Her comedy Fleabag was a bleak and honest depiction of female sexuality that made her an international star. Mon 31 Jul As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl — how to be a good, pretty girl — from such an early age. Waller-Bridge has made a splash and changed the world we see on TV by writing and playing two characters who are neither sweet nor polite. At the start of last year, she was a virtually unknown actor, who had spent more time temping than on screen or stage.
Then Channel 4 screened Crashing, her series about a group of twentysomethings who live together in domestic and romantic chaos as property guardians in a disused London hospital. Waller-Bridge played the dangerously spontaneous, sexually disruptive Lulu, who created havoc even by the standards of this anarchic little millennial community. The multi-award-winning Fleabag followed on the BBC, in which she played the eponymous antiheroine, a profane, damaged, promiscuous cafe owner who torments her repressed middle-class family, gets caught by her boyfriend masturbating beside him in bed to news footage of Barack Obama, and cracks deeply non-PC jokes to the camera.
Having just turned 32, Waller-Bridge is an international sensation, feted from the pages of the Sun to the New Yorker. She is filming a Star Wars movie , making an eight-part drama, Killing Eve , for American TV and about to stage Fleabag as a theatrical production at the Edinburgh fringe, with a new actor in the lead. The poster girl for a new pressure group, Equal Representation for Actresses, she is a forceful feminist and strides into the cafe where we meet looking like a model: tall and rangy and commandingly chic.
Did she always know she had an extraordinary talent? Oh, God, I say quickly. Did that sound horribly cheesy? Blimey, you can say it as much as you like. Because I think to be one, you have to have confidence in what you want to say.
She had known from eight that she wanted to act, was the star of every play at her private Catholic school in London and at 17 won a place at Rada.
