of bleeding.

5:17Adjoa Ando, star of stage, screen and cinema, what have you brought for me today? Please reveal it. Yeah, reveal it in front of me. This is the first time I've...

5:31This is the first time we've seen an actual vitamin on comfort eating. Well, well, there we are. Hang on, we've got loads of cheese on what I'm seeing is we've got cheese, we've got oat cakes. Yes. Then we've got a load of tomatoes. We've got a load of grapes, but we have got a healthy amount of full Brazil nuts. Brazil nuts. Yeah. My 26 year old, youngest, big brain knows everything in the whole world, daughter has said, mom, you can't eat that many Brazil nuts. It'll kill you. Cause I eat fistfuls of Brazil nuts. I mean, this is a very modest portion for me. and Hang on, I didn't know this This is the thing, apparently Selenium, who knew?

6:17The secret killer Come on It kills you Clearly, I don't know because I've been eating fistfuls of this stuff for years but apparently you're not supposed to I don't do anything bad anymore This is living dangerously Come on, you go crazy We'll have the defibrillator ready So that's naughty apparently but Brazil nuts are my go-to. I think it's from being a kid, you know, when you'd get nuts only at Christmas with the crackers and then trying to crack the Brazil nut shell and have a whole Brazil nut inside was like, that was an achievement. How do you eat this? Have you got a system that you, do you pile them on top of each other or is it like a smorgasbord?

7:01What I would do is I would slice it thinly as is here and then, do you know what? This is making me laugh. I actually had this last night. So, as you can hear, my mouth's completely open. Excellent. I'm having a grape as well. Good. I sat on the sofa. I had rough oat cakes, which these are, sliced manchego, which this is, and then I sliced up the cherry tomatoes. I sliced them into threes, and then I do a little triangle of joy, and then I grate a load of black pepper over the top, and I basically just hoover them into my mouth until they're gone. You haven't had anything? Are you having any of them?

7:38I will do. I was just there you go I'll have a little bit I'm gonna this is gonna be good broadcasting isn't it I've seen the finest minds in this city trying to broadcast while they ship things into their mouths there you go well so that's me it's not very glamorous is it but that's the point of the podcast I love oat cakes I love that you can feel yourself that you're really doing yourself a favour yeah I like the grindiness of them as well. They're quite industrial. It's an industrial snack. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's like talking through concrete.

8:25Adjira, you have been acting for 40 years. People might know you best as Lady Danbury in the recent TV series Bridgerton. season one was a record breaker for netflix 82 million households globally watched it in the first month season three is coming soon how much of a game changer has it been for you is there a bb and an ab before bridgerton and after bridgerton i think there is i'd get a certain amount of oh that's her off of the telly beforehand but now it's just enormously more can you go to the supermarket without people following you down the aisle i can go to the supermarket people don't follow me down the aisle but they do look at me sometimes they help me back up my shopping just you know there's some good things coming from it but for years i did shows that would be in people's living rooms.

9:28So I was in EastEnders. I was in Casualty. People would just come up and talk to you like they knew you. Yeah. Bridgerton is a whole different level. And I think there's a sort of emotional attachment to it because it dropped during the pandemic. And I think there's some even subconscious connection with, we're all scared. We don't know what's going on. We're all feeling quite isolated and powerless. And then here comes a little sweetie to make you go, I'm worried about what? Oh, I don't know. Is she going to? Oh, will they, won't they? Oh, that's a nice frock. Oh, look at that stately home. Oh, anyone can watch it.

10:05Everybody's included. So I think all those things were good. I think everybody wanted to feel like they were still connected to each other. And the show did that. In that way, it's become a game changer for me because people get quite emotional about the show, the character. I think it's freighted with a weird extra schwang, which is about weirdy COVID days. In the nation's psyche, you are frozen in time almost as that character. Big boofy hair and a stick. That's me. No, I was in America. I was in Atlanta. And I was going into a building with my niece and nephew and some other people. And a security guard, tall guy, must be over six foot, quite wide, full uniform, full down to the ground curtsy is what I got from him.

10:54I love it. And it's, yeah, so it's a very... You must see a real selection of curtsies as you go around, though. Of all ages and stages, yes, I do. Because a curtsy is difficult. It's quite tricky. See, this is the only thing that's kept me out of the royal family, I think, really. Your curtsying ability. yeah but you know what i met the queen last year i did a thing for her golden jubilee at windsor with horses and i'm doing curtsying for a living these days and i still panicked i was like yeah am i too low do you matter what did you do well go on give me a curtsy tip what do i need to think um just think about what you're wearing on your feet you don't want to tip over okay so just dip the head slightly you're showing the respect you try and be as elegant as you can one foot forward, one foot back and just dip you don't have to do anything grand because you're aiming for elegance respect and can I crank myself up to full standing afterwards and if you've got a certain length skirt on don't show your pants yeah you probably don't want to wear that skirt to me

12:09One of the main filming locations for Bridgerton is Badminton, which is a huge country pile in Gloucestershire, known for hosting the Badminton Horse Trials. Badminton is not far from where you grew up. Take us back. Tell us about your childhood there. Well, when I was nearly four, we moved from Leeds to the Cotswolds. it was a tiny village one street basically and a few bits off it lots of people who lived there worked for the Earl of Ducy who was a massive landowner so they worked on the farms and on the estates and it had oh god it was lovely I was just thinking about this the other day because my dad still lives there so I go back it had a number of pubs two garages two antique shops news agents, hairdressers, fishmongers and sweet shop, several grocery stores.

13:07It just had everything. We had a carnival in the summer, which was followed by sports day. We watched shows in the village hall. We watched films. Annie, get your gun. First film I saw was on somebody's dad's projector screen and we all sat cross-legged on the floor and watched it. It sounds like a village out of a BBC Two Sunday drama. It's Cider with Rosie. That was a documentary of my life, practically. You go blackberry picking and scrumping apples. Yes. Dams and jam, slow jam. There would be a bonfire on bonfire night and the kids would arrange the bonfire. We'd collect old furniture. God knows the toxic chemicals we were releasing.

13:47But anyway, we set fire to them all. I mean, it sounds idyllic. Was it idyllic? All of that stuff was idyllic. And I wouldn't have missed any of that for the world. And then the less idyllic stuff was just about being the black family in the village. But my mother taught, my mum taught the secondary modern, which is at the school up the road, in what was called the town, population 4 ,000, the town. and when the grammar school and the sec mod became the comp my mum was head of the first year so she was my head of year she came round all the primary schools in the village and she saw the children and I called her Mrs Ando and would have nothing to do with her because that's how you stay safe and I was very proud of her because she was hip and groovy and kids liked her She's from Liverpool She is from Liverpool And your dad was a journalist from Ghana who became an accountant for British aerospace when he moved to the UK.

14:52I thought he built Concord. I would lie on the ground as Concord went over in the vapour trials and I'd be like, my dad built that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he was an accountant. So you're the only non-white family for miles? No, there were the Pierces in Wooten-Undredge. They were Chinese. They ran inevitably. the takeaway um there were several children who were fostered or adopted but my dad was the only biological parent of color in my little area apart from the pierces and i love the accent that comes through when you're talking about this yeah did you talk like that yes um i could talk like this but you learn very quickly talk like everybody else it's your superpower and i love it And I love how chippy everybody could be.

15:45Oh, she's no better than short to be. Oh, really? Did being the only family for a long way around with Ghanaian heritage, did that make you want to know more about it? Or did you just kind of put a pin in it? Not on your day-to-day. No, not at all. Your day-to-day was brilliant. Loved all of that. And then occasionally you just have to smack someone in the face if they got too tricky with you. which I learned to do in the infants, I think. So it was a mix. But did you get into trouble when you did that? No, not in those days. Everybody was biff-baffing. You know, the headmaster was biff-baffing with his cane.

16:24Everybody got whacked with the ruler. It was proper corporal punishment. You're totally right. That's how it was. I hadn't even thought of that. You're so right. The teachers were hitting you in the 60s. Yeah, so it was biff-baff all round. It was the life, and we all ducked and dived our way through it. You know, there was the man who gave you sherbet toffees if you went to his house. And we all went, but we all knew, don't go on your own. Go in a gang? What, really? Yeah, but he's got sherbet toffees. What? Yeah, I'm going round. So, you know, all those kids' instincts that you just, you know stuff when you're a kid, don't you?

17:00Oh, my God. You've just unlocked a memory. And that's exactly it. old men would ask you to go to their house but you would just weigh away up the risks they had sweets yeah they had sweets they were hard to come by

17:24you're in the cotswolds with this mix of english and ghanaian parents did ghanaian food and flavors play a big part in your childhood? My dad's sisters taught mum to season chicken Ghanaian style. My dad was a great cook. My mum was a great cook. So we had everything, you know, we had everything from smashed potato and angel delight, right through to very Ghanaian flavoured rice and sauces and meat. And then we also had liver and bacon, something my mum made called the predicting meal which he still makes which I made for my kids my brother and I still laugh about it you would get it every summer holiday or Easter or half term so you could predict you were getting it and it was mashed potato mashed within an inch of its life with lots of butter and milk and black pepper and then white sauce and tuna fish and black pepper and there are particular sort of garden peas that weren't bright green they were sort of olivey green they weren't quite mushy peas either there is a very niche market there was only a particular brand can't remember what it was i know exactly which peas so yeah they're not sweet and firm no and poppable like garden peas no they're a kind of petit pois so you would have that with your predicting meal mashed potato and tuna and my brother and i would be like yes i love that At Joa, in spite of this bucolic world all around you, Bristol was only 15 miles to the south.

19:04Did you feel the pull of the bright lights when you were a teenager? Well, indeed. 1977, I saw The Clash. I'm a punk till I die. I loved it. The whole thing about the punk ethos was do it yourself. And it was about everybody join in. as long as you're into it, you're in. So there were skinheads, there were punks, there were rasters, there were all sorts of kids, all different backgrounds. It was like chippy. It was a chippy movement. Tell me about the night you go and see The Clash. Bristol Exhibition Centre. I went with Philip Stockbridge, who was kind of my boyfriend at the time. And before we went, we tried to go for an Italian in Bristol and spaghetti bolognese was like the Acme of Flash.

19:51very so and we went in and i had like loads of black eyeliner yeah hastily applied after i left the house yeah um black trousers we were doing this thing where we'd all had you know bags oxford bags or bell bottoms and then we became punks and so you would dye all your trousers or all your clothes in fact mum had a big metal tin i don't even know what it was but i would put it on the cooker yes with clothes dye dye on every dye on everything went in the cooker was i just remember the cooker was just spattered with black that never properly came off everything went in the dye on and then you cut all your trousers into drain pipes yes and so that night i had a plastic sort of bomber jacket it's really thin cheap naff with just a little like a granddad collar on it and a zip up the front, which I daren't zip because if I did, the whole thing might split apart.

20:47A white Airtex, probably P-shirt, with a tie on the inside of the collar, obviously. Yeah. And some big chopped down bags that were now dyed a dodgy colour black and were sort of leg tight. And some suede Clark's desert boots. And then Joe Strummer comes on. Mick Jones for me. Okay. Love Mick Jones. I bought the album for my friend. Claire, and her father snapped it in half in front of her. We're not having that filth in this house. Why? Because they were nasty punk people. Yeah. It was great. It was a fantastic movement to belong to when parents were snapping albums in front of you.

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22:29Hello, Grace Dent here. One more thing. If you love comfort eating, then you'll love my new book, Comfort Eating, What We Eat When No One's Looking. It's available order now. There's an e-book and an audio book if you want me to read it to you. With chapter headings like Why Butter Makes Everything Better and Why Potatoes Are Proof of a Higher Power, How Can You Resist? Comfort Eating is packed with funny, moving stories about my family and my childhood, as well as recipes and stories about recording the show.

23:13At 18, you decide to study law at Bristol Poly. Yeah. You're living with your boyfriend in a bedsit, surrounded by a big group of friends. Yeah. And then after two years, you decide to quit uni. How are you making ends meet then? In those days, you could sign on. You could sign on. You got your housing benefit and you signed on. I joined a black women's group when I was at the poly. Now it's called the University of the West of England, but we know it's the poly. We hated all the university. At the university, we hated them. I hated them. So I joined the black women's group, class warfare, Grace.

23:52I joined the Black Women's Group. And in those days, black was a political term. So there was a Turkish girl in the second year who went to my still very good friend, Yvonne Ramsaran, who was Indian Guyanese slash Irish. She was in the third year. And she went to Yvonne and went, there's one in the first year. And Yvonne was like, get up. So I joined the Bristol Black Women's Group. We went to Greenham Common. we did the encircling of the base Hannah did you did you camp? we didn't stop over any of that stuff we went on a coach for the day to be grumpy and go to the men you look after the children and they did but it was a beautiful thing to do we all joined hands and we all encircled the whole of Greenham Common Base this feels like quite a radical bedsit that you're living in it seems like you've got to this it's quite a radical time in your life what are you eating in the bedsit days?

24:50well when you sign on and you have a brethren and sisterhood of signer honors as well as you know the gyro comes in the sun comes up you dash to the post office you cash the gyro you buy 20 john player specials because you're not scrapping around for bits of tobacco left in the ashtray proper solid you buy a mars bar and then you walk back from the post office with your cash in your pocket your whole pack of fags and a half munched mars bar and then everybody who's run out of gyro comes to your house so there'd be a there'd be a rolling thing of everybody pooling their resources and we used to have a thing called proto-veg that's like mints yeah like Textured vegetable protein in the car.

25:41That's the one. Proto-veg. And you'd make a vat of it. You'd make a vat of rice and you'd chuck kidney beans in it, tinned tomatoes, whatever you could afford or liberate from your local supermarket. There was a lot of liberation going on in those days. And you'd just cook it up with a load of chilli and soy sauce, whatever you could get. And that vat would keep going and people would come round and they'd eat from that. And then when their gyros came in, they would contribute. And that's how we lived.

26:21Age 21, you move to London. Yeah. You move into a squat in Brixton. Yeah. You are setting your sights on acting. What's your big break? Well, this black American woman, Deborah, who was in my black women's group in Bristol, she got funded by Ken Livingston, God bless him, to do a show in London. And she said, come and audition for my show. So I came up to London and auditioned for her show. I didn't know what you're supposed to do. I hadn't been to drama school. I'd done drama O-level in the sixth form at school. So I did a piece from E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class about land enclosure.

27:03yeah I don't know and I sang a jazz song that was my audition I got the job so I left Bristol April the 15th 1984 I got a lift up to London I moved in with my then girlfriend who I'd met when Bristol Black Women's Group had a sororial visit with Brixton Black Women's Group yeah moved in with Dorothea and um she lived in Tooting no I'm not coming to London to live in to it was it was tooting broadway it was housing estate when i was like this is no so um there was an advert i know it's it's a much spiffier place now but there was an advert for a housing co-op that um had a squat that they had funding from lambeth for and if they accepted you to join their merry band you would be helping to build a house we lambeth provided an architect gave us a grant for materials labor was your own and in return you could live there this is a side of squatting we never hear about mate i learned how to lay concrete floors hang ceilings build window frames door frames i never did plumbing or electricity because i just thought no that's skillful this is not the interview that i thought i was going to be doing i i thought that we were going to be talking about beautiful dresses hair but what we're talking about is something far more fascinating Yes, laying concrete floors.

28:25Which is laying concrete. Come on now. We know this is proper. And squatting. Yeah. And I loved it. I mean, I did also do that thing where you'd walk down a lighted street and you'd gaze into someone's window and they were sitting. They had electricity and carpets and, you know, flushing toilets and all sorts of things I could only dream of. There was no flushing toilet at the slot. Well, at the time there was a bucket. We'd got the waste plumbed in, but it took a while to get everything else done. You join a feminist socialist touring company. That was amazing. So I did this job. I came back to London, lived with Dorothea, did the job, decided I didn't want to be in Tooting, moved to Brixton and then thought, yeah, I'm going to be an actor.

29:05Didn't work for a year. Model for life, drawing classes a lot, cleaned some toilets. And then other black women started telling me about auditions, which I've never forgotten because it meant they were putting me in competition with them to get the scarce jobs that were around. it was like this amazing generosity anyway one of these auditions came up I went and did it they rang to offer me the job which had an equity card attached to it which in those days they were like gold dust you'd have to do 40 weeks of cabaret to earn a an equity card and it was a closed shop so you couldn't work without an equity card um so I just got it by joining this company but the week I found out that I was being offered the job I also found out I was pregnant so they rang me and they said um we'd like to offer you the job and I went and I'd like to take it but I have to say I was like go on do it I have to tell you I'm pregnant slight pause on the line and then they went well we'll have to institute a maternity policy and I toured with that company till I was eight and a half months pregnant hang on a minute how were you when you're touring how where how are you traveling in the in the minivan how did you nourish a baby growing inside of you when you're living in the back of a van was a vegetarian so being a vegetarian on tour in the mid 80s was tricky a lot of baked potatoes and baked beans a lot of grated cheese chips yeah there was nothing for vegetarians then yeah and then I had the baby and then a week later I was in doing workshops with what became the company baby.