Jessica Stevenson has the most delicious laugh. It's a full-on,
throaty, infectious hyuk-hyuk number, and it's directed a lot of
things - from the absurdities of fashion (' Look at this,' she
marvels, encountering a gossamer-like dress on the stylist's rack; '
it's like something a gnat might wear') to the foibles of her
two-month-old daughter Flora, happily feeding at the photo-shoot (and
already boasting a smile as winning as her mother's). But more often
than not, it's directed at herself. 'For a while, I fought against my
inner goofiness,' she says as she rocks Flora to sleep. ' I wanted to
see myself as Lady Macbeth, but other people always saw me as Mrs
Malaprop. They'd be laughing at me and I'd have no idea why. So
eventually I gave in.'
The 33-year-old Stevenson is certainly funny, and has two British
Comedy Awards to prove it. But she actually describes herself as an
'actor-performer', and her most memorable characters - the
gauche-but-game Daisy in the Channel 4 20-something slacker sitcom
Spaced, the dumpy and practically mute Cheryl in The Royal Family and
the title role of a bewildered Bridget Jones type in the BBC sitcom
According To Bex - trade as much on pathos as slapstick.
' I guess none of them are exactly alpha females, are they?' she
says. 'They're more like most of us; trying to get on, making
mistakes, falling on their arses, picking themselves up, dusting
themselves down.' On the other hand - and Stevenson is very much an
'on the other hand' kind of person; her answers to the simplest of
questions tend to raom in circles, with plenty of sub-clauses, 'ums'
and 'ahs', before coming back to their starting point - you shouldn't
mistake her for a shrinking violet. 'I'm definitely an exhibitionist,'
she admits. 'Some actors are pretty shy, but show me a karaoke machine
and I'll hog it. I can't help myself.'
Both sides of Stevenson are on show in her new movie. Confetti is an
Office-style mockumentary following three couples as they attempt to
win a magazine competition to stage the most origional wedding of the
year. A nudist pair opts for a bare-all ceremony; two tennis fanatics
aim for betrothal in a Wimbledon mock-up, complete with rain break and
faux Sir Cliff; while Sam and Matt (Stevenson and Martin Freeman from
The Offfice) go for a full-on Busby Berkeley-style song-and-dance
extravaganza. There is laughter, weeping, violence and ferocious
family feuding - everything you'd want from a real wedding, in fact.
The cast is a roll-call of the comic new wave; as well as Stevenson
and Freeman, there's Jimmy Carr, Nighty Night's Julia Davis, and
Robert Webb from Peep Show. But prehaps choreography was the fact that
the film's director, Debbie Isitt, had no script; all the scenes and
dialogue where improvised, Mike Leigh-style.
'She had a lot of faith in our abilities,' says Stevenson, 'which we
weren't always sure wasn't misplaced. She'd talk to you about your own
life and experiences to draw out the characters. Then she'd roll, and
you'd just go on and on while she followed you with the camera. It was
sometimes quite scary for me - I hadn't dived in quite so deep before.
But once you were on a roll it was just like being a kid, playing
about, which is really all an actor's job is when you get down to it.
In the end, it was much harder for Debbie than for us; she ended up
with 60 hours of footage which she hadto edit down to 90 minutes. She
apologised in advance before she screened it to us; she was thinking
we'd be like, "What's this?" But actually, we were like, "Aren't we
brilliant?"
Stevensonis quick to credit Freeman, as well as Aison Steadman and
Sarah Hadland, who play her obstreperous mum and sister respectively,
for assisting in her own brilliance. 'I couldn't have had better
people to bounce off,' she says. 'And it was great to get a bit of
grit into the family relationships. After all, we all come from
varying degrees of dysfunction, so exploring that as part of the story
felt absolutely natural.'
In the razzle-dazzle finale, Stevenson, befitting her status as
karaoke queen, looks as if she's enjoying her Liza Minnelli moment
just a little to much, so it comes as some suprise to hear that her
own wedding featured no top hats, tails, or Tiller Girl kicks. 'It was
rather staid by compatison,' she admits. 'But doing the film made me
think that people should have whatever wedding suits them, whether
it's tacky or camp or whatever. You shouldn't get too hung up on
trying to please other people. I definitely failed to exert any kind
of control or atuthority over the event. we ended up with a melee of
nearly 200 people, and that was fair enough.'
Stevenson is warm and open (she's that rare type who will ask you
questions and show a genuine intrest in your answers), but this is as
much about her private life as she's prepared to divulge, apart from
the fact that she lives with her husband in North London, and that
they have two other children besides Flora: a boy and a girl. 'I am a
private person,' she stresses.'I always think it's bad luck to go on
about that sort of thing in print; it might jinx it. Plus this is my
chosen path, not theirs. I don't want to drag them in when they don't
have a choice in the matter.'
She will, however, happily discuss her pretty undeviating route to
her 'chosen path'. Stevenson was born in South London - there's a
distinct estuarine twang to her circumlocutions - but she actually
grew up in 70s Brighton after her parents divorced. 'It was me, my mum
and my sister,' she says. 'My dad remarried and had two more kids.'
She described her parents in a previous interview as 'working-class
hippies', which horrified her mother, 'She said we were actually
artists,' says Stevenson. 'I would say we were more boho. My mum is
Essex born and bred, but she was a voracious reader. She took in
lodgers and we had a jazz-singer neighbour. It was sort of a
transient community of single mums and extended families.'
In this atmosphere, Stevenson says she pretty much inhabited her own
fantasy world. She was a serious little girl - 'a worrier' - who once
wrote a letter to Margaret Thatcher begging her not to start a nuclear
war. Her academic record was 'unremarkable', save for star turns in
school plays. 'I showed promice, and I always felt it was my one
opportunity to have a career. I had no other drive. My mum went with
it; her one piece of advice was, "Don't piss it up against the wall."'
She laughs. 'Great advice, actually.'
Stevenson followed it by joining the National Youth Theatre for its
summer seassons from the age of 14: 'It was full of OTT hysterics and
I thought, "Yes - I've found my people." For years later, she'd
moved to London and was waitressing between acting jobs. 'There was no
looking back,really,' she says simply. 'I had found the life I
wanted.'
At this point, however, she still lent more towards tragedy than
comedy; infact, she was a 'sour,cynical' 19-year-old who'd frequently
scowl in a what's-the-point-of-anything kina of way. Having a
permanent hangover didn't help, she adds wryly. But her friends, who'd
always seen her comic potential, encouraged her to express it. She
began working on sketches and skits, then met Simon Pegg, her Spaced
co-writer and star, at a TV audition. Their rapport was instant. 'I
thought he was funny and talented,' says Stevenson, 'much better than
I was, but he brought great stuff out of me, thanks to constant
encouragement and quite a lot of shouting.' (Pegg reciprocates: 'I
liked her immediately. She had this great ingenuous quility about her,
but Jess is nobody's fool.')
Daisy in Spaced, the girl-women would-be journalist desperate to get
it right ('Patrick Cox's,' says a glossy magazine editor in one
episode after Daisy admires her shoes. 'Oh, you borrowed then?' she
replies. 'Small feet for a bloke'), remains the character clostest to
her heart. 'She's me to the power of ten,' she says. 'I saw her as
quite political, unfettered by self-doubt. She's sort of uber-girl
who's not perfect but is powering her way through life, not being
cowed by setbacks.'
In fact, says Stevenson, discovering her comic side helped rekindle
her lust for life, which had lain somewhat dormant through her early
20s. Surely having kids was also a factor? She ponders the question.
'I genuinely think that didn't trigger any profound change,' she says
carefully, 'except that now I can make fish pie. No, it's just living,
experience, age. I'm happier in my 30's because I've learnt to stop
worrying. I remember a long period when I was desperate to work
everything out. But the main thing I've worked out is that life's
really too short for all that.'
Press her, however, and she capitulates; she has a winning
no-no-no-oh-all-right-then way of eventually conceding. 'I suppose
having a family was always my goal,' she says, as Flora clucks
contentedly in her stroller. 'As a kid it was always my fantasy to
make a home with my Girls' World and Tiny Tears, and that is just what
I've done. To me, that is far more important than transient things
like fame. I feel that things can be quite fleeting, so I guess you
could say I've gone for solidity.'
For this reason, the normal yardsticks of success - the crack at
prime time with According To Bex, the acclaim that will greet her
characteristically subtle and multi-faceted performance in Confetti -
are somewhat meaningless to Stevenson. 'Someone asked me the other day
how it felt to be at the top, and I was genuinely baffled,' she says.
'I really didn't know what they meant. I'm to busy consolidating what
I have, to think about what I'm going to get next. I've got some good
working relationships with people i like and respect, and that's
really enough. I don't want to be the next Nicole Kidman,' she
concludes, her laugh, this time, managing to convey both fat-chance
and what-the-heck. 'I've got enough on my plate being the current
Jessica Stevenson.'