Rebecca Front is the kind of actor who, when you see she’s in something, you trust it will be good. She has had the luck – or rather talent and good judgment – to be cast in some of the best British comedies over the last 25 years. As well as roles in the pitch-black Nighty Night and the cult comedy Grandma’s House, Front is best known as one of Armando Iannucci’s regulars, appearing in The Day Today, assorted Alan Partridge series, and most notably as the inept leader of the opposition, Nicola Murray, in his Westminster satire The Thick of It. She hadn’t seen Iannucci for about a year when he sent her a text, asking if she wanted to be in his new space series, Avenue 5. She didn’t know anything about the show, but this was Iannucci, so of course she said yes.
When we meet at a hotel bar in central London, Front is modest and unassuming. The reason why she’s wearing so much makeup, she quickly tells me, is because she’s just come from a TV interview. In comedy, says Front, “it helps not to have a huge amount of vanity. I think it also helps generally as you get older. Historically, it’s not been great to be an actress over 50, but then I’ve never really been cast because of how I look. I’ve played such a range of parts, wearing wigs and loads of makeup, that I still get the feeling people don’t necessarily know what I look like.”
Front often talks in qualifiers: she is pleased that TV executives in the US look at her “quite differently” from the people who know her work here, who perhaps only think of her as a comedy character actor. If she has a large and fragile ego, she’s good at hiding it. While it’s not quite right to describe Front as underrated – she won a Bafta for The Thick of It, after all – she is better known for bringing brilliance to supporting parts in other people’s star vehicles. Is it never important to her to play the lead? “I don’t know if important is the word,” she says. For her, acting is always about “the quality of the script, the quality of the people I’m working with, and having an interesting part to play. I’m not really too bothered where I am on the call-sheet.”
As well as a never-ceasing stream of roles, she’s also published two books of funny essays and has been praised for being open – long before people talked much about mental health in public – about the anxiety she has lived with throughout her life, including claustrophobia. She is still unable to get into lifts or use the tube. Her anxiety “is more under control but I think I’ll always be anxious. I’ve had a lot of [cognitive behavioural therapy] over the years. I’ve got a therapist who, if I’m really starting to stress about something, I’ll just text and say, ‘Is there any way you can fit me in this week?’ I’m definitely much better having found the therapy that works for me. I know the tools I can use.”
Front was seven or eight when she first got a taste for attention and the power it brought: “Doing something funny, or pretending to do something and thinking, ‘This is quite fun.’” She did plays at school, sang in choirs, wrote songs. “I was performing every step of the way.” What did she like about it? “Like most actors, I’m quite shy, so I liked being other people. That felt quite liberating.”
And she enjoyed the craft – trying to get better, something her parents instilled in her and her brother Jeremy, a writer. Their father is an illustrator, best known for designing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album (Last year, Rebecca shared some of his work on Twitter in a post that went viral.) Their mother worked as a teacher and wrote children’s books. “It was always about doing things well and not wasting your abilities,” says Front. “There was never an emphasis on money – I didn’t grow up with very much money, and I’ve never really gone looking for the money work, although it’s nice when it comes up.”
Front was at Oxford at the same time as Iannucci but they didn’t know each other. However, soon after university, when she and Sioned Wiliam (now Radio 4’s commissioning editor of comedy) had a double act, he was brought in to produce a BBC radio show for them. He then started working on the Radio 4 comedy On the Hour and encouraged her to join it. This would later become The Day Today when it moved to BBC Two.
Since then, there have been more dramatic roles – as a chief superintendent in Lewis, as a cruel and ghastly mother-in-law in Poldark – but it is her work with Iannucci that has been a constant throughout her career. He has said The Thick of It could never return because politics is now post-satire. “It’s all gone too crazy. It’s a shame because I would be more than happy to revisit Nicola,” she says with a laugh. “Occasionally, I entertain myself by wondering what she’s doing.” Working for some think-tank, she reckons, and earning lots of money.
Because of that role, people like to talk to her about party politics, though she’s always been reluctant. Front, who is Jewish, neatly and politely swerves when I ask how she feels about Labour’s recent implosion over antisemitism, though she says that its rise in general “breaks my heart. It had never really gone away but I’d hoped we were moving into a zone where, even if people didn’t like minorities, they wouldn’t actually feel they could say it out loud. It’s not just antisemitism, it’s racism generally. That depresses the hell out of me.”
Set some 40 years in the future – on a space cruise that has been catastrophically knocked off course – Avenue 5 sees Front playing Karen Kelly, a demanding, no-nonsense American who becomes the go-between for the passengers and crew. She is based partly on Front’s husband of 30 years, Phil, a former executive producer, who she describes as hugely competent and assertive – “the man you want to be next to if your flight gets cancelled”. She says this with the awed look of someone who doesn’t know how to make a fuss.
Karen is also based on an American woman she once met in the queue for the loos in a smart department store, who suddenly demanded of Front – without making eye contact – directions to Trafalgar Square. “She’s that woman, which is why a lot of the time Karen will preface her sentences with ‘OK, so …’” Karen wasn’t always going to be American but the accent “gives me an extra level of confidence. American accents often sound much more confident than British ones.”
The show is only two episodes in when we meet and reviews have been mixed. She isn’t surprised. “I think people want it to be Veep [Iannucci’s US politics satire]. It’s still satire and it’s still satirising similar targets. The Thick of It and Veep were not exclusively about politics – they were about human nature and selfishness, venality and power. And that’s exactly what Avenue 5 is about. But people are going, ‘There’s not enough swearing, it’s all a bit glossy’ – although it doesn’t remain that glossy.” The show is not, as some have assumed, a spoof on Star Trek, but rather a spoof on our times: “Many of us feel we’re in a driverless ship that has careered off course.”
It’s an HBO production, the first US TV series Front has done. Now in her mid-50s, there is a sense that Front is gearing up to take on America. “Now my kids are at university I feel, ‘OK, I can dip a toe in and see what comes up,’” she says, with typical understatement. Front is, however, “quite ambitious” and later I think how unusual – and great – it still is to hear women talk that way. She would like to do Shakespeare, which she’s never done, and dreams of being in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Chekhov. “Obviously I would love it if Sam Mendes rang up tomorrow and said, ‘I want you to be the new Bond.’” She laughs. And, I say, Iannucci will probably still be offering you roles when you’re in your 80s. She lights up. “I would love that.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion