January 31, 2009
The vout!” says Jessica Hynes, who used to be Jessica Stevenson, leaning forward and slapping a table in the bar. “The vout!Rooty macvoutyness! The vout! Do you see?” Sort of, I say. Only I'm not sure it will make a lot of sense on the page.
“The vout!” cries Hynes, the star of Spaced and The Royle Family and, more recently, Son of Rambow and Faintheart, her latest outing - a comedy based on battle re-enactments. She's talking about the jazz legend Slim Gaillard, who appears in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but who also, it turns out, once spent six months living in her mum's cellar in Brighton.
“He turned up when I was 7 or 8,” she says. “He was into the vout of life. And I don't know what that means, but he said it with such conviction! The vout! And now I feel I'm infused with the vout. That's what it's all about. The vout! I feel I have the vout! And I got it from him.” This bit is going to look really weird, I tell her. And Hynes laughs and slaps the table again. Because I think that's what she wants.
To be honest, she is not the woman I expected her to be. Many of her characters are frumpy, put-upon women, but I'd expected to meet Daisy from Spaced, a sort of adorable, overgrown Lisa Simpson. Hynes is not Daisy. She's spikier than that, a little more brittle and far more intense. She talks with exhilaration, whether it's about her family, or the aubergine dish she tried to cook at Christmas, which went wrong and ended up as a weird sort of chutney. You wouldn't want to argue with her.
Hynes is used to people thinking they know her before they do. “I went to Glastonbury last year,” she says. “I've usually gone with my family, but this year I said to my husband, ‘I want to go by myself'. I suppose it might be the start of my midlife crisis. So I went alone, without a tent and justslept around a campfire. And I met people who kind of recognised me and maybe found it strange that I was wandering around Glastonbury on my own. But at the same time they acted as though I'd just come with them. It was extraordinary. Because otherwise, you know, it might have got quite lonely.” With her own heroes, she admits, she'll do the same. She was in Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests at the Old Vic last year, and she found herself behaving most inappropriately with Kevin Spacey.
“I think I found myself slightly wanting to be his best friend,” she says. “Like a lot of people do. I had to pull back. Getting a little overexcited. Acting slightly inappropriately enthusiastic at his presence, you know?” I tell her I once saw Spacey walk out of a lift and a woman I was with was so excited that she reached out and tweaked him on the nipple.
“I didn't do that,” she says. “Never. I've never clung on to anybody's nipple. Not in that way. Write that down.” That's her most Daisy-from-Spaced characterstic, probably, the way she lapses sometimes into the kind of screwball repartee that her old collaborator Simon Pegg has made his career out of. “I like to think of myself,” she says, at one point, “as an older, fatter, seedier, less successful Kate Winslet.” You're older than Kate Winslet? “Oh, that's nice. It's nice that you're querying that. Certainly fatter and less successful, yes. But older?” I didn't mean...
“Let it go.”
That sort of thing. It's fun, but you're always going to lose.
Hynes has three children, aged between 3 and 10. She has known her husband, Adam Hynes, since she was 18. Although they were married in 2002, Jessica Stevenson became Jessica Hynes only a year ago. When I ask her why, she starts to tell me about belonging and identity, about wanting to be the same as her husband and kids. Then she stops and gives a guilty guffaw.
“Oh, look,” she says. “To be honest, it was done slightly on a whim. I told a family friend and he was appalled. He said, ‘What have you done?!' And I said, ‘I know! I regret it! But I can't go back.' Because that would be even more mad, wouldn't it? Oh God. Look, it's done, now, OK?” You wouldn't get that sort of candour with Cheryl Cole (née Tweedy).
There's a wildness here. “I used to play out a lot as a kid,” Hynes says. “A bit wild, yes. Would I have got an Asbo? I did give Russell Beany a black eye once. I was tough. I needed to be.”
Born in Lewisham in 1972 (three whole years before Kate Winslet), Hynes was the child of hippy parents who moved down to Brighton and then promptly split up. She and her sister were bounced over to San Francisco with their mother to live with their grandparents, and then bounced back again, without their mother, to live with their father and his new girlfriend. “But they weren't particularly keen, either,” she says. “So eventually our mother came back. Yes, I do remember it. Quite clearly. I was 5.” Back in the Brighton family home, still a hippy but now without Hynes's father, her mother started to take in lodgers. Some were travellers, some were professional chess players, but most were, in some way, involved in jazz. That was how Gaillard came to be living in their cellar. With his vout.
“My sister and I became full-on latchkey kids,” she says. “Walking to school alone. My sister always returning. Me, I'm afraid, not. I think I had a sort of crazed ebullience about me.” By eight-ish, her mother would start ringing around, trying to figure out where she was. Sometimes she'd be playing alone in the park. Sometimes she'd be round at the house of her mother's friend May May, a black woman from Chicago, married to another jazz musician. Hynes cries a little when she talks about May May. I'm not sure she notices. “That was my home from home,” she says. May May died a couple of years ago.
“You could turn up at their house and she'd always feed you,” Hynes says. “And there was always a party going on. Good parties. Children were just there. Which is what I was doing. Pogo-ing up and down to Prince, aged 7. But then falling asleep under a pile of coats and waking up at five in the morning, thinking . . . well. Running home through the cold streets. My sister would just take herself off to bed. I thrived on it.”
It sounds like a wobbly time. Hynes says this was how she learnt to act. “If we'd been through a rocky patch, that was my role. To cheer everybody up.” Later, at school, a teacher told her she should act professionally. She took herself off to acting classes and, eventually, joined the National Youth Theatre. Her first big job, she says, was in a corporate video, in which she played a secretary. She remembers sitting in the bar, afterwards, in some company's corporate headquarters, drinking her first margarita. “I remember thinking, Ahhhh!' I must never forget this moment! I've made it!” And she had. She jobbed around for a few years, then came The Royle Family, then came Spaced, and then came everything else.
There's a slight tightness in her voice when she talks about Pegg, but maybe she's just bored with being asked about him. They're still in touch, she says, a bit. Only the other week somebody sent her a ukulele song about Spaced and she sent it on to him.
“I found it very difficult immediately after Spaced,” she admits. “That finishing, I stumbled and fell. My momentum stopped. I just wasn't sure how to rediscover my creative thrust.” Having met her, it makes far more sense that their collaboration came to an end. As it turns out, the character from Spaced she most identified with was Brian, the crazy artist downstairs. Unlike Pegg, she's just not a very mainstream sort of person. It's jazz, probably. It's vout.
Outside the Groucho Club, James Corden from Gavin and Stacey is smoking a cigarette. “Aha!” he says. “It's Jessica Hynes, née Stevenson!” “Oh f***,” says the actress, after they've had their showbiz hug. “You see? It'll never end. I should have just changed my chequebook.”
My Perfect weekend
Taken From: timesonline.co.uk