Failure Throwback: Phoebe Waller-Bridge

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0:36hello it's elizabeth here and i have a special seasonal treat for you for the next few episodes i've handpicked some of my favorite ever interviews from the how to fail archive Today, I bring you an episode from July 2019, the unstoppable Phoebe Waller-Bridge in our second chat together. Fleabag is back. I love this episode because it was a year almost to the day since she was the first ever guest on How to Fail. And in the 12 months that had followed our first ever interview, she had become this global success story. Fleabag had won a clutch of Emmys and BAFTAs and I was really interested in hearing from her what that felt like and whether actually there were moments of failure that she experienced along the way.

1:25The other reason I love it is because Phoebe is a dear friend of mine and it's always so much fun to talk to her. Thank you so much for listening and here she is, the one and only Phoebe Waller-Bridge. So this is a very special episode. Just over a year ago, I launched a podcast. The idea was to have vulnerable and honest conversations with people about the things that hadn't gone right. I DM'd a hummus company on Twitter for sponsorship. I sold my wedding dress on eBay to get the funds to hire a producer. And then I asked people I knew to be my interviewees. My first ever guest on the podcast that would become How to Fail with Elizabeth Day was none other than my dear and generous friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

2:14At the time we spoke, she had just wrapped filming on a Star Wars movie. The first series of Fleabag had aired and she was hard at work on the second, and a TV drama she had written and exec produced called Killing Eve was about to air. Since then, Phoebe has become one of the most phenomenally successful women on the planet. Killing Eve won three BAFTAs and was praised in Rolling Stone for undermining every rule of TV and for being hilarious, bloody, unclassifiable. Fleabag season two was universally acclaimed as a masterpiece and single-handedly made the entire Catholic Church question its commitment to priestly celibacy.

2:59Her off-Broadway one-woman show ran to rave reviews and was watched by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Nicole Kidman. Now she's writing on the new James Bond film, bringing her caustic feminist wit to 007's historically retrograde attitude to women. But what has life been like for her behind these extraordinary successes? After all, this is a podcast about what happens when you scratch the surface of achievement. It's about the moments of vulnerability, of sadness, and yes, of failure that don't always get the airplay. What has she learned from those moments when things didn't go according to plan, when success didn't always feel like it should?

3:41And that's why I'm barely coherent with excitement to welcome back my most downloaded podcast guest of all time, the one, the only, the dazzling Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Phoebe! Hello, listener! You're back! I'm back! Thank you. How has it been? What have you been up to? Haven't heard much from you lately. It sounds quite exhausting when you read it out on the page like that. Yeah, it's been pretty great. Pretty intense and great since we last spoke. Have you been getting enough sleep? No. No, not really. Although last night I slept for like 13 hours. say night yeah yeah it just happened you know sometimes when it happens when your body like puts you to sleep to get some other shit done that that you don't know about so that's what happened last night and what is it like genuinely when you hear me read out an introduction like that and you look back on what the last 12 months have contained because it is literally almost exactly a year ago since we met last to do this podcast yeah I suppose when you read it out it does and also because I've heard your podcast so many times and every time you're reading out people's achievements I'm always like oh my god like that's extraordinary everything yeah mine's like it just sounds silly I don't know like there'll always be a surreal element for somebody reading out your past 12 months and I guess leaving out the bits in between that we're going to talk about which is that like Killing Eve came out and that was such a huge and exciting thing and had had such an impact on my life but then the process of making that thing was a whole other experience in its own so it's always like when it's always compressed into just this happened and then this happened, and this happened.

5:21It's actually very rare that I see the year like that, because I suppose from everyone else's point of view, it's when it comes out. But from my point of view, it's all the work it takes to get it there. And then that's the end of the job. And other people see it as the beginning when it comes out. Does this make any sense? Makes total sense. And actually, as you're talking, I'm remembering that when we first met in 2014, you were writing scripts, and you're like, oh, I'm sort of adapting these spy novels. and it was a very long process of lots of, there was rejection along the way before it became Killing Eve.

5:53Oh yeah, yeah. It was turned down sort of by everybody, actually. All the channels in this country, I thought it was a goner and we thought it was a goner, the production company. And then they sent it to BBC America who just very simply just went, and with all the complicated notes you get back and the reasons that people don't want it or it might not fit on their channel, that kind of stuff, they just came back to us and just said, great! And like, that was it. They were like, we love it! and just said like go for it. So also sometimes you think something is gone and I really did with that and then suddenly it just, obviously the producers were working hard behind the scenes to get it away but then suddenly something that I thought I would never return to becomes the biggest thing in my life.

6:29One of the many, many things that I love about Killing Eve and actually about Fleabag as well is that you never explain a character's sexuality. It is there and it is what it is and I think that that's particularly revolutionary when it comes to women and female characters. Is that something that you set out to do or it just comes to you naturally? I think it comes to me naturally. And then once it's there, it's really important to me to protect that and not to wave a flag or have any kind of smuggery around any choices around that sort of thing. Or allow it to be an event. I just want the characters to feel completely truthful and surprising.

7:09And they're not thinking about it. Villanelle's not thinking day in, day out about the fact that she's bisexual. She's just shagging who she wants. I think that feels more natural. And also for me, it's just trying to represent a relationship between those two particularly women that I do recognise in real life, that women do interact romantically, erotically, like professionally and sexually in ways that every day, all the time, in ways that we just so rarely see on TV. And I like that we play it as a non-event in the TV show, which then makes it a bigger thing, rather than there's the bisexual character.

7:45And I suppose Eve's fascination with Villanelle as well was just not having to explain what that was, just letting us discover it with Eve, that she's discovering her sexuality and her obsession. It's not being pointed at. Yeah. Now you've casually walked into my flat with a water bottle that I've just noticed has the 007 logo on it and a little name sticker saying Phoebe Waller-Bridge above. Bond 25. Okay, this sounds like I'm walking around with my 007 badge on. I'm not. This actual physical water bottle is the best water bottle I have ever had. Why? Water bottles always leak. Especially when you're giving them on production.

8:26You can ask Jenny Robbins, who's been my story producer on Fleabag and Killing Eve, who's also working on Bond. We both were given this water bottle and we both had a total freak out about how amazing it is. It not only just has a push down lid, but then it screws as well, like just on the little knobble bit at the top. Got it, yes. But it never leaks. The screw bit is just really satisfying. It's got this little clip that you can put on your belt and it's just very sturdy. The colour's cool. It's like a light kind of grey. I cannot get over the actual design of the water bottle. And the annoying thing is that there's no branding on the actual bottle.

8:57Honestly, Jenny and I have been looking, so we don't know where to get it. It's just one of these mysterious things. It's just the 007 water bottle is the best water bottle. But is that just for cast and crew? You can't, I don't think you can buy that. No, you can't buy that, no, yeah. It's not like the Love Island water bottle, which is my other favourite model. Yes, you can buy this. I mean, that's the thing. Actually, do you have that here? No. We'll take it afterwards. But yeah, of all the excitement and everything, suddenly we went into our office and there was just a water bottle there and that's when we really lost our minds.

9:25You're like, forget Daniel Craig. I've met this water bottle. It's just the best water bottle. It's just so satisfying, the shape of it. And it's just, I've never carried a water bottle from set around with me in real life, ever in my life, other than this one. And it looks like it's because it says 007 on it, but it's not. It's because it's an excellent, excellently shaped bottle. I promise I'm going to get onto your failures in a minute, but I've got one more question, which is, it has been extraordinary, the overwhelming acclaim. I can't remember something in my lifetime that has got the acclaim that Fleabag specifically got for the second season and I wonder what it's like to carry that weight because you're now almost universally heralded as the voice of your generation and people come up to you on the street and say I am Fleabag and this meant so much to me how do you cope with the weight of that maybe you try not to think about it and I've ruined that for you now um it doesn't feel like that heavy actually doesn't feel like weight.

10:30I think there was something about this season of Fleabag that I feel slightly disconnected from in a lovely way. It feels like it had another thing, like it took on another energy. We could slightly feel it on set. We were all just sort of like, what is this? There was something a bit mystical about the energy between all the actors and a director. And just everybody there was just operating on such an emotional level. Everybody cared so much about the story that it felt like it was all of ours and it really really does still feel like that honestly and it sounds really corny but I feel like every single person on that set gave a little tiny part of their heart to that show and I think you can really feel that so when I was watching it and when the reviews were coming in and when people were talking about it we were all talking like oh my gosh we all felt that there was something special so it's actually a light feeling you're just sort of like oh it was special what we all did.

11:18And do you feel understood in a way because something that I keep coming back to on this podcast is the idea that when we are open about our vulnerabilities and what we perceive as our weirdness actually that's the biggest source of connection with other people and did you feel that with Fleabag? I did massively with the play and the first series particularly because that was such a specific type of humour and such a specific type of insight into a cynicism and a kind of brokenness that I'd felt in my 20s and that a lot of my friends did and that feeling of not being so alone because what was written felt it was raw I could recognize it was raw and truthful to me and to our team and Vicky you know directed the play and so when that went out and people responded that was like oh oh we're all going through that we're all going through that we'll have gone through that we can touch on that but this series I think again because it was love the thing that felt so heartwarming about it was that how much people wanted to see a story about love because that's what I really felt like I wanted to see a romantic love story but also not about families like breaking up or breaking down anymore it's like the attempt to connect the attempt to love whereas in the last series I think she couldn't love and she'd been so burnt by loving a friend and then fucking it up and I think love was just so held which is in this one it was putting it out there And I felt like that was really moving about the response, is that people do want to love each other and they want to watch shows about love.

12:50That's so beautiful. I do remember watching the final episode of Fleabag Ever and being in floods of tears and sending you a video message just of me crying. Just of me being like, how dare you make me cry this much? The fox! The saying goodbye! It was amazing. Oh, I know. And there's actually takes of Andrew and I when we first did that scene. we were both in floods and also not in a way that we were like building up to the scene and it was none of that bullshit because it was so last minute the road was so noisy we didn't have any time to shoot that scene and I knew it was the most important scene we all knew it was the most important thing we'd be like oh god and it was like we'd be talking and suddenly a boss would be like and they'd be like stop go again so we just sort of got there and I'm like okay sit down and then just went go and so I hadn't felt like I was emotionally prepared for the scene anyway I was like oh damn this is not gonna go as well as I could and sat down and just did that scene with Andrew we both just literally in floods and there are about two takes that we can't really use because we were just like and also I mean any scene with Andrew just end up sort of crying in any way because he's so truthful even like the light-hearted ones you're just like oh my god there's man yeah it's honestly that sense of something other happening in it oh I'd love there to be a dvd of outtakes a dvd like I'm from sorry 1995 you specifically want a dvd yes just for me yeah it's really funny though stuff like that because that was the hardest scene to edit because it felt there was potential for it to be really amazing but if we lost the rhythm or the beat or the emotional journey for one second then we'd lose the I don't know the power of it and also Andrew came to set that day determined to say I love you too because it was a it was an option I wasn't sure if the character said I love you too at the end and so it's just eventually I love you it'll pass and then the kind of joke and then go and I sort of wasn't sure if he should say I love you to and Andrew came in he was like I'm saying it and he's basically like I'm not giving you another option because I have to say it and you know when an actor feels that strongly about something they'll be right especially for someone like Andrew you know and he had huge input to the whole thing but and I think actually that's the clincher of the whole thing is that he says it he was so right and uh I have him to thank for that was it a real fox did you have a real trained fox.

15:04No, we tried with the real fox. This was the funniest thing. There was like two foxes turned up and they were called like Buttercup and Tinker Winker or something and they turned up and it was so funny because again, middle of the night, a really loud street and everyone was like, we've got to be really careful with these foxes. We can't spook them. And what we'd realised is that like urban foxes are like that because they've been fucking living in London. They've been on the streets. They've been on the streets for ages and they've got that swag. These two little foxes have been brought up in, you know Henley like by the river and I saw him so then he came out and they were like what the fuck is this there were two of them tiny and they were in there and you're not going to believe this lay down and then the handler came up to me she was like so Tinkerbell doesn't like people and Buttercup doesn't like any kind of loud environment so either way we're fucked okay and they're like the only way we can make this happen is if we play Coldplay very very uh very loudly into the street and if nobody else can move.

16:04So there's a really surreal moment when everyone had to step back, the whole crew had to step back, the director, everybody had to step back. And then it was me sat alone because that's when the fox comes. And then they open this thing and then they put on a little radio and Coldplay starts playing. And then they open the thing and this tiny, terrified little fox just going, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, comes out and then just skids around for ages. We did that for about 20 minutes. And then we went back to look at the footage, and it was, I mean, it was just too funny.

16:32There was literally, it went everywhere except for in front of the camera. And so then we got the CGI fox in the end. Oh, my God. Was it like Coldplay Fix You or something? It was. God, I wish I could remember what it was. I think it might have been Fix You. And it was Coldplay. Like, they just love Coldplay, and it calms them down. But obviously, I mean, it must have been a terrifying experience for those foxes. But they didn't really have the cool swag that we needed. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so failure to find a fox that would walk in front of you is not actually one of your three failures. And these are failures that you have very kindly chosen from your last year, because I do think that that's a really interesting thing to examine, because for so many people listening to this podcast right now, you are the epitome of success and fame and brilliance.

17:14And I think it's really important that everyone realises that there is a journey to get there. And if you're not there right now, that's fine, because sometimes there are weird things that happen and you learn from them. so the first one is really interesting it's about how you were actually in New York when Fleabag season two aired over here and you felt disconnected from the people that you most loved so tell us about that yeah so I um so the show was coming out and also like I said before you you're working so hard and then you you finish the job and then it's done well for me it was done the show was ready to go out and then it was just going to go out whereas for everybody else it begins when the show goes out and so we finished editing it was all in the can then went to New York to do the play which was also an amazing experience but then the show came out and I'd underestimated as we all had what impact the show was going to have and that people were going to want to talk about it so much and like it so much and I was essentially just so far away from everybody and on different time zone and doing the play but working really hard was like writing during the day and doing the play during the night it wasn't like a kind of like New York baby Broadway thing it was more like just work at work and I hadn't really connected with my family and my friends my close friends and family but particularly my family when it went out so then they had this kind of strange explosion of this show happening that had so much to do with me and the work that I've been doing and Izzo my sister who'd written all the music for it she was connected to it professionally as well so she had a bit more ownership over it but because it's about family and everything this show I think there was suddenly this really intense my family have experienced a kind of intense focus from people in their lives and people asking about the show and asking about me and I think one of my regrets is that I wish I'd seen that coming so that we could have just been a bit like this might be weird you never want to overestimate the success of something you've done so you don't want to say this is gonna be huge guys so uh so let's hold hands and I honestly didn't have that feeling either it was just like done this and off we go and also it changed my family's lives a tiny bit when Fleabag One first came out because suddenly there was a Walla Bridge profile.

19:20And it's a distinctive surname. It's a distinctive surname. And everyone weathered that really brilliantly. And also people assume that it's based on my family and all that kind of stuff because it's about a family, which also is a whole other conversation because that's about, you know, how women can't write. Oh, don't worry. We'll get on to that. Yeah, go, go, go. Women can make things up too. It's not all, you know, our diaries. Also because the show is called Fleabag, which is your family nickname. Yeah. So there's also this sense that the people who love you and know you are watching you on screen, but you physically, Phoebe, are thousands of miles away.

19:53So they can't see you as the real person. They see you on screen. And that must have been so weird. And by the way, no one, I don't think, could have anticipated the enormity of what was about to happen, because it has been astonishing, deservedly so. But I don't think you should beat yourself up about that, because you couldn't have known. and you would have sounded like the worst kind of hybrid of mariah carey and donald trump like guys i'm a huge deal and um but was that it was there a slight disconnect between your family seeing you on screen but not seeing you in person yeah so i think all this buzz was sort of happening back in london i was kind of in this apartment in new york and not around anyone who'd made the show or not around my family and i think they were actually taking the brunt of the profile of the show suddenly getting bigger also I wasn't there so they were being asked all the questions about the show and they had no answers and the time difference and everything just made it weird basically it was just communication breakdown with my family nothing really happened but I just suddenly felt like I could have been braver with I know what you're saying because I think women specifically just to generalize horribly over gender I'm not all women but some women struggle with claiming their own power so we struggle with the idea that we can say I think what I've done is a really good piece of work and it might garner some acclaim and I want you to be prepared for that because it seems self-aggrandizing and we don't like that because we've been raised a certain way to like be modest and self-deprecating and always to slightly undermine ourselves and maybe it was that that you were feeling.

21:31Yeah definitely definitely some of that you just don't know do you? And you don't attempt fate. Don't attempt fate exactly but also I think when you're writing fiction and you're making art just trying to train myself to use that word I know and even when you used it you had to giggle yeah but you've made art but I feel like I feel like the difference in my head is now I'm that's what I'm trying to do yeah and so I feel like that's instead of just like I'm writing a sitcom it's like no I think the ambition must always be to write something with artistic integrity and so I'm trying to train myself to use the word although whenever anyone else uses that word I'm like um but yeah when you're trying to make something artistic you're trying to make something artistic I certainly felt like a lot of what was personal to me had gone into that show so I'd sort of like emotionally vomited so much of my insides and my life and my relationships in a kind of abstract way into that show and it's incredibly personal for me so I had been fortifying myself in the process of making it as well like I was aware that what I was doing was inviting people to see me in a very personal way.

22:37I was inviting people to watch this character and relate to her, whether they do or not, but that's the beckoning from her. But that's something I've controlled and I've created. And then so the people closest to me, like my family, they didn't necessarily invite that. And there's so much over-familiarity that comes with that. And so I think people assuming that Izzo is like Claire or is Claire and that people would ask her, are you Claire? And she'd have to explain a million times, no, I'm not. and they were like, oh, did you shit in a sink? Was what she got a lot of the time in the first series.

23:05And also people just assuming that so much of it is true. And so that actually, that bleeds into my family's life when the show's going out because then they weirdly are having to defend our family. And to defend their own individuality, I guess. Well, yes. Yeah. And I think I'd underestimated that because what I know I'm writing is, it's really personal to me. And of course I'm drawing on real life experiences and things and things that echo in real life through the things do echo through the show but you know I write about my biggest fears I write about losing my best friend or losing my mum or not communicating with my dad or not getting on with his new partner and all those things are my worst fears when actually you know my mum's alive and well my best friend is alive and well we have an unbelievable relationship my my relationship with both my siblings is incredible I get on really well with my stepmother and with my dad but it's the what if yeah and I think what people see when they watch it is the um oh that must be it and I just wish I'd had the foresight to sit my family down and gone what I've done is really personal it's not about you guys there's a few degree of separation in other people's minds because it's so personal about family and because there are strange links like I did have an ex-boyfriend with a motorbike or like my stepmother is actually an artist and all those sort of things that I just wish I'd had more responsibility and said to them just managed to fortify them a bit more.

24:25I think that is so beautifully expressed what you've just done there because I think again that this is something that is very gendered in art creation is that the most pretentious sentence I've ever uttered possibly no that's what we're talking about no it's not it's very factual the creation I as a female novelist have often felt that when women write about families it is always assumed that it is their family and that they don't have the intellectual imagination to make that cognitive leap into real fiction. Whereas when Jonathan Franzen does it, and don't get me wrong, I love Jonathan Franzen, but when he writes a family novel like The Corrections, it's seen as the state of the nation.

25:09Oh, I just love how you speak. When we were talking about this briefly before, when you said that, it was like, that's exactly the point. And actually, probably, that's why I assumed that it wouldn't be seen like that and people wouldn't assume that of my family and maybe it is a gendered thing maybe they do like I say it's a strange thing because nothing actually happened it was just this underlying sense of oh gosh I wish I'd taken better care because they're actually fielding things that I was completely unaware of like people coming up to my siblings and my parents all the time being like is this true what's this about is this you know is this you guys and I just really felt for them do you think that that would have happened were you a man I don't know.

25:48I really, really don't know. There's just no way of knowing. It might be to do with the fact that I'm a woman, but it also might not be. I feel like in terms of how the show has that kind of autobiographical assumption is something that I'm asked about a lot. And I'm also asked if I think that happens a lot because I'm a woman. Sorry, it's a really boring question. No, but it's not because it's a really interesting question. And it's one I wanted to talk about with you as well, because either it's the show feels so raw and real that that's why people think it's real or it's because people assume that there's a limit to a woman's imagination I think I'd always rather believe the former yeah you have a suspicion but I don't know to be fair I think that the former is true of you because Fleabag and Killing Eve as that critic from Rolling Stone so brilliantly put it like they defy all conventional genre not only in terms of the tv that you're writing but the characters that you're writing and the way that they are.

26:42But I think what's interesting about that is that you don't define yourself in a particularly female or a particularly male way, I don't think, as a writer. No, not at all. I don't think of myself in that way at all. I'm aware of it because of where I'm positioned in the industry, but I know that my work will never pander to that. In fact, the opposite. And I think that's part of the fun. It's part of the game. Because once you know what box you're going to... And people do. I understand why people want to put people in boxes, because it's how we understand people. And it's how we can immediately feel like we know who they are and what's safe about them.

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28:13It's interesting what you were saying about how there are certain things that come from your insides, as it were, but you warp them to an nth degree. So actually, it feels like a lot of the characters in Fleabag are aspects of you rather than based on real people. And I have had the great good fortune of meeting and getting to know your sister, and she is nothing like Claire. but the bit that I think a lot of people related to and thought was so beautiful was the bit where Claire's saying that she would run through an airport for Fleabag because it's this peon actually what you're doing there is this peon to love and to family connection yeah and actually that summing up the whole feeling that you have which is whatever happens you're the person that I will always love you to a degree that no one else will ever understand and actually just forgetting to say that it's kind of actually remembering to say that it's a big part of families and siblinghood I think we take for granted that you're there for each other if you're lucky enough to have family that is there for you and that you sometimes just need to say it and the power of that but then again I'm writing that and it just came out like I didn't but I'm writing that episode and I'm very very last minute writer in like in a kind of panic last minute way so I'm writing all that stuff and I'm not feeling like that the fact that that line had such an impact and it makes me go back and look at it again and go oh my god yes that's of course that's a big moment but I wasn't right and going and then Claire says I love you in her own words to flee back like it doesn't feel as structurally sort of like contrived to that but then and I love that and love seeing that people were saying that they were texting their sisters that and stuff afterwards but there's so much that I mean Izzo and I when we were watching the episodes together and Izzo wrote the music for the show and so there's a lot of her insights in this show as well the music is utterly fantastic it's just insane and again I get a lot of the heat around the success of the show of course I do because you know I'm writing and I'm in it but the process of there being an episode and it's not working and it's not working and everyone knows it's not working and I've got this genius editor Gary Dolan I've got Harry and Jenny Robbins story producer and Harry Bradbury the director and we're all in the room we can't make it work we can't make it work we don't know what's happening there were so many dark moments in the editor like it's not working and then Issa will deliver some music and we'll put the music over these two scenes and suddenly it will make sense.

30:29And that happens so many times with this show. And Izzo, you know, I knew that I wanted something really massive and choral and it to feel epic because it's a small story. It's about a couple of people in the world. But to them, it's epic. And I love that feeling of making something feel big for the characters, even though we're acknowledging that the characters are just a bunch of middle-class people in London somewhere. But for them, they're in their own Greek tragedy. And so when we first, when I was talking to Izzo about it and said, can you write some music? And then like big choral stuff.

31:03And the references I was giving her were like an orchestra of like 120. And she has the budget for like six people. So I was like, can it be like that? And she's like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And then she went away and she did it. And she was using these six incredible singers. But then when she brought the music back, and this was an amazing thing and ties into the whole, there's something other about it. She brought the music back and we were putting it over the first episode. and we were thinking something's not working something's not working it's just not clicking so we put that in the bin which is actually a storage place on our editor's computer rather than an actual bin he puts it in like Izzo's bin and then she started writing more music for the first episode and then as we got later down the series and we were editing it and this scene wasn't working and it was episode four and five things weren't working and Gary just took out what Izzo had written for the first episode and put it on the final episodes and it worked her compositions fit perfectly to the cut that he'd done before any work had been done either to her composition or his edit and it was this really spooky moment of she'd written the end at the beginning and then she didn't need to write anymore because she'd already written the entire show but just backwards wow and then we realized that so it was already there and the age of the singers gets older through the series and they're actually using young boys at the beginning and then adult singers by the end and then we weirdly it's only after we realized that that's it's a show of you know it's about maturing it's a coming of age story and she did that with the music which was which is amazing but yeah but there's like loads of dynamics between me and Izzo in it and actually there was one night when we were talking about the music and we were back we lived together and we were staying up late and I mean Sian Clifford's performance is so amazing and we just love watching it so much but then we did have to watch through one episode together and we were just pissing each other going that's us that's us that's us that's us that's us am i right in thinking so the episode where claire gets a terrible haircut didn't that happen to you yes yes yes and i remember you didn't you call your your mom and iso and iso was like it's really this is really bad it's really like she was talking to your mom being like we really need to take this very seriously because it is a massive issue tell us what happened i can't I got a haircut before the first series of Fleabag and it ends up becoming like the Fleabag haircut yeah because in Crashing which by the way if you haven't watched Crashing you must watch Crashing the second episode of Crashing is one of the funniest things I've ever seen on TV but you had really long hair I've just remembered that was hair extensions oh okay I've done but I've made I'm very observant you are but I've made the pilot Fleabag just before I made Crashing and so I was going to have to make the pilot Fleabag then make Crashing and then go back through the rest of the series so I wanted to have a different look between the two shows and I also just wanted to have locks for a time in my life although it's basically like carrying around a pony on your head and you can't run your hands through it no and it's really itchy and heavy but then when someone does it all nice for you then it's your Beyonce if you've probably noticed in crashing that's the person that came to mind when you saw my look but yeah so then I got a new haircut for Fleabag and I thought it was too short and also I think I was just having my period and I was just like in the middle of it the stress of the show about to start filming and I hadn't finished the scripts and all that kind of stuff and then I got a haircut on top of everything else and I was like I remember being in like floods like absolute floods of tears and I called Izzo and I was like literally like the focal thing I was like my fucking life is over and I'm about to go and do this show and I'm gonna tell and she was so amazing she just went she was like she took me so seriously and I'll never forget it this is one of those airport moments because she took me so seriously she was like okay listen where are you and I was like I'm at my flat I'm never leaving my flat again it's so short and then she was like I'm coming over and she came over because of my bad haircut and she's in the doorbell rings she's there and then she was like oh darling I was like don't say it looks nice and it's just one of those moments and then she sat with me and we worked it out and we kind of It was just one of those moments of sisterly and loyalty and love that I've never forgotten.

35:12And it's just so funny because then the next day I'm like, totally fine. And then I see friends and they're like, have you got your hair cut? I'm like, yeah, yeah, do you like it? It's like the madness. But it does show, I think that it shows the stakes around hair and stuff. I think that's where the idea came from for Hair is Everything because the stakes around that stuff are stupid high. And it's like, why do we care? Why do we care that much? and it just feels like it's so deep in us that you know all that image stuff and everything but but it is also just great material your second failure is I think something that people will find surprising if they only know you through the incredibly strong and complicated characters that you create which is your tendency to people please in specific instances related to work so tell us about that yeah I feel like it's the part of myself that drives me most crazy and we've talked about it a lot and actually I don't know I feel like I've spoken to a lot of women about it but just what would happen if I'm not just the nicest person in the room all the time it seems like cataclysmic and I know that's insane or maybe it's not actually but the characters you know I've said in another interview that I write characters that don't care about that because I'm teaching myself how to be one.

36:31And it's not really not giving, like not caring what you think. It's not caring about the consequences of speaking their mind or doing the thing that they believe is the right thing or just following their own instinct. If that's met with people disagreeing with them that they don't mind. And when it comes to my actual on the ground work, like the actual writing and making of a thing, I can fight and fight and fight for something because it's very specific. I'm fighting for the art, shall we say. But it's all the politics in between it. I still feel completely handcuffed by a politeness. And not that politeness isn't a good thing, but I think it can be a yoke around your neck when it's the thing that gets in between you and saying what you really want to say.

37:15I don't ever want to be a genuine nightmare to people. And I don't think I would ever be. But I think knowing the difference between not caring about people saying that you're difficult when you know you haven't been. Actually, during Killing Eve, I actually had a sort of physical reaction to the pressure that I was under. I was sort of shaking and I basically almost passed out in one of the offices one day and had to get picked up and go to a doctor. It sounds to me as if the Killing Eve thing, you were also very grateful that BBC America was taking this chance and other people had rejected it and suddenly you're going from Fleabag which was very much a one-woman thing to something where you're heading up a writer's room and there are lots of different opinions all at once and that must have been incredibly stressful.

38:00Do you think you've got better at it because of that salutary experience where what you were doing in your mind had such a massive knock-on effect to your physical self? I do I felt like I hit the edges of something during Killing Eve and also because I was filming Star Wars at the same time and you feel so lucky so you do push yourself. I also probably should have said I need to take a week because I can't think straight because I'm so tired but unless you really demand that no one's really gonna say that for you because everyone's just like should we fine get on with it and even if they did which I did you know a little bit I'd say no no I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine because the tankard's moving forward so I felt like you just had to I had to keep going I got better on it with fleabag I think but then I said I was still having like I was still so tired I was still having like shakes and stuff.

38:48The final take of that, I was so, so, so tired. I do work myself to the ground as well. And I'm really, really hard on myself when I'm doing it. And I feel like that's because I care so, so much about getting it right and getting it really, really good. But I also think sometimes you need to give yourself permission to stop. And I didn't stop because I didn't want to let people down. God, oh. you also need to give yourself permission to stop because being creative can't come when you're frazzled and adrenalized and not thinking straight you need to have a period of rest although sometimes I get scared that my most creative stuff comes when I'm that frazzled that's so interesting really but I don't know if that's true I don't know if it's true but I do feel I'm so self-critical when I'm writing so if I'm like woke up at 10 a cup of coffee went for a jog sat down I'll write three sentences and I'll be like this is a part of shit whereas if my deadline was two days ago and I've got a whole load of ideas I've already chucked out and then I have to do something really quickly I can't judge it so much then I'll send that off easier it's very strange process because I get so much energy from it and yet I have no structure to my creative process at all do you still write in bed yeah yeah yeah yeah a lot of the time let's particularly with Fleabag 2 I was rewriting on the set so much and that I mean it's so crazy for the actors because I was so lucky to have those actors who already knew their characters so well and have such great instincts like Brett Gelman I wrote his final speech in episode six in the car between the unit base and the set I just was like I'm really sorry I've just got to rewrite it because it doesn't weirdly it felt more like the original speech felt more like a Fleabag speech than a Martin speech so I quickly rewrote it in the car and he had loads of input into it and it was brilliant but when I say I'm last minute I mean it did get to extremes with that but then sometimes the good stuff does just come out there and I think I need to work out so the next process I'm going to go through is not have any deadlines not take any other jobs on I'm going to write on spec now and see if I actually get anything written or if I need a deadline that's exciting yeah how do you cope now with knowing when you need help I mean what's your relationship like with anxiety and nervous exhaustion and handling that.