Yahoo News After Life star Ashley Jensen: ‘Women aren’t allowed to get old’
It has been years since Ashley Jensen gave a face-to-face interview. She did a few Zoom chats during the pandemic, but they weren’t her thing. “I’m quite old-school,” she grins. “I like to talk to people and see the whites of their eyes.”
Meeting Jensen feels peculiarly like spending time with someone you know. This is partly because she’s such good company, chatting away about anything and everything, and partly because she made her name playing best friends. She found fame as the lovable Maggie Jacobs in Extras with Ricky Gervais, before moving to Los Angeles and landing a role in the hit US series Ugly Betty as the lead character’s dependable pal. She can also do comically awful “frenemies”: see her play the passive-aggressive nightmare that is Fran in the Sharon Horgan sitcom Catastrophe.
At various points in our interview, Jensen leaps out of her chair to re-enact goofy moments from her career, and she peppers her conversation with impressions: she’s great at the “Oh my gosh, we love you, you’re sooo talented” gushing of American TV executives, but her pièce de résistance is her comedy hero, Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Jensen’s latest role, though, has little room for laughter.
We’re meeting today at the BBC to talk about Mayflies, a two-part adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s bestselling novel about two friends, Jimmy and Tully, whose lifelong bond is tested when Tully is diagnosed with a terminal illness. It’s a moving drama that switches between their youth in working-class Scotland – they are music-obsessed kids who dream of escape – and middle-age, where they are played by Martin Compston and Tony Curran. Jensen is Tully’s loving partner, Anna, who must contemplate the unthinkable when he raises the subject of assisted dying.
When Jensen read the book, she says she “literally wept through the last 30 pages”. But the BBC’s description of Mayflies as “uplifting” also holds true. It is a story of love – between Anna and Tully, and between the two friends – and moments of joy. It asks us to consider what constitutes a good life and a good death. And it’s about looking back at your youth, although for the actors who played the young Jimmy and Tully it was something else entirely. Jensen hoots: “All these young ones were excited because they were in a period piece – about 1986! I told them, ‘I lived through that. You’re playing the kind of boys I fancied, the boys that talked about film and wore the big military coats and listened to the music scene in Manchester.’ You do look back with a certain nostalgia, but not in a maudlin way, and Mayflies doesn’t do it in a maudlin way either.” Jensen is 53 now and very comfortable being so, though she jokes: “I still think the millennium was 10 years ago…”
At a time when so many depictions of men on screen revolve around toxic masculinity, I was struck by an exchange in which the two male friends in Mayflies unashamedly say that they love one another. Jensen agrees: “It’s a difficult time at the minute to be a man, actually. Male friends that I have are all questioning how to be a man: ‘Are you insulted if I hold the door open for you?’ They don’t quite know what to do. I think it’s a really nice thing to be able to see a man being a bit vulnerable. To be vulnerable and open are two of the most wonderful things.”
In Mayflies, Anna is grieving for her husband. Five years ago, Jensen’s husband, the actor Terence Beesley, took his own life at the couple’s home. They had been together for 18 years and their son was eight years old at the time. In a statement to the inquest into Beesley’s death, Jensen said: “I had no idea he was capable of what he did.” She has not spoken about it publicly. “I’m not proficient as an advocate for mental health. I have my story. I deal with it in a private way,” she explains. She doesn’t want to connect her role in Mayflies to her own experience, except to say: “I think when you get to a certain age, everybody has dealt with a certain amount of grief in their life. It’s just an actor’s job to be able to tap into that. When you’ve lived a life, things have happened to you. We’ve all got a sadness.”
She bats away any suggestion that playing such a grief-heavy role could have been overwhelming: “I did focus on what I was doing, but I certainly didn’t sit weeping in the trailer for an hour. I think when you’re somebody’s mum, you can’t quite afford that indulgence. Quite a lot of actresses have to go home and get the tea on, do you know what I mean?” Her son Frankie is now 13 and clearly the centre of her world. They live in Bath, where she settled after returning from LA. “I quite like being in a place where there are lots of tourists,” Jensen says, “because tourists are always happy.”
Recently, Frankie started watching Extras, the 2005 series in which a procession of A-listers – David Bowie, Kate Winslet, George Michael and others – send themselves up, delivering lines that can feel like something from another age. “Kate Winslet going, ‘You are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental’, which you wouldn’t get away with now,” Jensen says. “There are bits of it I’m watching and I’m like…” She does a jokey grimace. I ask which other lines would be deemed iffy today and she cites the episode in which Maggie tells a camp writer that he might want to tone it down a bit because he’s coming across as “too gay”.
On iPlayer, the series has a “discriminatory language and content” warning. I suggest that several shows from that era feature jokes that some might find offensive today. “I know, I know. We’re in a culture where we’re all too scared to say things now,” says Jensen. “I’ve read that political correctness is killing comedy. Is it? I’m not a stand-up comedian; I guess stand-up comedians would know that more than I would. But we are in a culture where you’re kind of scared to offend anybody, you know?”
She remains a firm supporter of Ricky Gervais, who cast her in both Extras and his more recent Netflix hit After Life. His comedy frequently offends people. “He doesn’t care!” she laughs. “When you think of artists in the old days, like painters and writers, they didn’t give a flying f---. They did what they believed, and said what they wanted to say, and I feel Ricky does that. He’s a true artist because he doesn’t kow-tow to anyone. He says controversial things, he offends a lot of people, but a lot of people think he’s funny.”
One of the reasons Jensen stays away from social media (which is a shame for the rest of us, because the pictures she shows me later of her and the dog dressed up for Hallowe’en would get a million likes on Instagram) is that there is no room for reasoned debate. “‘I don’t believe in you therefore I cancel you.’ The art of discussion is not as alive and well as I’d hoped it would be.”
Worse still, kindness is “not revered any more, is it? I think that’s really sad. And women aren’t allowed to get old, that’s another really sad thing.” She would like to tell young women, in this age of Botox and Instagram filters, to accept themselves: “It’s all right. You don’t need to look like a hardboiled egg.”
During her stint in the US, she was never told to change her appearance, although she puts this down to the fact that she was already 38 by the time she got there. She grew up in Annan, Dumfriesshire, and the only comments she got were in the early days, after she graduated from drama school in Edinburgh and began working in Scotland. She played Billy Connolly’s daughter in the BBC’s Glaswegian detective drama Down Among The Big Boys (1993), and looked gorgeous in it, but it prompted someone in the industry to offer her the services of a dietitian.
When she played Sandy on stage in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a drunken audience member approached her and said: “You’re a bit fat to be taking your clothes off.” Weaker characters might have folded, but Jensen says it just made her defiant. “It really hurt me, but I thought, ‘I’m not letting some mindless man have an effect on me.’ I found the strength.”
She spent 15 years plugging away in theatre before her Emmy-nominated role in Extras, so it tickled her to be introduced to TV viewers as “newcomer Ashley Jensen”. Working in US television was “brutal” but “brilliant”, a ruthless business that nevertheless was a blast to be a part of. “I was able to properly play at Hollywood.”
She jokes about going to the Golden Globes and spotting “the Big Five”: “You know when you go on safari? At the Golden Globes you’d go, ‘There’s Meryl Streep, De Niro, Pitt and Jolie…’” But eventually she tired of it. “At first I embraced it – I had a publicist and a stylist and a lawyer, I had a guy who did the pool. Then I said, ‘Right, I’ve done that now. You can all go away and I’m going to grow vegetables and walk the dog.’”
Her roles since have been nicely varied – a registrar in Kay Mellor’s Love, Lies and Records, an amateur sleuth in Agatha Raisin, “Biscuit Woman” in cult film The Lobster, as well as voiceover work in children’s films. Next, she’s taking over from Dougie Henshall in Shetland. She plays a native Shetlander who returns home after 20 years working for the Metropolitan Police.
Jensen is rather relishing the prospect of a primetime lead role. “It’s a BBC One show with seven million viewers, which can’t be wrong,” she says. Over the past few years she has been “happy doing little bits here and there, which didn’t take up too much of my time. I’m somebody’s mum. But then your wee person gets a wee bit older and a wee bit more interested in playing their guitar in their bedroom than doing the Lego with you.”
And she’s looking forward to working in Scotland again, as she did on Mayflies, because that’s more a part of her than LA ever was. “Sometimes these jobs happen for a reason,” she says. “This feels the right time and the right place.”
Mayflies is on iPlayer from Dec 27 and on BBC One at 9pm on Dec 28 and Dec 29
