If you judge a person by the company they keep, then Aisling Bea is pretty cool. She’s tight with Sharon Horgan, mates with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her Love Island WhatsApp group includes Richard Curtis and Lena Dunham. ‘People always want to talk about my cool friends,’ she mock-eyerolls, as I grill her about the A-list group chats.
It’s fair to say, though, that until this summer, the Kildare-born comedian-actor-writer was best known for stand-up, small acting roles and TV panel shows. Then came This Way Up, the Channel 4 comedy drama she wrote and in which she stars. And this week, she is thrust on to the global stage as Paul Rudd’s wife in Netflix series Living With Yourself. She’s soon going to find that people ask about her famous friends less often.
We meet in a fancy London hotel, and Aisling makes sure I’ve acknowledged her ‘styled look’ of Equipment trousers and a Joie top before pulling a giant cardigan by Irish brand Electronic Sheep around her and pouring a cup of green tea. Her jokes land with such deadpan delivery that, for a split second, she sounds serious. When I wonder how Paul Rudd looks so baby-faced at 50, she instantly replies, ‘Cocaine.’ The publicist in the corner stops tapping on her phone and looks up. ‘He takes cocaine three times a day,’ says Aisling. ‘Absolutely full of coke. And you can quote me on that.’
The publicist-troubling statements are a sign that Aisling doesn’t yet feel like a star, or not the kind of star whose quotes might be plucked from their context and spread like jam across the internet, anyway. I hope she enjoys that freedom while she can. The other thing she’s enjoying is being ‘just an actor’ on Living With Yourself, after putting her heart and soul into passion project This Way Up. ‘It’s like having a one-hour baby compared to a 17-hour birth,’ she explains. ‘It’s like, oh, that one was fine. It just fell out.’
In Living With Yourself, Paul Rudd is a schlubby guy called Miles who, tired of feeling dissatisfied, spends the cash that he and wife Kate (Aisling) had saved for IVF on a spa that promises to turn him into the best version of himself. What they actually do is clone him, genetically perfecting him in the process, but they neglect to dispose of the first Miles. So Kate finds herself with two husbands: the grumpy original and a second version who is perfect in every way – except that he’s a clone.
The pair have great chemistry although, at 35, Aisling is 15 years younger than her on-screen husband. ‘That does tend to happen,’ she sighs, ‘and it is something I’d normally roll my eyes at. Paul is the exception because he can play 40, so it didn’t look weird. But it is unbelievable how, when you hit my age, which is still young, suddenly you’re the wife or mother. Four years ago, I was playing characters that had just got out of university. It’s like, bloody hell, how did that change so fast? Time speeds up three times faster for actresses, without a doubt.’
Despite the high concept, the show is grounded in reality: office politics, and the way that long-term relationships can slide into weary predictability. ‘It connects with stuff we’re thinking about,’ she nods, ‘in terms of finding yourself and what will fix... well, not fix, but help this.’ She taps her chest, then helpfully whispers into the dictaphone: ‘Pats left boob there.
This Way Up shares a common trait with _Living With Yoursel_f: almost every character needs to be ‘fixed’. Aisling stars as Aine, who’s recovering from a nervous breakdown (it is a comedy, I promise). While we’re all much more comfortable talking about mental health these days, Aisling says it’s about dealing with one of the last taboos: loneliness. ‘If you talk about being lonely, people don’t want to be near you, like they might catch it,’ she says. But it is the element of the show that connected most with people. ‘I can’t keep up with the Instagram messages I get from people telling me how lonely they feel. And they are not people of a certain age, colour, personality or view on Brexit. It’s so human.'
Aisling argues that technology is making us more lonely by tricking us into feeling connected, when actually we’re starved of human touch. ‘Sometimes, I feel like I’ve spoken to so many people, but I’ve been on my own all day, replying to WhatsApps. It’s like having a salad, but they’ve taken all the vitamins out. You know you’ve eaten, but you don’t feel satisfied. It has been the thing that’s haunted me most in life,’ she admits.
She talks articulately about mental health, and has written movingly about the emotional impact of losing her father, who took his own life when she was three, so investigating the human condition feels natural to her. But, I ask, when writing a character who’s had a breakdown, did she... ‘Did I have one? I was going to say, did you do research around it? ‘I’ve done a lifetime of research, I suppose,’ she says. ‘The show is a work of fiction but it doesn’t mean there aren’t grains of truth in it. I don’t go into what those are because I worked really hard on the show and don’t want to start pulling it apart over what’s real and what’s not.
Sharon Horgan produced the series and also stars as Aine’s sister, which is nice symmetry because they met when Aisling was cast as Sharon’s sister in 2012’s Dead Boss. Is their off-screen relationship sisterly? ‘Lots of my show is influenced by our actual relationship, and I love her daughters, I feel like I’m their aunt.’ They get to hang out properly together mostly when they happen to be away for work at the same time. ‘When I was filming Living With Yourself in New York, Sharon was there directing an episode of Modern Love for Amazon,’ she explains. ‘And Sharon doesn’t like to be on her own in a hotel, she needs to be around people. She’s a lot more cuddly than you’d think.’
The friends are actually flying out to LA next week, to film the pilot of Delilah, a script they wrote for Channel 4, which was rejected in the UK before Sharon sold it to HBO (you snooze you lose, Channel 4). Aisling grins as she tells me she’s looking forward to hanging out, having manicures. ‘Sharon is like your big sister’s cool friend,’ she says. ‘I mean, she has a capsule wardrobe. Even her downtime clothes – she’ll turn up for a lazy day in a pair of dungarees with a band T-shirt, but a band she’s actually seen. Also, she’s like 14 years older than me and we look the same age. I keep hanging around with these ageless beauties. Maybe I should start doing cocaine?
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, meanwhile, is Aisling’s generation, and part of her wider gang. ‘We’ve messed around at improv things, and we’ve got friends in common,’ she says. ‘There aren’t that many of us – and this may sound arrogant – who’ve made our own show and starred in it. Like myself, Phoebe, Lena, Daniel Taylor, Roisin Conaty, Jamie Demetriou, Jessica Knappett. We share our stories and look out for each other. There is loneliness in writing something on your own, then being the face of it – and the highs and lows of that.'
Are you all in one big overachieving WhatsApp group? ‘We’re in a variety of WhatsApp groups,’ she laughs. ‘But my busiest one was the Love Island one. Richard Curtis’s daughter Scarlett started it and, because we all genuinely love the show, it became this radical feminist discussion.’ How many people are in it? ‘Well, I thought about 10 because of who was talking. Then I looked and was like, “Jesus, I’ve got to be careful what I say – there’s like 88 people in this group!’
Refreshingly, being careful what she says doesn’t seem to be Aisling’s strong point. Our conversation turns to politics, because she was a vocal campaigner during the Irish referendums on same-sex marriage and abortion. With things so bleak politically at the moment, is she optimistic? ‘I’m optimistic about humans,’ she begins. ‘I was not connected to politics when I was younger, so it’s amazing to see this young girl [Greta Thunberg] spearheading a movement, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is younger than me, but she knows how to mobilise voters through social media. Young people are now more active and that gives me hope.’
Would she ever go into politics? ‘Ah, there’s just no money in it,’ she deadpans. ‘No, seriously. Only psychopaths go into politics.’ Her publicist gently interrupts to tell her that next on her schedule is lunch and her face lights up with joy. Then she looks at me apologetically and says, ‘Sorry, not that this wasn’t great, but... lunch!'
As Aisling heads out, she starts bellowing statements from our conversation at random: I assume she’s guessing what the headline will be: ‘Politicians are psychopaths! Sharon Horgan is cuddly! Paul Rudd takes cocaine!’ Long may she not be careful what she says
Living With Yourself is available now on Netflix; This Way Up is on All4.