The marvellous Guardian had a nice surprise in it today:
‘Fame is quite scary’
A stalwart of quality British comedy for the last six years, Olivia Colman is getting serious – which is what she wanted all along. By Sarah Dempster
Monday June 18, 2007 The Guardian
Scrunched up on a fashionably uncomfortable sofa in ITV’s airless headquarters, her legs origamied into an impressive approximation of a bow tie, Olivia Colman is pondering the infinite imponderability of stardom. “Well, it’s nonsense, isn’t it, really? Thankfully, I’m still at the level where most people don’t know who I am. I prefer it like that. I’m basically a slipper-wearing, parka-wearing, slightly spotty lady, who likes to wander around Peckham with her pushchair. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in Heat magazine. Gosh, no. And this is only the third interview I’ve done, ever. So I’m just ever so slightly terrified. Um … hah!”
There is something of the Ealing schoolmarm about Colman. Dimpled and jolly, you can imagine her raising an eyebrow at Alastair Sim following a misunderstanding over a hockey stick. Conversely, you cannot imagine Colman swearing, or appearing on something with Russell Brand, or vomiting in the gutter outside Soho House with her bra out. All activities that – given the extraordinary momentum of her career and her presence in virtually every zeitgeisty comedy of the last six years (Black Books, The Office, Look Around You, Green Wing, Peep Show, Hot Fuzz, That Mitchell and Webb Look et al) – the 33-year-old actor is more than qualified to engage in. And yet she thinks fame is “strange and quite scary”.
“This may sound mad,” she says, “but you sort of assume that no one’s going to watch what you do. You go on set, have a lovely time, and then you forget anyone’s going to see it. So it’s always a bit of a shock to be recognised. I get terribly embarrassed.” She shakes her head and reaches for an almond croissant. “Bonkers,” she says, apologetically.
Today we are here for a screening of The Time of Your Life, a drama series about a woman, Kate (played by Genevieve O’Reilly), who awakes from an 18-year coma, only to find the marble-wash denim blouson is no longer the towering totem of modish infallibility it once was, and her family and friends are mysteriously reluctant to talk about the accident that left her comatose.
Colman plays Amanda, Kate’s former confidante and a housewife gradually awakening to a realisation of her own: her life, with its ageing husband, regrets and stew, is rubbish. Given the overwhelming preponderance of comedy on her CV, it is slightly odd seeing Colman playing it straight. I kept expecting her to throw something at somebody’s head, or suddenly empty her handbag everywhere. “I can understand that,” she says, nodding politely, “but I’ve done drama roles all the way through my career. I went to drama school [Bristol Old Vic Theatre School] after Cambridge expecting to do Lady Macbeth and things, but it’s never happened.
“I’ve been for a couple of serious theatre auditions and done appallingly. So I think by default I’ve ended up doing comedy. I love it, but I love drama too. Having said that, I went up for The Time of Your Life thinking it was more of a comedy than it was. Hah! But really, it’s lovely.”
Colman is probably best known for Peep Show – Channel 4′s enduring, splendidly acidic comedy of manners – in which she plays Sophie, the frumpy, endlessly forgiving object of the appalling Mark’s (David Mitchell) affections/psychosexual neuroses. “It’s funny, so many people think Sophie is really sweet, but I’ve always thought she was a bit horrid. The way she led Mark on … she was so sneaky and manipulative. Which is of course even more fun to play”. She is “enormously proud” of Peep Show. “Sam [Bain] and Jesse [Armstrong] are brilliant. They have almost too many ideas,” she says of the series’ creators and writers. “And thank God they’re writing. Just imagine what goes on in their heads. If they weren’t venting it on paper … who knows what they would do? It’s a terrifying thought.”
Colman met Peep Show’s David Mitchell and Robert Webb at Cambridge in the early 1990s, after auditioning for Footlights “by accident” (she had thought it was a serious drama audition and wandered in, having “nothing else to do that afternoon”). She “adores” the duo and “very much hopes” their remarkably fruitful working relationship will continue. She appeared alongside Webb in semi-improvised Brit-flick Confetti. They played naturists and spent much of the film wandering around with their bums out.
The experience, according to an uncharacteristically grumpy Colman, remains a source of broiling horror. “There were certain chats that took place for an entire year before filming which suggested the nudity wouldn’t be quite as awful as it was. I would have felt better about it had I been aware how much was actually going to be on display. It was,” she says, glaring at the coffee table, “the worst experience of my life.”
Thankfully, sunnier times beckon. Colman, who is six months pregnant with her second son (her first, Hal, is almost two), will spend the next few weeks filming the second series of the Bafta-winning That Mitchell and Webb Look. In the meantime, there is the release of comedy-drama allotment film Grow Your Own, in which she plays “a lovely nerd”. Her work rate is astonishing. Does she ever yearn to knock the phone off the hook and spend six months in her dressing gown, watching Car Booty and eating cereal out of the box?
“Oh yes, but I love working,” she chirps. “And I find it quite hard to say no to anything. I do try to spend lots of time at home with my son and husband [writer Ed Sinclair, whom she met while at Cambridge], but my dream is to keep doing what I’m doing. I love it. I’ve been in so many wonderful things and it’s kind of all worked out by accident. I think I’ve been extremely jammy”.
· The Time of Your Life is on ITV1 tonight.
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