The lovable star of Broadchurch and Peep Show whose versatility landed her two Baftas
• See the Observer's faces of 2013 in full here
Beg Olivia Colman to name the highlight of her (amazing) year and she's instantly in a muddle. "When did I get my awards?" she asks me, eyes wide. This isn't false modesty. Nor is it a case of taking success for granted. It's just that there exists such a long gap between filming a series and its screening: dates do get blurred. But, yes, it was only in May that she picked up two Baftas: one for best supporting actress for Jimmy McGovern's series Accused on BBC1, the other for best female in a comedy for Twenty Twelve on BBC4. "Well," she says, with a smile. "I can't lie. It is nice, winning awards."
But 2013 was the year of Broadchurch, too: ITV's huge surprise hit, in which she co-starred with David Tennant as DS Ellie Miller, a police officer on the trail of a child killer in a small seaside town. Did she know it would be so successful?
"No. Once you start wondering if something is going to be popular, you're taking the work on for the wrong reasons. I liked the fact that my character was strong, she'd worked her way up, she was funny. But then, it was all done so well. I loved the way the excitement was able to build, a whole week between each episode, no secrets revealed, not even to us.
"It was just as television used to be: when we all spent a week wondering if Ross and Rachel were going to kiss in Friends or waiting for Colin Firth's Mr Darcy." Colman will begin filming a second series of Broadchurch in May, but is keeping mum so far as plot goes. "All I can tell you is that where Chris [Chibnall, its writer] is going with it does make sense."
Her attitude both to ratings and to winning awards is: best not to let these things go to your head. "The furore around a job only lasts a week, then you have to pretend it never happened. You can't let it ruin things, you must stay honest. Winning the Baftas was immediately peculiar. I'd always imagined that winners partied all night, but at the dinner, I ended up whispering to my husband, 'Can we go home? I want to put my socks on and have a cup of tea.' We snuck out and were back by 10. I couldn't take it all in."
Her sense of perspective is, she thinks, strongly connected to times past. "When I left drama school in Bristol, I couldn't get arrested. I kept failing at the audition stage. I did a typing course and worked as a temp – quite a jolly temp, but not a very good one – and as a cleaning lady. I can't forget what it was like to struggle to pay the rent, and sometimes to have to borrow money to get on the bus, and it's important that I don't. I've got friends – wonderful actors, beautiful to watch – who haven't been as lucky as me and it makes no sense."
Colman will be 40 in January and yet only now is she truly hitting her stride, versatile and charismatic, even if she has been required, as she puts it, "to cry solidly" for the past two years. Does she think things are finally beginning to change for actresses, who so often become invisible once they hit 35.
"It's still the case that in the papers it says, "Actress, 59", whereas a 59-year-old actor will be thought of as handsome, his age an irrelevance. But do I think there are getting to be more roles for older women. After all, the people at home in charge of the remote: they're mothers. They want to see more people like themselves when the kids go to bed."
Does she feel under pressure to look a certain way?
"I've yet to meet a woman who genuinely doesn't care. I'm fortunate in never having been presented as an ingenue; things would be harder to handle if I had. I'm relaxed in my skin to a degree, but women do have days when they hate themselves and other days when they think, 'Oh, I look all right today.' Actually, I think my face has more to say now. When I look at my young face, it was kind of round and boring."
She and her husband, the writer Ed Sinclair, have two children and have been together for 20 years (they first clapped eyes on each other in Cambridge, where she went to teacher training college and met David Mitchell and Robert Webb, with whom she would later star in Channel 4's Peep Show) and perhaps it's this, above all else, that keeps her so sane, and so generous (she is the loveliest, most straightforward actor I've ever interviewed, by a mile).
"I love my job, and I love my home, and there isn't a tension between the two. I'm pretending at work and everyone is polite to me because they have to be. A runner gets you a cup of tea. But I don't go home and say, 'Where the hell is my cup of tea?'" She grins, happily stirring her cup of Observer tea with an ancient pen. "I quite like having to pick up pants and all that. I suppose that I like being needed." Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.
• See the Observer's faces of 2013 in full here
Beg Olivia Colman to name the highlight of her (amazing) year and she's instantly in a muddle. "When did I get my awards?" she asks me, eyes wide. This isn't false modesty. Nor is it a case of taking success for granted. It's just that there exists such a long gap between filming a series and its screening: dates do get blurred. But, yes, it was only in May that she picked up two Baftas: one for best supporting actress for Jimmy McGovern's series Accused on BBC1, the other for best female in a comedy for Twenty Twelve on BBC4. "Well," she says, with a smile. "I can't lie. It is nice, winning awards."
But 2013 was the year of Broadchurch, too: ITV's huge surprise hit, in which she co-starred with David Tennant as DS Ellie Miller, a police officer on the trail of a child killer in a small seaside town. Did she know it would be so successful?
"No. Once you start wondering if something is going to be popular, you're taking the work on for the wrong reasons. I liked the fact that my character was strong, she'd worked her way up, she was funny. But then, it was all done so well. I loved the way the excitement was able to build, a whole week between each episode, no secrets revealed, not even to us.
"It was just as television used to be: when we all spent a week wondering if Ross and Rachel were going to kiss in Friends or waiting for Colin Firth's Mr Darcy." Colman will begin filming a second series of Broadchurch in May, but is keeping mum so far as plot goes. "All I can tell you is that where Chris [Chibnall, its writer] is going with it does make sense."
Her attitude both to ratings and to winning awards is: best not to let these things go to your head. "The furore around a job only lasts a week, then you have to pretend it never happened. You can't let it ruin things, you must stay honest. Winning the Baftas was immediately peculiar. I'd always imagined that winners partied all night, but at the dinner, I ended up whispering to my husband, 'Can we go home? I want to put my socks on and have a cup of tea.' We snuck out and were back by 10. I couldn't take it all in."
Her sense of perspective is, she thinks, strongly connected to times past. "When I left drama school in Bristol, I couldn't get arrested. I kept failing at the audition stage. I did a typing course and worked as a temp – quite a jolly temp, but not a very good one – and as a cleaning lady. I can't forget what it was like to struggle to pay the rent, and sometimes to have to borrow money to get on the bus, and it's important that I don't. I've got friends – wonderful actors, beautiful to watch – who haven't been as lucky as me and it makes no sense."
Colman will be 40 in January and yet only now is she truly hitting her stride, versatile and charismatic, even if she has been required, as she puts it, "to cry solidly" for the past two years. Does she think things are finally beginning to change for actresses, who so often become invisible once they hit 35.
"It's still the case that in the papers it says, "Actress, 59", whereas a 59-year-old actor will be thought of as handsome, his age an irrelevance. But do I think there are getting to be more roles for older women. After all, the people at home in charge of the remote: they're mothers. They want to see more people like themselves when the kids go to bed."
Does she feel under pressure to look a certain way?
"I've yet to meet a woman who genuinely doesn't care. I'm fortunate in never having been presented as an ingenue; things would be harder to handle if I had. I'm relaxed in my skin to a degree, but women do have days when they hate themselves and other days when they think, 'Oh, I look all right today.' Actually, I think my face has more to say now. When I look at my young face, it was kind of round and boring."
She and her husband, the writer Ed Sinclair, have two children and have been together for 20 years (they first clapped eyes on each other in Cambridge, where she went to teacher training college and met David Mitchell and Robert Webb, with whom she would later star in Channel 4's Peep Show) and perhaps it's this, above all else, that keeps her so sane, and so generous (she is the loveliest, most straightforward actor I've ever interviewed, by a mile).
"I love my job, and I love my home, and there isn't a tension between the two. I'm pretending at work and everyone is polite to me because they have to be. A runner gets you a cup of tea. But I don't go home and say, 'Where the hell is my cup of tea?'" She grins, happily stirring her cup of Observer tea with an ancient pen. "I quite like having to pick up pants and all that. I suppose that I like being needed." Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.