Sally Phillips - ‘I saw Colin Firth and thought - he’s mine!’

0:28Hello, lovely How to Fail listeners and viewers. to bring you this extra special episode of How to Fail with the wonderful Sally Phillips recorded in front of a live audience at London's Barbican. That's the secret to Shazza, basically. She's not Bridget. And so she doesn't get to snog Colin Firth or Hugh Grant or Leo Woodall or Patrick Dempsey or Chiwetel Epochera and consequently spends 25 years saying, fuck.

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1:23My guest tonight is distinctly uneasy with being called a national treasure, but it's hard not to think of Sally Phillips as part of the fabric of our culture. She has appeared in a string of the most influential and hilarious comedy series of all time from the sketch show she co-created Smack the Pony to Miranda I'm Alan Partridge the thick of it and Veep naming but a few. She's also appeared in all four of the Bridget Jones movies as one of the titular heroine's best friends, Shazza. It could almost have been very different. After graduating with a first in Italian and linguistics from Oxford University, Phillips was set on studying for a PhD in spaghetti westerns.

2:11Eventually, she saw sense, sort of, and opted to go to clown school instead. From there, her course was set. Alongside this busy and thriving career, Phillips has also been an important voice in the neurodivergent community. The mother of three neurodivergent sons, the eldest of whom, Ollie, has Down syndrome, she has been a tireless campaigner for disability rights. Both she and Ollie are now patrons of the Down syndrome association. I am quite often failing, Philip says, or getting it wrong, or feeling like you've got it wrong and definitely wanting to get it right, definitely wanting to be good.

2:51But we all fail, and we all fail differently, don't we? London, please welcome to the stage the one and only Sally Phillips!

3:08Appropriately enough, I nearly missed the chair there. That would have been good, wouldn't it? Forever on brand. Bridget Jones, do you mind if we start there? Not at all. Because I, like many people here, have watched and adored every single one of those movies. And the latest one in the instalment, and the last, has just come out. And I wonder what it was like for you reconnecting with your character 25 years after the first movie, and not only your character, but all of the other actors 25 years on. Yeah, I felt very emotional, because you kind of... I mean, it's such a heavenly world, the Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis working title world.

3:53And it's not one that I live in. And you just can't help thinking back to it. So it was my 30th birthday on the day of the read-through for the first film. And I walked in and I was like, you know, my career was going like this. It's just going to get better from here. And I looked over and I was the only person in Britain who hadn't seen Pride and Prejudice. And I saw Colin Firth and I thought, he's mine. I am in the right room, I thought. My life is going swell. And obviously Colin was taken. And so was Hugh.

4:32That's the secret to Shazza, basically. She's not Bridget. And so she doesn't get to snog Colin Firth or Hugh Grant or Leo Woodall or Patrick Dempsey or Chiwetel Ophodra and consequently spends 25 years saying, fuck. you do swear exceptionally well in those movies thank you is it true that you initially tried out for bridget yes yes i think so yeah i did well i did and i had i um i felt a bit ambivalent i mean it's ridiculous i mean i could never have played it um but i was it just because you are it doesn't mean you can play it as you can see by renee playing it so well being taxic texan norwegian yeah and I remember Sharon McGuire the director saying the character needs to be drunk quite a lot how do you think you'd do that me saying uh I don't know I might get drunk

5:28which was which was the wrong answer and we spent quite a lot of time trading stories about how we'd been dumped and I think at the well I know at the time I had just been dumped by an artist who had told me that since he'd been going out with me he hadn't had enough time to go swimming oh my god it's like so savage wow like I am not stopping you swimming swim all you like I'll meet you in the pool but yeah anyway so it was an unsuccessful audition for Bridget and then I auditioned for Jude as well so they were just playing chess to the pieces but they were making the movie before Renee came on board and once she came on board it became an entirely different thing so I feel very lucky to be in it but your original question was how did it feel going back the second one I guess wasn't that emotional because it was pretty soon after but number three and number four there were such long gaps that you were catching up such a lot of life like people had got divorced and lost partners and lost children and you were checking in on big, big things.

6:43And I felt very emotional this last time because I was just thinking how differently those 25 years had gone. So I turned 30 on the day of the first read-through and I'm about to turn 55. And those 25 years just turned out so differently to what I was expecting. And I've really enjoyed it, but it's been, you know, I've felt a bit sometimes like a plough going through the earth you know I mean obviously lots of people have life a lot harder than I do but there have been difficult things and and I don't think Shaz has had such a difficult life to be honest well she was the one who played it well she was the one you never she was the one who was always single and always swearing and I think she only really went out with one person married him and they were happy the good thing about 25 years passing is that colin firth is now single sally colin firth is now dead oh in real life i mean don't do that to us at the barbican 2 000 people almost had a panic attack no colin firth alive and well single but you're not but is he single i mean oh i don't know i'm not i'm not single i mean ships are passing exactly what could have been what could have been okay i actually also before we get onto your failures, I want to ask you about my favourite comedy of all time, which is Veep.

8:09Because you play the now ex-Prime Minister of Finland. I won't be able to pronounce her name properly. Minna Hakkinen. Minna Hakkinen, the former Finnish Prime Minister, yeah. I think the funny thing about her is that she's a character with ostensibly no sense of humour. Yeah. Is that fun to play? Autistic Barbie. Apart from, you know, not short, everything, a pound shop Barbie. yeah so much fun to play because she's got an encyclopedic knowledge she's like a you know qi with no camaraderie no laughter track and um yeah she's just full of useless information and it was so much fun i mean i i julia lewy drafus who plays um the president vice president and president um it was one of my all-time heroines she was just so brilliant in seinfeld and when I started doing comedy there weren't that many women doing comedy there weren't that many women looking you know normal doing comedy because you had to make yourself look masculine or strange or you had to explain to people visually that you were, it was okay to laugh at you and she was just such a heroine and I was so nervous going into that I was like I've got to be Finnish and I've never been to Finland and I don't know anything about Finnish politics and I knew Armando did a lot of improv It's like, how am I going to improv in Finnish about Finnish politics?

9:34So I read five books on Finland and cyber-stalked Jörghi Katainen, the Finnish Prime Minister. And then Julia and I just found we made each other laugh. A lot. And so it was heaven. What you were saying there about women in comedy and what a long road that has been to be sort of taken on your own terms as being funny as a human. Smack the Pony, looking back on it, was revolutionary for its time. I mean it started in what 1999 and were you aware that it was revolutionary when you were doing it we just thought it was going to fail yeah we just thought it was going to fail I thought it was going to be a disaster I remember going to bed in a I guess depression or fear state and yeah that day we devised and workshopped ideas for quite a while and then I bumped into Dune McKeon who wasn't in it at that stage on the stairs in Talkback and I went, we're doing this women's comedy show and it's so bad that no woman is ever going to be allowed to tell a joke ever again on TV.

10:35I said, come and do it. Please come and do it. And she got her agent to ring and she came and did it. So I went to bed for two days and I came back, Dean McKeon was in it. That was good. But yeah, we thought it was going to be, we were so frightened. We were just so frightened of letting womankind down that we had really, really strict rules about, you know, the amount of time we put into trying to think of a title that didn't sound like it was about periods you wouldn't believe it like months months and months and then we ended up with this ridiculous title that no one can remember everyone calls it drop the dead donkey and and it turns out that people think that's the sexual practice anyway which is isn't as far as i know not yet not yet um before we get on to your failures what was clown school like I've been to lots.

11:26Have you? Yeah, I love clown school. Humble brag, how many have you been to? Humble brag, because the thing about clown school is that nobody talks about clown school, no, the thing about clown school is that if you're someone who feels like you get things wrong in your life, at clown school, getting things wrong is getting things right. So wearing clothes that are a bit wrong, that's correct. And if you get something wrong in an improv, people applaud. they applaud your mistakes and so it's something that a lot of women find and really enjoy and I know and there's no tiny cars there's no buckets of glitter there are sometimes red noses but it's just a relief yes is what clown school is so it's sort of opposite of Stanislavski where Stanislavski might be putting loads of things on you know limps and histories and whatever and clown is just taking it all off and just failing and being as small and pathetic as you are but with a kind of optimistic spirit and and i think it's just a really useful you know tool in acting making your acting more i don't know immediate or something fascinating i'm so glad i asked this question because what a great school in acting but as you say also in life the liberation i've never had that response to an answer to a clown question.

12:53People have always glazed over. You should come. I actually really wanted to. There is a clown conference in Bristol. The state, how do you deal with the state of the world as clowns? What can we do? And I'm obsessed with clowns without borders. Clowns sans frontières. Who go to war zones. Oh, my God. And on their website, they go, we don't know if we make it any better. But, you know, we're doing what we can. Oy, oy. And why not?

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14:16Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Let's get onto your failures. Yes. Your first failure. So many. I mean, it was so hard to choose. The first failure, failures of courage. Yes. And you actually gave me an itemized list. Did I? yes what does it mean to you about a failure of courage i mean i i feel like where i have been apparently brave is because i haven't thought things through beforehand and if given the option i will generally um try and get out of it so that ranges i mean there's so many examples of it one would be um you were when i think there's humiliation don't know why i'm here when i think this humiliation I tend to try and get out of it.

15:10One example would be I used to love playing the flute and I mean you know I probably had social issues and I used to play the flute all the time instead of talking to people and I got my... Just at dinner parties and stuff, just whip it out. I used to lock myself... I used to... I could do that. I used to lock myself in the toilet and play the flute because I like the echo for hours at a time and did my grades very young and my flute teacher put me forward for young musician of the year and I would never have I mean I would never have got anywhere and I realized quite quickly I wasn't going to get anywhere and I just I didn't go to the first round and I wish I had I really wish I'd gone but there's so many examples of things like that.

15:58Another one is just starting out in comedy and I was at a friend's house, two guys, and I was looking through the Edinburgh programme, Edinburgh Festival programme, and I was like, gosh, there's women going up doing shows with just them. It's like it's not just men doing stand-up. And I said, maybe I should do that. And one of them said, both, burst out laughing and one of them said what would you call it the sally phillips experience and they cried laughing and i went off into a back room and i cried and then came back and pretended it hadn't happened and i never did it so i've never done my own thing and i wish i had I really wish I had had that courage then so what I've done my whole career um please god don't let me cry because that would be so pathetic but um but I've done my whole career is I've fitted into behind other people and with other people so I didn't ever do stand-up I did protected stand-up in a thing called Klub Zarathustra run by Simon Munnery where it was all the guys, Stuart Lee, Simon Munnery, Julian Barrett, people like that.

17:22And I would go in and I would be Simon Munnery's joke explainer. And I would be funny and I would write as much material as everybody else. But it wasn't, I would never do it on my own.

17:35And consequently, I suppose I've worked really hard and I think I am one of the best straight men in the business in that I can make, I'm very good at getting chemistry going with people in comedies and supporting the other person. I don't really like looking at the camera myself. My worst thing, well, two worst things. One thing is doing murders. They're really difficult as a comedian. I'm glad you added as a comedian. As a comedian, yeah. In the shows. They are quite difficult. Yeah, not real murders. But the other thing is like at the end of a TV show where the lead character looks out at the ocean and the credits roll, which is just a camera in your face, just in your face for like three minutes.

18:26And I can't do it. I really can't do it. I have to be looking at someone or sort of clinging on to someone. I have to have complicity with someone in a scene because I am really afraid. Or you need that sense of connection and interaction. because you're curious about the world. But I'm interested in this fear of failure piece and how much that's tied in with feeling you have to be perfect because you are someone who is also a high flyer, having gone to Oxford, got a first. How much of that played into it, that fear of getting it wrong? Pass. yeah I don't yes I mean I suppose there's there must be a driven thing I think um I'm really scared of judgment I think because I my dad worked for British Airways we moved around a lot as kids so when I came back to the UK everything was wrong so people would be nice ago cool trainers like green flash trainers I go they go where did you get them I go just you know sheen sports and then you'd realise later they were laughing at you.

19:44And so you learn to become, loads of actors and comedians have had this kind of upbringing. You sort of learn to fit in and you become, you've had it as well, haven't you? You become a kind of observer.

19:59And I suppose if you're exerting a lot of effort into fitting in, then not fitting in becomes uh scary it becomes it becomes a thing anyway yeah yeah one of the things that you put in your itemized list under this gosh i think i texted that from australia in the middle of the night i mean it's so i can't quite remember what's on it did i put procrastination on there no you put marriage oh yes

20:30yeah yeah no my marriage so yes failure of courage yeah that was a that i've now come to see that so my marriage failed um and one of the reasons it i mean there were many reasons it failed but one of the reasons it failed, I think, was that I was absolutely not prepared. I was so frightened of it ending and me being on my own with one, two, three children, and I was so sure that I couldn't manage that. Turns out I can. Yes, you can. That I wouldn't talk about the possibility of it ending. So we could never actually talk about what was wrong. Because I don't think you get the freedom to really examine what's going wrong unless you can look at it in that depth, think about it not being there.

21:33And you can't appreciate what's right unless you can appreciate. So I would just shut down the conversation and wouldn't... God, this is a tough podcast. it's light and shade light and shade it's like therapy in front of 1 900 people but yeah uh yes i wouldn't um yeah i would wouldn't i would do anything to avoid the conversation so i'd only talk about positive things we could do so courses we could go on and you know uh that kind of thing and i would get very angry when um you know when we went to a therapist who said well do you actually want to be together I'd be like no you don't no that's not what we're that's not what we're prepared to talk about we're not talking about that and I just kept going you know we're having peculiar challenges because we've got we've got an unusual family so we've got unusual challenges but we you know we don't need to talk we really should have talked about that much earlier if you could give your past self advice or indeed anyone in this audience who might be going through something similar relationship-wise.

22:45What advice do you think you'd give yourself? I think I'd say that divorce isn't always failure. And I suppose I've come to see life force as really precious. And if you're with somebody who's putting out your light and you're putting out their light, because I don't think either of us were doing it on purpose, I think we just married exactly the person to give the other person a breakdown to make the other person feel absolutely worthless you know we had extraordinary how people do that you pick exactly the person that's going to make you feel like you just shouldn't be alive taking up space and so yeah I made him feel awful just by being me and he made me feel awful just by being him and to continue in that was not successful so I suppose I would have said you know I was thinking only in terms of morality as well like what one should and shouldn't do and I would have told myself to be less dogmatic and look at my definitions a bit more I think beautifully put and to round this failure up you are now dating someone who sounds lovely he is you were set up on a blind date by our mutual friend George yes thrilled to hear that well done George well done George and have you found the person who wants your light to spread I have lucky me I have and that that's the thing as someone who who likes what i do and encourages me in what i do and tries to free me up to do what i what i do um so i'm incredibly lucky and i'm not sure i do enough of the same back so that's the thing is to make it you know mutual and your second failure which we've sort of touched on is your failure to be as you put it tm a serious actress yeah so did you have ambitions to be a serious actress?

24:59I thought I was a serious actress. I did. I thought I was. People are shouting out, you are. I am. Am I now? Yeah. Oh, move on. Yeah, no, there's loads of, you know, I would play Juliet and I would die and and the audience would go, oh, bless. And we're like, what? What's this all about? I've always been slightly ridiculous. So I've wanted to be Barbie, but I'm kind of, you know, everything, a pound shot Barbie. Bit rubbish Barbie with the limbs don't move, and maybe she's got strange fringe, only one outfit, it's nylon jumpsuit, you know. And so I would, you know, when I was auditioning to play these serious parts when I was starting out, I couldn't get any traction, couldn't get anyone interested.

25:57The minute I started doing comedy, I got an agent, I started getting jobs. But I felt somehow that this was a failure of depth. Like the gravitas thing, that there's something about me that is not deep or serious or received or something. There's another occasion where I auditioned for Terence Davis. Do you know who that is? He's like one of our greatest filmmakers, sadly died a couple of years ago, a Liverpudlian artist. He made very, very beautiful films. And I've done a lot of, you know, mucking about and walking into walls, falling down wells, that kind of thing. wearing fake beard on Portobello Road.

26:46You know, I did it with Panache. It was a career highlight. But I got the script and I was like, I can do this. This is a beautiful thing. And I think I can do this. And I learned it and I rehearsed and I rehearsed and I rehearsed. And I went in and I, we got on well. And I was like, oh, this is great.

27:11And he said, or do you want to read? And I went, yeah, well, how did you see the character? But I, of course, really, really prepared. And in the script, this character was very, very sunny. Emily Dickinson's best friend who just shone like a ray of sunshine. And I was like, I know, I know those people. I know she's manically depressed.

27:38There is no way. Like, I'm in comedy. I know that those people, those people that tell those jokes, they're really depressed. And I said, how did you see her? And he said, oh, she's a ray of sunshine. I said, oh, but I thought she was probably like underneath that. He was like, no, she's just sunshine all the way down. And I just shouldn't have asked him. I should have just done it because it probably would have, I don't know, it would have been okay. But anyway, I then couldn't do it because I was trying then to do what he'd said. and I've done something else and it was really bad and I said sorry can I do it again and I tried to do it again and it was a bit better and there were three scenes to perform and he said pretty much after the first one sort of thank you very much and goodbye and I was so shocked because that actually never happens to me in person I mean, in self-tapes, I think, they just take one look at my mug and they go, no way.

28:45But when I'm in the room, normally, normally, it had never happened to me before. And I said, oh, so you don't want me to read the other scene? He said, no, I've seen enough, thank you. And I still might cry. Yeah, I feel it for you, I feel it for you. And then he said, I can see I've really hurt you. I didn't mean to do that. Please forgive me. And he held his arms out and he hugged me and that was awful. So then this man was, you know, my failure to have depth and seriousness had evoked pity. Yes. But in a way, that's the biggest sign that you had depth and seriousness. Oh, but it was awful.

29:39And I was in the casting director's house and I went to the toilet and I cried for about 15 minutes. And that hasn't happened to me. I've cried after a haircut. Never cried after an audition. And then I went to my agent's and I was still crying and I could not stop. and I was like, why is this? And I think it's because it was this thing that I longed to be, you know, I used to do ballet when I was a kid, I loved it, loved it, and I got told to give up because I was too fat. I wasn't that fat. Fuzzy house. And I just, you know, have this image of myself watching Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House, this little tubby kid that was never going to get up there, you know, wishing, and it feels a bit, I've got that little, fat clown school person inside who longs to be someone beautiful telling beautiful stories sally i want you to know that you are that person that you are a beautiful person telling beautiful stories thank you that's so so moving this is this is so embarrassing it's not embarrassing it's so moving and i want you to feel the audience here feeling you because that for me is the most beautiful example of someone who has plowed into their vulnerability and shared it had the courage to share it this is not a failure of courage and in doing so has connected which is what storytelling is you are so successful at what you do and you are so beloved for what you do and I'm so sorry that you have been judged by men because it sounds to me that there that there's a recurring theme and I understand it because of the similar time we came of age being a very different era where there was a lot of misogyny both externalized and internalized and when I hear you speak about working with men or auditioning for men or having relationships with men there's this theme of judgment and when I hear you talk about working with women like in Veet there's this theme of support and I wonder how much of that you feel played into it I don't know maybe I mean it was a very I mean I'm much older and you bless you for saying we're the same age.

32:10If you're not. Like you say, she's practically perfect in every way. Yeah, coming out with a lad, I mean, it was quite shocking being at university and at university I was in charge of all the men I knew and then I came out, it was lad mag era and that was a real shock. But I think there is something in, well, this is why I really approve of this podcast, you know, embracing your weaknesses, your weak bits. I remember reading George Saunders, who wrote Lincoln and the Bardo, writing about discovering his style. And he was really rubbish for ages because he was trying to write like Hemingway. And then he said he suddenly realized that he wrote a little comic thing and his wife really laughed.

32:56And he was like, oh, he talks about it as standing on a pile of manure with a little flagon in the top with his name on it. And it's like, well, it's not the Hemingway Mountain. it's this little pile of manure but it has got a flag with my name in it on the top and I think that's it, like having to embrace well not having to I'm so lucky comedy is such a great life it's actually been really brilliant but I hoped to be you know Judi Dench at the RSC or whatever and I'm not that and I will never be that but I've had more fun I've worn a beard on the Portobello Road First of all, it's never too late.

33:40Secondly, doing what you do, doing comedy the way that you do it, which is so full of subtlety and nuance and hilarity and profundity, that's how you get the deep messages across, because you make it accessible. Well, I think you just have to do what you do. I mean, I don't have that body, that face, whatever. I have this body, this face, and this body, this face is a tiny bit ridiculous. and well you know and and and you you work where you are don't you and and it's good to make peace with that um before we go on to your third failure and i know this is going to sound creepy but i love your face and i love your body and i don't want you to speak to yourself in that way yes

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36:02It identifies a few things. It's not diagnostic, so it gives you a probability, and it's added in on top of scans and blood tests. So you would already do a scan and a blood test, so you add in the NIPT. And we felt, as parents in the Down syndrome community, that this was introducing for-profit motives into population screening, and that it was being driven by profit motives and not by ethics. And we felt it was really important that the government commissioned an ethical review before allowing these big companies to come in and sell, oversell this product. One way in which they oversell in the marketing is, for example, calling it non-invasive prenatal testing implies that it is of equal value to amniocentesis, whereas it's implying that it's non-invasive.