Michele Manelis talks to the star of new comedy series Mrs Fletcher
In which way do you relate to Mrs Fletcher? She's a woman suffering from empty nest syndrome during a mid-life crisis.
What struck me so much about this project was that this woman feels like a shell of
a person she was so long ago. She's been divorced almost 10 years and it's an interesting place to start with - a woman of this age who has spent so much of her life in service of other people. The thing that I most related to was her sense of just searching.
But you're nowhere near the empty nest situation.
True. I have two kids who are just 10 and almost 13 but it's going faster and faster. And hormones are a-raging at our house. And I am definitely feeling that this mum-hood chapter is starting to close. I'm feeling a deep nostalgia and I can only imagine if I was looking at the next chapter, without a partner, how that identity would be forced on me.
She's also grappling with an addiction to pornography, which we never see represented by women.
Yes. It's fantastic. She is coming into porn at this stage of her life, which is like a Pandora's Box, this addiction of hers that becomes louder. And she wants it more and more and more, because it feels good and it feels alive. It makes total sense to me why an addiction would start that way, because she's feeling something after such a long time. It's the idea of being fearless in your own life and it's also her little private secret that starts to seep out. It's her new private affair that she's having, really, with herself.
You are very uninhibited on screen. We tend to see you naked quite often.
My poor children. If you look at the body of work I've done recently, not just about sex but about women's reproduction, it's very interesting to me that this part of our life doesn't stop. Just because you become a certain age or because you've had children or you're in peri-menopause or you have a hot flush, it doesn't stop. And it's still as loud and as important as it was beforehand. I feel like somehow there is culturally often a blunt cutting-off from a woman's experience after those things happen. And I'm interested in seeing and I'm interested in working with people who are investigating it or want to ask questions about it.
