It happens to be World Mental Health Day when Aisling Bea, the 35-year-old Irish stand-up and creator-star of standout Channel 4 “sad-com” This Way Up, walks into a central London hotel to talk about her new Netflix show.
She smiles broadly, plonks herself down on the sofa with a daredevil disregard for potential knicker-flashing, and gives a lengthy, reflective response to the casual conversation-opener, “How’s it going?” Clearly, this is someone who’s more than averagely in touch with their own state of mind.
So how is it going? Grand, actually. Living With Yourself, a surreal sci-fi comedy starring Paul Rudd as a burnt-out man whose spa break goes badly awry, has been “a big drink of water”, after the intense experience of creating, co-producing and starring in This Way Up.
In that show, Bea played Aine, an Irishwoman in London, who’s recovering from a “teeny little nervous breakdown”. Both are melancholy-tinged comedies but, for Bea, very different: “I’m just an actor in [Living With Yourself], and I’m not the lead; it’s just a joy. Also there’s a lot more money in this show, so, y’know, everything’s a bit shinier.”
Bea is shiny too — in complexion, jewellery choice and temperament. Earlier in the day she appeared with Rudd on Lauren Laverne’s BBC Radio 6Music show and is feeling totally cool with her self-confessed uncoolness: “We had one tape growing up and it was Neil Simon, Harvest Moon” Not Neil Young, then? “Neil Young! Neil Young! What did I say?”
Otherwise it was mostly pop, which reminds her: “The Spice Girls, this year? Those four women put on A. F***ing. Show.” Still, the question of whether she’d consider herself “into music” occasions further consideration: “I listen to Mi Gente from Beyoncé’s Homecoming album, honestly, 18 times a day. Is that being into music? But then I do think there’s sometimes a snobbery around music, as well as the general snobbery of minimising women’s stories … Now, finally, the people who have access to money are realising that people want to see our ‘small’, ‘frivolous’ stories on screen.”
Bea often gets to talking like this about industry sexism, which is why her decision to play the wife role, essentially, in someone else’s star vehicle might surprise. The Odeon Leicester Square screening of the first two episodes of Living With Yourself was a bit awkward, she says: “I sort of wanted to explain to people, like, ‘I am in it more! That’s why I’m here!’ It’s not like I was in town and Paul felt sorry for me.”
Happily, it soon becomes clear that while Bea’s character Kate is a supporting role, she’s also a fully rounded character. We should never have doubted: “I’ll be damned if I have to spend all these years grafting to go, ‘Honey, I’m home!’”
As much as the show is about every individual’s struggle with their inner selves— very literally, in the case of Miles (Rudd) and his clone (Rudd again) — it’s also about the intense intimacy that exists in a long-term relationship.
In the past few years Bea’s been romantically linked to actors Michael Sheen and Andrew Garfield, but she’s living alone at the moment and she gets it: “I often say that I think the neighbours probably think a pair of angry lesbians live next door. Someone who’s in a couple going, “Why was that left there?! Jesus Christ! Someone could have tripped over that!”
Bea has appeared in serious drama before, including The Fall on BBC Two, but it may well be her unexpectedly moving Living With Yourself performance which finally nixes any notion that she’s “just” a comic actress.
Comedy was never a means to a Hollywood end, however: “Oh, I hope to never not be a stand-up. I hope to be Joan Rivers’s age and die on stage.” Indeed, towards the end of last year, when she was living in New York and shooting Living With Yourself, Bea got into a sleep-depriving routine of filming during the day, writing her own stuff at night and gigging over the weekends.
“I was like, ‘Don’t worry! This won’t affect my mental health at all!’ Cut to me in my flat at Christmas, crying over a Chinese.” Would she welcome her own clone turning up on the doorstep? “I mean I’d love someone to do some stuff around the house … But what’s interesting about the show is Miles goes and gets a quick fix and I think that’s what we all want. We don’t realise that if you go to therapy at say, 30, that’s 30 years of undoing. You won’t be fixed in six sessions.”
Therapy is a recurring theme in Bea’s work, as in her life. She’s been publicly talking up the talking cure since at least 2017, when an article she wrote about her father, who took his own life when she was a child, went viral. So when she got her own series, she made a point of having her lead mention the prohibitive cost of therapy.
“It’s such a privilege to get better and to be mentally healthy,” she says now. “It’s such a privilege even to be in a culture where we can talk about it, like this. Like, that should be a whole class right up until you leave school, ‘How do you feel?’ I wish! Oh my God, the language I didn’t have growing up, that I wish I had! And I’m a girl! Men are completely kept out of the language world.”
The “sad clown” who uses the stage as a psychiatrist’s couch is a well-worn showbiz cliché, but Bea’s got a real therapist, thank you very much, and is motivated by different creative goals: “I suppose the idea of a TV show is, at least it’s free … It’s a way in for people who might watch that show to get something else.”
She also holds no truck with the idea — articulated, most recently, by Joker director Todd Phillips — that the world has grown too “woke” for comedic innovation. “Oh, I think that’s a load of s***e. It’s so bloody boring! Just do it a bit more conscientiously! Just try a bit harder! That comes from people who haven’t had to try hard, and all of the people who aren’t complaining are women and people of colour, because we’re really used to having to work out creative ways to get ahead.”
A woman with a clipboard appears in the doorway to collect Bea for her next appointment, but, by now, she’s on a roll now: “… And this whole thing about ‘cancel culture’, it’s like, is it cancelled? Really? Or did someone flag up something shitty someone did?”
Bea doesn’t yet know if either Living With Yourself or This Way Up will be commissioned for a second series, but she hopes the news, good or bad, will be delayed, so she can enjoy this period of relative downtime before writing starts again.
Still, it’s clear her mind is already bubbling over with new ideas: “I can’t just suddenly go and change the government, but I have six blank scripts open for six episodes and I have the ability to say what I want from every character. So what am I going to do?”
Living With Yourself is out on Netflix from Friday 17 October
