Entertainment
Cold Feet’s Fay Ripley talks about overcoming anxiety to return to the theatre after 30 years-Hugh Montgomery-Entertainment – Metro
‘It actually left me no option because it was so damn good.’
Cold Feet star Fay Ripley is back on stage in new comedy Kerry Jackson (Picture: Ben Stockley)
As well as being one of Britain’s best-loved actors, Cold Feet star Fay Ripley has carved out an impressive side career in food, writing three cookbooks. So it seems fitting that for her first stage role since the mid-1990s, in comedy Kerry Jackson, she’s playing a restaurateur.
Has she thought about opening an eatery herself, I wonder? ‘I definitely have considered it. But the thing that stopped me is the graft. I’m a lazy actor – just chatting to you, I feel like I need a lie down,’ she laughs.
Fay is doing herself down, of course. Her decision to dive back into theatre after so long by taking on the title role in a National Theatre play is hardly that of someone who is work-shy.
What’s more, when we speak during a break from rehearsals, she tells me she has just got over a bout of laryngitis. ‘Holy Christ, if you’re going to walk away from the theatre for 30 years, you really don’t want to lose your voice in the second week of rehearsals back – but I’ve come back on my front foot,’ she says, brightly.
After treading the boards when she was starting out, Fay stuck to screen work for so long because she became ever more nervous about the idea of live performance.
‘As you get older, you put up all these rules, and the rule was “don’t put yourself into a position where you’re going to have huge anxiety,”’ she explains.
It was a plan she stuck with until she read April De Angelis’ play. ‘It actually left me no option [about doing it] because it was so damn good,’ she says. ‘It’s funny, it’s human, it’s brilliantly quick-witted, it’s sharp, it’s political – all of the things I’m attracted to as a viewer.’
Fay and John Thomson won admirers in Cold Feet (Picture: ITV/Shutterstock)
As Fay explains, it’s a show that takes on big issues – such as class, gentrification and the effects of Brexit – all with a light touch through its portrait of life in the now-fancy east London enclave of Walthamstow Village.
At its centre is Kerry, a working-class woman whose new tapas restaurant has just opened in the area. ‘She has chosen to open a business in a place where she ultimately feels she doesn’t belong, but she wants a piece of it,’ Fay says.
Kerry is also a Tory voter with a ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps’ mentality, and while her politics are at odds with Fay’s own, the more liberal, left-leaning characters ‘come out of the play way worse’, Fay notes, adding that April has written something to make people ‘slightly rethink [their] very comfortable views’.
Even down a phone line, Fay has the kind of effortless warmth and wit that suggests she was always destined to be a star. However, after leaving drama school, she struggled for quite a while. ‘It took me maybe six or seven years to get going,’ she says. ‘In the meantime, everyone else I knew was flying… I felt like the last rat on the sinking ship.’
When Fay hit 30, Cold Feet came along and changed everything. Far from an overnight success – as she points out, the pilot originally flopped before it won a TV industry award and got re-shown – the comedy-drama about six Manchester friends built up a head of steam to become one of the defining shows of the ‘Cool Britannia’ era.
Fay, playing the down-to-earth Jenny, and her co-stars became celebrities of a kind, but the fame was never overwhelming, ‘because – let’s just calm down – I wasn’t Madonna’, she laughs.
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‘There were a few women who were in love with John Thomson’s character, Pete [Jenny’s husband], who used to come up and berate me and go, “Oh poor Pete,”’ she continues. ‘I’d say, “What do you mean, poor Pete, he’s had an affair!”
‘There was a bit of banter like that, but basically the show was loved, and Jenny was a character people related to, so it [the attention] was really fun.’
After 13 years off-air, Cold Feet made a comeback in 2016 and Fay admits they were all ‘terrified’ it wouldn’t work. It was a huge relief when it was a hit with critics and audiences alike. Now it’s on hiatus again, but there’s every chance there will be another catch-up in a decade. ‘That’d be the hope, but they’d better do it before our minds go and we can’t remember our lines,’ she jokes.
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As for other future plans, can she see herself doing more theatre? ‘Let’s see – I have yet to put my foot on that stage, my friend, so you might have to watch that space,’ Fay says.
‘I’m a terrible worrier, and a catastrophist, but not about my career: I’m more worried about how to do the bows on the Christmas tree than I am about what I’ll do when I finish this role.
‘I’m not sure what to do next that will be this exciting… I might have to now go and open an actual restaurant, after all, and put my money where my mouth is!’
Fay stars in Kerry Jackson at the National Theatre until January 28, 2023, nationaltheatre.org.uk
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