Series Two, Episode Two - Polly Kemp

Series Two, Episode Two - Polly Kemp

POLLY: So, um, I’m from the North. I moved to London when I was nineteen. I didn’t really like my secondary school and it didn’t really have any arts or drama clubs, and all I wanted to do was be an actress. So I rather spectacularly failed every exam I possibly could so that I couldn’t be forced into a catering college in Salford, and instead I came to London to pursue the dream, which was to be an actress. So I came down and I worked as a nanny for some actors whilst I auditioned for drama school. And it took a little bit, actually, it wasn’t very easy for me because I didn’t really have any kind of drama background — well, my parents liked the arts but I hadn’t had a drama club to go to, I was literally going from a standing start. So it took me two years, and then I got into the Drama Centre London, back in the day — back in the bad old days — where I did three years of formal classical drama training.

EMILY: What was your experience like at drama school?

POLLY: Um … hindsight is a wonderful thing. At the time I would say that I just put one foot in front of the other, I tried really hard not to evaluate too much what was going on. However, on reflection it was three years of sustained bullying and misogynistic discrimination. It was pretty tough. I got into Drama Centre and I had my expectations managed from day one: it was gonna be harder for me, I was a ‘character actress’, I probably wouldn’t work until I was a bit older, the parts would be smaller for me … And I sucked it up, I thought that was the gig. There were less boys than girls in the year, and — women and men, sorry, we’re adults! Their sort of artistic vision was that the only type of theatre that was valid was European classical theatre, often writers and dramatists that we’d never heard of that were very male dominant. So there would always be one rather gorgeous beautiful tragic lead and then the rest of the year of girls would have to either be a sort of boy sidekick, you know, the clown, or the crone — nothing that really stretched you. And then at the end of my second year I was told rather brutally that I wouldn’t get into the third year unless I lost weight because there would be no work for me in the business, so if they couldn’t market me in the third year there was no point in them taking me through. So I went away and starved myself. And I went from probably a fairly healthy — I don’t know, I never used to weigh myself back then, about ten and a half stone, maybe, curvy — to, at my lightest, because I did start to weigh myself, just under seven stone.

LAURA: Ah.

EMILY: Wow.

POLLY: When I went into a ballet class at my drama school I sat down one day — tired, starving — and bent over and the ballet teacher came up and announced to the class, ‘Ah, bravo, Polly, we can now see her ribcage.’

EMILY: Oh my God.

POLLY: I know. I know. Hideous, when you think back on it. And I suppose what was problematic for me was there was no pastoral care. Nobody noticed that. My parents lived three hundred miles away and my mother was obviously concerned but she couldn’t intervene because I was so determined I wanted to be an actress. And I so bought into the notion that I needed to bend myself out of shape to meet the expectations of these two men that ran the college, because I saw them as being right. They were the principals of the college, they knew what the business would be like, what they were telling me was right. I became very  self-conscious and what should be a very liberating and freeing experience, the process of creativity … in a sense that should have been cultivated for the three years I was at drama school. In fact, what happened to me was I was boxed into a corner, pushed into a shape, put into a category, told to be something that wasn’t necessarily close to me. So it was very difficult for me in the third year then with the parts that I was given because I didn’t have an authentic voice, I was trying to be something that I wasn’t. And then I went into my first job at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I did a couple of years of theatre. And in the three years I had at the RSC I experienced other things that have informed my life now as a campaigner, however on the whole it taught me to show and to show off and it actually helped me rid myself of the three years of being pretty oppressed and pushed down. I sort of became a bit of a show-off. And I suppose because of the type of actress that I wanted to be — somebody who wanted to show — my weight became much more normalised, although the food thing has always been a problem. The weight issue is always in the back of my mind, I’ve never lost that. And I don’t think that’s anything singular to actresses, I think women as a whole struggle with how we look.

EMILY: Do you think that any of the men in your year would ever have had a similar pressure in terms of getting ‘built’? Do you think there was ever the same kind of pressure put on them to look a particular way?

POLLY: I didn’t notice it. No. The bullying wasn’t exclusive to the women. There were men in that year who did also suffer bullying. There was probably a sexual dynamic there for the boys, unfortunately. It was a very toxic environment. Lots of people love Drama Centre, lots of people were thrilled by their training there, and I often hear, from my experience, it’s mostly men who came out of Drama Centre really loving it. And I think the principals of the college definitely encouraged the men more than the women. That would be my experience. So I would say that while both sexes suffered bullying it was predominantly the girls and I never saw the same pressure on appearance for the men.

EMILY: So after the RSC what shape did the next chunk of your career start to take?

POLLY: I self-defined myself because I had been defined as a character actress, so I didn’t really ever push myself beyond that particular little area. I bobbed along from fairly nice little character part to character part, I worked with Peter Hall’s company, I did a great Poliakoff play on tour. I loved that. And I just bobbed around places like Oxford Stage Company, and the West End, and started to pick up little bits of television. And that’s how the first ten/fifteen years were, bobbing along from job to job. I was your archetypal jobbing actress. I was quite happy with that. I had problems with my weight, my weight went up and down because of what happened at college and because I’d probably messed with my metabolism, so I went up and I went back down again at one point because of a broken heart. I lost a lot of weight. So sometimes my casting would change, when I was very skinny suddenly I was going up for leads in telly, and again, because I wasn’t really prepared for that, it didn’t happen. So I found that quite frustrating, actually. I didn’t know how to prepare for the lead part, so I’d suddenly go up for a lead part in a series and because I’d been bobbing along having fun doing little character parts and sort of being able to go along and do a little speech and people would trust me with that, I didn’t understand what was required of me in a meeting where I was being seen for a lead part. You have to be much more disciplined, and you can’t go in and crack a joke and be a bit of a twit, which was always my default position. You have to be a more serious and look like the kind of person who can carry a series. So I did find that frustrating. I couldn’t even articulate that. Again, that’s something I understand with hindsight. At the time it was just really frustrating. Why do I get all these great little parts, but nobody trusts me with a fantastic lead? So as a result of that I have always hung around in nice supporting characters. Until, of course, I hit my mid-forties, when they no longer exist. I was very lucky — I got a series called The Thick Of It.

LAURA: That’s my favourite series ever. Honestly, it’s my favourite ever television programme. I’ve seen every episode like six times.

Laughter

POLLY: Ah, that makes me so happy.

LAURA: Yeah. I absolutely love it.

POLLY: I was great. I suppose that was the next moment after that first year at the RSC. That was the next moment where I felt somebody created a space where I could play and create. And that’s all I need really, a safe space where I can play and be the best that I can possibly be. Plus also, I’d say my preference is for improvising. So even though The Thick Of It wasn’t really improvising, it was a very structured story that you can kind of riff around ... it wasn’t freestyle, in fact they were very, very, very heavily scripted stories, but really smartly they understood that you give the script to the actor, you let the actor rehearse, and while they’re rehearsing you write down what they’re saying so that you can give the lines the nuances and stresses that you as the actor would normally do. And then you’d get the script back and the lines would just sound like you, so that when you came on set the lines came authentically from you because they were essentially a bit of you.

EMILY: You mentioned that you were bobbing along until your mid-forties…

POLLY: Yeah.

EMILY: Tell us about what happened then?

Laughter

EMILY: About that forty cut-off point.

POLLY: Um … I did a series called Desperate Romantics on Channel 4, playing Lizzie Siddell’s mother Mrs Siddell, and it was just a typical part that I did, it was great. And I sort of feel like from then on — that was nine, ten years ago — I would have been forty-five. I just feel that I then ceased to go up for a part that would go beyond two episodes. I seemed to go up for parts that would be somebody crying, the mother of the victim. I did a lot of crying in morgues. My child had died, or my husband had died. And also quite hardwired into me is this idea that work breeds work, so I felt it was really important to just keep working. So even though the parts were getting smaller I felt it was really important to keep doing them. And the fees would be going down, and the experience would be less fun because I’d go in as a day player and you’d have regular cast who are busy, they’re carrying a show, they don’t necessarily have time to make you feel better. So there you are, on set, going in trying really hard to get into the rhythm they’re in, do the best you can. It feels a bit stressful. But I kept on doing it, because it was important to work. I probably did my last play about ten years ago, playing a part that essentially should have been played by an older woman. It was a psychic. And I suspect it should have been played by a woman in her fifties and sixties, and I was seen at that time as somebody who could be in their fifties or sixties. I feel like the people who employ have little understanding of what forty-five or fifty-five in a woman really looks like. So that was a difficult experience and I dried and got terrible stage fright, so my agent would ask me to go up for plays and I didn’t feel that I could do that. And then your CV begins to thin out and people can see that you’re not doing a series, or you’re not doing a play, you’ve done five guest appearances in episodic drama that’s probably one episode where you’re the doctor or Mrs Victim. It’s clear. And it’s a sort of vicious cycle — the less you do, the less you’re seen for. Also, statistically we know that there are less parts for women over forty. They begin to disappear off our screens. You might get one older woman and she’s gonna be played by somebody who’s got a lot more stuff on her CV. And what’s great about that is she will continue to work because she’s got lots of great stuff on her CV, so she might — not in any way to blame her — but she might start mopping up the small amount of quite nice parts over forty-five, or those couple of actresses that do that, mop all that work up. And the rest of us who’ve been working pretty consistently find ourselves beginning to fall away.

I mean, I do work. I do a couple of jobs every year, I do nice little jobs. But it’s not enough to pay my mortgage, I have to do other stuff. I have a partner who works, so we can live a good life, but if I was on my own I’d be really struggling. I’d probably have given up and taken a full-time job. The last ten years have been hard because essentially I’ve never lost that desire to play, and I don’t get the chance to be creative in the way that I’d like to be. And the result of that is I feel quite angry, because it doesn’t seem fair. I don’t understand. I live my life as a woman in my fifties now, and it’s full, three-dimensional, it’s rounded, it’s interesting. I have friends who are in their fifties. They have fascinating, interesting, powerful lives where they do extraordinary things, but I don’t always necessarily see that reflected on screen. There are the odd shows that do do that, it’s not a complete desert out there.

I’m still boxed in, now. I’m boxed into the middle-aged parts, I’m a middle-aged woman. And I will in all likelihood play the mother of a victim, a wife, or an angry lady on the street. I won’t automatically get seen for that superintendent, or that extraordinary MP, or that judge. Unconscious bias will put a man in that position. People are challenging those choices a bit more now, but I don’t think there are enough guarantees in place that you are always seeing women alongside men for a bunch of parts that both genders could easily play. So as a result a lot of my male contemporaries continue to work in a way that I would love to work, and that’s great. However, I just feel that we need to share that a little bit, because there’s plenty of my contemporaries who are women who don’t work, who were never off the television in the ‘90s. They were never off it! And they never work, or they very rarely work. How can that be right? How can that be right? It can’t be that they’re not good. What that says to me is that there isn’t enough work for them.

LAURA: So having worked consistently up until that point, were you aware of that as something that might happen, or did it come as a … what the hell is going on?

POLLY: I … Yes. Interesting question. I was conscious that … I dunno, the lived experience is just something that you do each day. You get up, and you live your day. So one doesn’t have a concept of future or past, really. I worry about my pension? That’s it, really, that’s the extent of it. It’s probably why I haven’t worked in the way I wanted to. I’ve never had a big plan. I’ve wanted to live a creative life, but I’ve never had a strategy. So I heard the stories — it’ll get harder for you as you get older, there’s less work for older women. I saw older women not working. When I was in the RSC, there were these women who were doing the tiny parts, and I’m aware that I felt vaguely sorry for them because I never thought that would be me. Because I was living my experience as a woman in her twenties, you don’t immediately put yourself into that position. So I was aware of it on one level, but obviously it’s different now the consciousness is … I’m experiencing that. And actually that’s quite painful, because I think back to myself at twenty and I just really wish I could have a really good long talk to myself at twenty and say, ‘Go and talk to those middle-aged women! Make them a fucking cup of tea!’

There’s a lot of focus on the extrinsic value of stuff, you know who’s playing what by critics. There has been a series of quite unpleasant reviews of shows which have taken exception at the colour of a woman. That kind of ridiculous critical review of stuff doesn’t just apply to women, it does apply to actors of colour. I know actors of colour have come up against a lot of criticism, or the directors have come up against criticism for giving those actors that role. I think it’s utterly ridiculous. Everyone has the right to be able to — everybody can tell a story. I think the focus needs to be on that, not on colour or gender.

LAURA: People use that as a way of criticising actors who they don’t think are — like you can have a white male actor in a part and if people don’t like the performance they’ll never ever comment on their gender or their race. But the second that part is played by a black actor —

POLLY: Or a woman.

LAURA: Or a woman, people see that as relevant to the criticism.

EMILY: It’s like what Harriet Walter said to us when we first met with her, she was talking about the Donmar Trilogy and creating all-female work. And she said, ‘Well the one thing I’m gonna say, is that if you’re gonna do it, it’s gotta be fucking brilliant, because if you give reviewers any opportunity to say it didn’t work, they’ll go, “Well, they tried”, and then they won’t take it seriously again.’

POLLY: You see that’s so unfair. It’s so unfair when companies like Propeller, or companies like the one Mark Rylance put together at the Globe which were the all-male productions of Shakespeare, that all you get is, ‘Oh, it’s just so authentic.’ It just makes me tired.

EMILY: It’s why Emilia was so —

POLLY: Oh, God, I wish I’d seen it!

EMILY: I definitely at some point in my life have heard people say that the reason that things tend to lean into having male leads is that audiences trust it more, probably because it’s what they’re used to seeing. The idea that if there’s a man in the driving seat, people feel comfortable, audiences relax, people go, okay, he’s got the gravitas and the weight to carry this forward.

POLLY: What you’re talking about there is unconscious bias, so at some point historically the patriarchy became the norm. So when you say director, or actor, immediately you think of a man. Which is why Equal Representation for Actresses is ‘for actresses’, we have to say that to make it clear that it’s about women. There is a stat or a study somewhere that says that from a man’s point of view if there’s more than 17% women in a room they automatically think it’s equal or more than them. We have a society that is so hardwired to men being upfront and centre that when it changes by any small increments we immediately begin to think, ‘Oh God, there’s far too many women here.’ And we all have it. It’s not just men, it is women too. So often that’s why the work of people like Lucy Kerbel is brilliant, because she specifically through Tonic goes into organisations and challenges artistic directors of both genders on their choices. She told me the story of a female artistic director who because she was a woman didn’t think she had that problem, until they had a workshop and then that artistic director went back to her desk and saw pictures of the productions she’d done and upfront and centre were men, and also in the creative teams. It was all men. And she hadn’t even realised she was doing it. I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t think for a second that you can just come in and say, ‘Hang on a sec! You haven’t got enough women!’ It’s much more nuanced than that. It’s about education, it’s about awareness. It’s about counting numbers, it’s about hard data, and saying, ‘You think you don’t have this as a problem because you’re a creative, creatives don’t think like that.’ But actually, we do. Just because you’re creative doesn’t automatically make you liberal. It doesn't necessarily make you equal, or tolerant. You have to check all of those things all of the time.

LAURA: Have you seen Nanette by Hannah Gadsby?

POLLY: Oh, yeah!

LAURA: It’s brilliant, but there’s one part where she talks about the straight white man as human neutral, that the sort of bog standard human being is that. And I feel like — I feel like I’ve done it as well, I’ve watched a very male heavy or male centric play with a male lead and I’ll see that as being about the human condition. Whereas you can have a female led play or a female lead, and suddenly it becomes about what it’s like to be a woman, but that’s a bit different from what it’s like to be a human being.

POLLY: Coming to consciousness of this as a problem has been an evolving landscape for me. There have been times where I’ve been very conscious of it when I was younger, and then it disappeared because it was more expedient that I put those thoughts to the back of my mind and got on with working. But when this consciousness rose again I went to see Escaped Alone at the Royal Court which is Caryl Churchill’s play and it stipulates that there are four women, they’re all over seventy, they just sit down the whole way through and it’s stream of consciousness. And because I was in this experience as founder of ERA I just looked at that and I suddenly understood — I had such a first-person experience. I got what they were … I just knew. I know because I’m a woman, I have a female experience, there were four women on stage and I just got it. And for the first time I understood that there are generations of men who go to see Hamlet and for them it’s a first-person experience because it’s a man up there talking about life. Of course they love it! Of course if you’ve got predominantly male artistic directors of the NPOs they’re gonna love that because that’s their experience. It’s immersive for them. So they’re gonna find lots of ways to justify it. They’re not gonna understand their bias, because for them it’s such a visceral experience and why wouldn’t they continue to create work like that? Because it works for them. But it’s without any understanding that actually 65% of the paying audience are of a different gender, and for them there is a suspension of disbelief just one step more. And actually when you make that audience aware of a different experience like Emilia — the stuff on Twitter about Emilia is crazy.

EMILY: I hadn’t thought about the fact that obviously the experience that I had with Emilia of connecting to everything it was saying and every woman there was cheering and going, ‘Yes! Yes! You’re saying what’s in my head all the time!’ Of course men, if it’s a male lead and a male story, they connect to it. Of course. Of course that’s how it works. But that’s even more of a reason why there should be at least an equal level, and why something like Black Panther is so important for the black community to be like, ‘That’s us. We see us.’ Everyone needs to see themselves represented or have stories they can connect to that is what they’re thinking or they’re feeling. If you don’t give that, you ostracise an entire community of people.

POLLY: So Equal Representation for Actresses wouldn’t say we want all female, and we wouldn’t stipulate that every show should be 50:50, what would say is that you look at, say, your programming for a year and you count your numbers, you just keep and eye on it. And not just actresses on stage, but also the creative teams, also the gender of the writer, whose story you’re telling, and who are the other key creative roles? The directors, and the people who are programming. There needs to be much more scrutiny. It’s only in ensuring there is 50:50 representation in key creative roles that you can make a sustainable 50:50 representation on stage.

LAURA: So we are starting to touch on ERA now, but it might be good to go back and discuss how that came about. How did it start?

POLLY: It’s that thing about consciousness coming up and going back down, to do with what was going on in my life. So after 45, work began to tail off, you begin to feel more furious. I worked with Vicky Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan, I talked to them. We did Puppy Love, which was a show essentially about women. It didn’t get re-commissioned, so on the back of that I felt pretty fucking angry. Vicky invited me to come to a symposium hosted by Tonic, by Lucy Kerbel, where she was reporting on work she had done with the NPOs, and she offered up her findings. A sort of snapshot audit of one night on the West End, and the figures were depressing. What you’d expect, you know. In terms of writers for that night on the West End there was 3% female, which actually only represented one writer which was Agatha Christie and The Mousetrap.  Everything else was written by a man.

LAURA: So that was all the plays that were on the West End on a given night? 

POLLY: On one specific night. She basically reported on the picture, and the picture, if I were to generalise, was that 35:65 ratio that we see a lot, which is women in 35% of the roles and men in 65%. That began to ring bells for me, and then the Geena Davis report came out. Geena Davis’ Institute in America was established by Geena Davis, the actress, because she was so concerned at the gender representation in the television that her kids were watching that she started to count numbers. Then she created the Geena Davis Institute and they did some very solid research on 800 films across 11 countries, which is the ‘Gender Bias Without Borders Report’. At the same time, Suffragette came out – the film. And it was this interesting thing of — there was a women’s film in the sense of, ‘There’s your women’s film, have that…. That’s your women’s film for a year, put you all back in a box, and business as usual.’ And there was this research that I was seeing which was saying that actually ‘business as usual’ was pretty terrible for women. The outcomes for women were pretty dire in this industry.

And then an email plopped into my inbox, forwarded from a friend. It had come from Elizabeth Berrington, who had seen the Geena Davis Report and was equally horrified. So she sent a message out to all of the contacts in her phone, people she’d met over the years as an actress, who forwarded it on, and forwarded it on, and I emailed her back and said, ‘I’ll help you do this. If you wanna do something about this, I’ll help you do it.’

We called a meeting of about 40 or 50 actress and it was really clear. The stories we heard were of bullying, of gender pay gap, of lack of parts. So we took this as a mandate to continue, in whatever form that would take. So we gave ourselves a name, and then I just put one foot in front of the other and started to reach out. We were able to begin to bring people together, meet people, and get information. We talked to Anna Serner via Skype, who is the CEO of the Swedish Film Institute and had achieved gender parity after two years in the funding of films by women. We were helped by Baroness Oona King very early on, who helped us understand that there was a political process that we could begin to engage in, that we could look at lobbying MPs. We connected with other campaign groups, and then the badges began to become the method by which we could make our presence felt at events. Denise Gough — the fantastic Denise Gough — actually volunteered very early on to wear our t-shirt whilst she was accepting an award at the Critics Choice Awards, and that made the papers. So you begin to connect: ‘Oh right, okay. I get a famous actress wearing the t-shirt, then people want to talk to us.’ So we came up with the idea of the badge, and Denise then offered to wear it when presenting an award at the Oliviers and we thought, ‘Oh! Maybe we’ll get the badge on some other people!’ And we did. The only thing was the badge was tiny and it didn’t really come out in the pictures…. So we went away and rethought that, and we made the badge bigger. Then we began to work on the BAFTA TV Awards, and that’s where we made our biggest impact. James Nesbitt rather brilliantly and rather generously, whilst he was presenting an award, talked about our campaign – which was on television and was in front of industry gatekeepers. That was brilliant. And when he did that, the camera also panned to the audience, where Phoebe Waller-Bridge was also wearing our badge, and Olivia Coleman was wearing our badge, and it started to pan around and you could see our badge in the audience, and so we were given a kind of platform.

What we then understood was that we’d done a lot of research, we had a lot of facts and information, and so we’d established a presence, but we hadn’t necessarily stated our case. We’d very generally said, ‘We need more women!’ and we’d given them the basic stat, which was that for every two actors there’s only one actress. We based that on Geena Davis’ findings and our own findings across 181 televisions programmes that had qualified for high-end tax relief, that had passed the cultural test that we’d done, and that showed that same stat. 

And then the Harvey Weinstein scandal happened, and the revelations were terrible. However, people began to talk about the gender issue, the toxic power dynamic that had allowed people like Harvey Weinstein — and others — to behave in a certain way. So there was an appetite for the conversation and people gave us a little bit of money to have our event. We generated enough donations to hire BAFTA and, through our network of friends and ERA members, we managed to get to pretty much the majority of the gatekeepers, the commissioners, artistic directors … Unfortunately on the night, it was the first night of the snow, God damn it! So we lost about 50-80 people but we still had about 150 people, and included in that were Piers Wenger, Andy Harries, and other important producers and commissioners. To my surprise, they were shocked by what we presented them with. A lot of the information we have is readily available, so when we were putting it together and I thought about it, I thought, ‘Well, they’re probably going to think that’s interesting, but they’re gonna know that right? They know that, right? I found it. I found that information, they must know that.’ And I was sat on the front row and behind me people were gasping, and I was surprised by that! I wanted to turn round and go, ‘What? You didn’t know this?’

Currently, myself and other people from the committee are in the process of trying to move some of our thinking on, because where we want to move into is to begin to challenge hiring practices. I think the terms on which people hire people in the entertainment industry need to be examined rigorously. We need to have processes put in place that ensure that you’re not always going back to those pools of talent you’ve gone to time and time again, that predominantly have white, middle class people in them – and the majority of them are men. We need to be looking fairly and equally across the broad spectrum of people who are wanting to be part of this industry, and it’s got to be inclusive. We need to make sure that in our processes of hiring people above and below the line we are always seeing people with disabilities, because for them it’s even worse – for them it is terrible. And making sure that if you are seeing a part that says ‘Judge’, that you can see the men if you want to, if that’s what you believe, but you must also see an equal number of women, and in that there should be a proportion of women of colour. Always.

EMILY: We always finish off by asking if you had any advice for young graduates, or young actors joining the industry, whatever route they might have taken — what would it be?

POLLY: Look after your mental health. Sit down and figure out what it is that you value and work towards that, rather than to what you think you should be. I think those are two different things. Spend some time with yourself, try and find your true north and ignore what anyone else says or thinks.