Despite the strangeness of its circumstances – broadcast remotely to no live audience – there was at least one aspect that seemed oddly familiar to Sian Clifford the night she won her first Best Actress BAFTA. ‘The whole thing was so Fleabag,’ she says, laughing down the phone from the new home in south London she’s sharing with her quarantine companion, a freshly acquired, breed-indeterminate rescue pup. ‘When Phoebe and I are together, things like this often happen.’
The screen sisters and real-life BFFs planned to enjoy the evening in a happy place: Waller-Bridge’s back garden. ‘Dappled sunlight, gorgeous lighting, everything planned,’ she recalls. Sian had chosen a Vampire’s Wife dress to wear only the day before. ‘Really contemporary, beautifully made, fit me like a glove, I was very happy.’
Vegan burgers were bought to enjoy after the ceremony. Suspecting that he was about to have a crowning moment of his own, Sian and Phoebe FaceTimed Jamie Demetriou, one of Fleabag’s earliest boyfriends and creator/star of Stath Lets Flats, to bid well wishes. ‘He’s Fleabag alumnus,’ says Sian. When you break down the British TV landscape of the last 12 months, the Fleabag influence – those doors Phoebe Waller-Bridge has inched open for audacious, funny, irreverent and true storytelling on TV – are everywhere.
Sian Clifford: 'Fleabag Is Magical. There's Not A Wasted Line In It'
It was only when BAFTA’s technical support turned up, informing the two friends their proximity to one another would cause feedback, that a perfect last evening together, intended to honour the generationally defining and dysfunctional sisters, was interrupted. ‘So, we tried it – to try and disprove them,’ says Sian, ‘and of course they were right. Then we tried with me sitting inside and Phoebe outside and the lighting was just terrible. Then she remembered our friend Josh from down the road was on holiday and she said, “I’ve got his key!”’
They hotfooted it to the new location. ‘We had to try and get his WiFi password, while he’s up a mountain in Skye. It was absolute chaos – and this was five minutes before it began. Phoebe wasn’t dressed and I said, “You know it starts in, like, a minute?” I’d showed up ready and she was like, “Whaaaat?”
Sian Clifford
1 of 2Sian Clifford
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2 of 2Sian Clifford
The BAFTAs were a happy occasion, not just for glorious overachiever and serial neurotic Claire, but for the fabulous show itself and for Phoebe’s gorgeous counterweight. Sian’s Best Actress trophy brought to an end a year-long TV awards cycle that Fleabag season two – a masterpiece work of free and wild television storytelling – kicked off by picking up Best Show at the Television Critics Association. In the intervening 12 months, it accrued a clean run of Emmys and Golden Globes. Now, the BAFTAs were recognising Sian, too. ‘I mean, amazing,’ she says. ‘I am still reverberating, honestly.’
The success of Fleabag has had a noticeably positive effect on Sian’s professional life, the fruits of which began to appear during lockdown. First up was her incredible, tender and blunt suburban domestic performance as Diana Ingram, wife of the couple at the centre of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? scandal, in Quiz. Currently, she’s playing Tina, the loner mother of Maisie Williams’ erratic, escaped hermit in the purposefully original comedy cat-and-mouse thriller Two Weeks To Live. ‘The show is about freedom,’ Sian notes, ‘and I think that’s very pertinent to what’s going on now. For me, everything has come into such sharp focus about what really matters. And who and what we value has been grossly exposed in our cultures because of Covid.’
Again, the Fleabag footprint can be felt gently trodden over both. James Graham, Quiz’s writer, was one of the success stories nurtured through Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s early theatre company, Dry Write, which Sian had often acted for. Maisie Williams’ Kim in Two Weeks To Live doffs a knowing cap to Villanelle, the anti-hero assassin of another Phoebe masterwork, Killing Eve. ‘The TV landscape right now is extraordinary,’ says Sian. ‘Part of that is to do with streaming platforms. It’s given permission to channels to start taking bigger risks; to make things that are more provocative and challenging.
I think what audiences are craving and what creatives are burning to give them are more complex human stories that don’t fit neatly into genres. Fleabag was definitely a part of that. It was genre-busting.’
The four shows that have kept Sian glued to the box during lockdown are the brilliant Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance (‘I’d no interest, knowledge or any connection to basketball before it. Now I’m obsessed’); the stinging verité story of sexual consent, I May Destroy You(‘This is Michaela Coel revolutionising television, as far as I’m concerned. She is visionary’); the comic-book adaptation Watchmen (‘what they have done with that story in order to speak to a narrative of our times is so necessary and absolutely mind-blowing’); and, inevitably, the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
‘It absolutely contorted me in every direction. I felt so deeply for them,’ she says of this year’s star-crossed lovers. ‘I resonated with that story deeply. I was someone who had a really tough time at high school. It shattered me. I’ve never been in more pain with something than watching that show. Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones, their performances are extraordinary.’ Like every sentient human being, she’s been gently pinched by the Mescal bug. ‘I met Paul recently and he is absolutely dreamy. Superstars, both of them.’
Sian says that the Fleabag effect on her own life isn’t about framing her work with new confidence, despite her knockout successes in both Quiz and Two Weeks To Live. ‘Confidence comes from working a lot, from flexing your muscles more and more. So that’s the gift I’ve been granted. It’s sort of reminded me of the actor I was before I left drama school. I was a huge risk-taker. That was all I knew.’
The reality of work only heightened TV limitations. ‘I came into the industry and was inevitably stifled by it, put into various pigeon holes. That changes you. I’d sort of forgotten my confidence, the boldness I had. That was the gift of Claire. You stay the same but people’s perception of you changes. People treat me very differently.’ Sian is an engaging conversationalist and even-minded philosopher. ‘I’ll always remember who was kind to me,’ she says. ‘And who wasn’t.’
Her own special gift as an actor is to bring her innate feelings for the human condition straight on to screen. Playing Diana Ingram, she says, was not about whether she liked her or not. ‘I don’t think as an actor it’s your job to comment on a human you’re embodying,’ she says. ‘You have to accept them, rather than like or dislike them. If you’re playing a powerful person, you can’t play power. You have to embody power. That’s why, if you see people in positions of power and there is something deeply inauthentic about it, it’s because they are playing a role as opposed to actually being a powerful human being.’
Is she thinking of Boris Johnson when she makes this observation?
‘No comment,’ she says wryly.
The Covid crisis has clearly given British comedy’s current reigning Best Actress pause for thought. She isolated alone for its duration. No major work projects were interrupted by the pandemic. ‘That initial period, when this was so completely new and alien to us, was the most arresting moment I’ve ever experienced in my life,’ she says.
‘It was completely beyond our control. I’ve never felt more connected to every being on this planet than I did right at the beginning of this. It’s not just Covid, it’s the Black Lives Matter movement gathering momentum, too. Everything seems to be imploding. It’s very easy to feel quite powerless right now.’
In the time spent alone, smiling at neighbours in ways she hadn’t before, connecting and disconnecting under a new reality, lessons can start to be learned. ‘I don’t know how we resolve this. But I do think it means dismantling existing systems in a very dramatic way. We are being called to quit our judgement of one another. It’s time to examine ourselves.’
‘Two Weeks To Live’ is on Sky One on Wednesdays at 10pm
Photographs: Sophia Spring
Hair: Charley McEwen at Frank Agency using IGK Hair
Make-up: Justine Jenkins using Drunk Elephant
Stylist: Frederica Lovell-Pank
Main image: full look, Givenchy; Earrings, 1980s Vintage Givenchy earrings @ Susan Caplan
Black and white outfit: full look, Loewe; Earrings, Begum Khan