‘Fleabag’ Star & Creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge Explains Why A Raunchy Show Needs A Lot Of Heart

Fleabag is an unbridled look into the mind of one young woman. The whip-smart, delightfully devious series is the brainchild of its star, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The actress conceived the character first as a means of catharsis. She used “Fleabag” as a way to voice her own frustrations and it soon spiraled into a heralded one-woman stage show.
Decider got a chance to chat with Waller-Bridge about the genesis of the show, her family’s reaction to the bawdy material, and why it was important to open the series with a candid look at arse-fucking.

Decider: What I love about Fleabag is that it’s about all these dark things that I don’t even tell my friends about. So I was wondering how did you decide to be that candid with the character?

Phoebe Waller-Bridge: When I was writing the play, I was really getting off on the idea of treading that kind of naughty line and, not wanting anything to be gratuitous, but knowing that my favorite moments with my friends are when I do tell the truth, but they are slightly shocked by it. I knew that I wanted this character’s confidence to be the first thing that you’re struck by. She’s unashamed and she’s unapologetic. She wants you to know what’s inside her head. And I think the quickest way to kind of gain power in that sort of situation is to talk about sex really candidly. I think when people do that, sometimes you’re like, “Oh! Are we doing that? Are we talking about arse-fucking in the first five seconds? Okay.”

Decider: I remember during the Amazon TCA panel, you said the whole character was born out of frustrations about feminism at the time when you wrote it. Watching the first episode, I was just struck by how there is this kind of tension between wanting to be a feminist and a “strong female,” but having certain sexual desires and self-hatreds, is that kind of what you’re trying to evoke there?
Waller-Bridge: Yeah, I think just that obsession of defining what feminism is was sort of boring to me and frustrating to me, when I was like, “It’s clearly just one thing. It’s clearly just equality afforded to women as it is afforded to men.” All the other kind of details around it, like if you want to change the way that your body looks or if you want to have sex with lots of different people or if you don’t want to have kids — all of that kind of stuff that suddenly became part of the debate. Actually I think it’s irrelevant to the central debate.
Suddenly, feminism was about hot guys wearing t-shirts saying “This is what a feminist looks like.” And that was like a wave of “cool feminism.” And it was like, [sarcastically] “Oh, that’s great! That’s great. Thanks, guys.” And I was just so confused. I was like, “I just want to write a character that’s like, ‘I’m just going to get on with stuff and then worry about it afterwards.’” Which is really what she does. She just sort of lives her life and follows her impulses and then goes, “Oh no, am I that bad? Am I? Dunno.” (laughing) I think that’s a way of living for a lot of people.

Decider: I think most? (laughs) Can you tell me where the name Fleabag came from?
Waller-Bridge: It’s actually my family nickname. Which begs the question, “Is this autobiographical?”, because it isn’t. I also wanted something that would create an immediate subtext for the character. So, calling her “Fleabag,” calling the show Fleabag, gives the subtext of “Fleabaggy-ness.” Then presents herself so…nice hair, lipstick, coat…like, nailed it. She looks like she’s got stuff together, and yet her name betrays the subtext of her.
Decider: Talking about how it’s not autobiographical, were there any moments where you were concerned that friends or family might see shades of themselves or worry about what was happening in your head that you weren’t sharing?

Waller-Bridge: Yeah! Everyone thinks it’s them! It’s so funny! So many people saying, “Love the show…is this character based on me?” It’s amazing because these characters are amalgamations of so many people that I’ve met and so many experiences that I’ve had. None are drawn from anyone in particular. And I wouldn’t do that anyway because that’s a different kind of game.
I think my family and I have always been a very, very, very open family and making people laugh is like one of the most important things around our kind of kitchen table, and even if it means being naughty. And we’ve always kind of been encouraged to be kind of slightly provocative and open and honest, so I sort of felt like I was in safe hands with showing them. I did explain to them that it’s very sexually explicit and there’s a lot of damage there, and stuff, but they were just like, “Yeah, great, cool! Can’t wait to see it!”

Decider: So you were a classically trained actress, I understand.
Waller-Bridge:  [Pretentiously-silly voice] Yes, indeed, yes.
Decider: So, was this the first thing you had written? Had you played around with playwriting before? Was it intended to be a showcase for you as a performer to show other sides of yourself? Talk me through how you went from like RADA to Fleabag. (laughs)
Waller-Bridge:  (laughs) Yeah, I mean they seem like totally like antithesis to each other. Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s really shitting hard when you leave. Um, and then – but the best thing that happened was when I realized it was shitting hard and I left and also having kind of done a string of like princess-y parts, kind of just sad that my husband’s gone away or sad that he’s come back, you know those constant kind of roles. And I was like, “Oh, this is boring.” And then, about a year after I left drama school, I met Vicky Jones who directed the stage play of Fleabag and she was a director doing kind of fringe work and I was an after-work actress and together we created our theatre company called DryWrite and we started facilitating loads of new writers.
Decider: And then, so what was the transference from stage to screen? How did that happen?
Waller-Bridge: That was – well the sort of literal journey of it was that BBC saw it at Edinburgh and then commissioned a pilot and made the pilot and then Amazon saw the pilot and then they came onboard for the final five. So it was quite a big gap of like a year and a half between the pilot and the rest of the series.
And, yeah, it was kind of hard because I played all the characters in the stage play. It was just like a one-woman band. And it was all totally focused on the fact that she was telling the story and she was the only narrator that you had and there was no other evidence of the world she’s describing to you except for what she says so you have to believe her one hundred percent. So I could really play with the audience over that, revealing information bit by bit. Whereas, suddenly, when it was onscreen, she was actually existing in the actual world and you could see the evidence of her world around her and how she could try and lie as much as she wanted but you’d see the truth everywhere. So that was the big kind of challenge, was finding the interesting relationship with the audience again, which I guess was the relationship with the camera.

Decider: You mentioned the gap between the pilot and the rest of the series. How did that time away from it change your perspective on the material? Or, did it not? Did you already kind of know what you wanted it to be?
Waller-Bridge: That’s really like a good question because it changed a lot. Because when I was writing Fleabag for the first time it was like in my bones, in my heart. It was like coming out my guts. Then it was a couple years later, I was a happier person, I was like “Oh, dear. Gosh. How do I go back to that place?” I had written a show in the interim, as well, and done a sitcom, which was a much more kind cheery, kind of more well-known set-up of just like six people living in a flat. And so I had also learned a lot about writing between the pilot and the rest of the series.
I guess what I just learned was that it just had to have as much heart as possible if I’m gonna get away with her being so candid and so hard and totally unapologetic about some of the things she does in her life. It was really knowing that zoning in on the heart rather than the distress and the trauma.
[Watch Fleabag on Prime Video]