Switch on any of your favourite comedies from the last five years and there’s Lolly Adefope, glamorous and wry, not just stealing the show, but holding it aloft as she marches out of the shop to the sound of rapturous alarms. She was Fran, the droll, sexy best friend in Shrill, a comedy about, among other things, the politics of being fat. She was Ruth Duggan, the reporter who treated Steve Coogan’s character with venomous contempt in This Time with Alan Partridge. She was Lady Daphne in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, exquisitely disgusted by her husband and the aristocratic world in which she has landed and, in fact, by everything. It’s tempting to carry on, actually, listing Adefope’s supporting roles, because each one leads me down a merry wormhole of video clips that bring different, particular joys. But instead I get on the train to meet her.
It’s midday in a busy Peckham café and we cram ourselves on to a table and order toast. Adefope was born nearish here in south London; her dad a doctor, her mother in IT. Her early obsessions with kids’ comedies like Kenan & Kel led to later obsessions with Catherine Tate and Peep Show. After university, she interned at a comedy production company and started going to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she suddenly saw, in lights, her future. She found a “gang” of “attention-seeking people who, like me, had a part of their brain missing”. At her first Fringe solo show in 2015, she wrote and performed a character called Gemma, a comedian doing her first standup gig. “I was working in an office at the time and it was really boring while still a lot of work, which is the worst combination. And so I wrote this character whose friends from work have come to see her do this gig…” When Gemma realises they haven’t turned up, the tone shifts to a sort of hysterical sadness. “I think I was just trying to cheat a little bit.” By playing an inexperienced comedian, “I could mask my inexperience.”
She may have been inexperienced, but she was never scared, not about getting on stage. “The scary part, for me, would be writing something and thinking it wasn’t funny. Knowing that it’s not true to yourself and doing it anyway – that would feel terrifying. But I feel that if you think something’s incredibly funny and you commit to it, people will think that’s funny, too.” This is the difference, she says, between actors and comedians. “If you’re really funny, you’ll always find an audience, whereas you can be the most talented actor and nobody can ever see you. It feels imbalanced.” She pauses for a moment. “I also think, though, that you can be really unfunny and objectively offensive and people will still give you Netflix specials.” She shrugs, camply.
Gemma was Adefope’s first attempt at writing a character and since then she’s found an uncomfortable niche. She likes “characters who don’t realise how they’re coming across, people with a lot of confidence or arrogance. I think of myself as somebody who’s observant, who can tell when someone’s being disingenuous. I think it’s funny when they mistakenly think they’re coming across really well, because then everyone’s happy.”
From standup, she started taking comedy acting roles, popping up in shows like Motherland and Stath Lets Flats, before moving to Portland, Oregon, at the end of her 20s to film three seasons of Shrill as Aidy Bryant’s fabulous housemate. Returning to the UK, she worked on This Time with Alan Partridge and on Chivalry, but she is most beloved as Kitty, the sweetest, most relentlessly positive ghost of a Georgian noblewoman a person could ever hope to meet. This is in Ghosts, the ensemble comedy about a group of dead people who live in a mansion with a living couple, only one of whom can see them. It’s about family, death and eternity, and has been roundly reviewed as one of the best British comedies of the decade.
“Making it was just the nicest thing in the world,” grins Adefope. “I saw an actor post a photo of a show he was on, with the caption ‘We’re such a family,’ and in the green room I turned to everyone and was like…” she purses her lips, “They’re not though, are they – not like us.” Part of Ghosts’ appeal was the sense that the cast were having just as lovely a time making it as we were watching it. And they were, Adefope says. Because there’s nothing like “dressing up and making your friends laugh. The best bits were always in the green room playing shag, marry, kill together. But also it was invigorating to work on something that is so loved.”
Mathew Baynton, who co-wrote and starred in Ghosts, says: “As a writer of comedy, you hope to cast people who can make the writing work, which is a fairly rare skill. But rarer still are those who elevate it and find more than you realised was there.” He and Jim Howick wrote one episode in which Adefope’s Kitty played Cinderella in a pantomime. “On the day, though, Lolly had made the choice that Kitty’s acting voice would be an affectation, a self-conscious attempt to do good acting. It was so much funnier. That’s Lolly and that’s why she’s one of the very best.” Ghosts ended last year after five series. On the final day, Adefope says, everyone “took themselves off for little moments alone. I cried when they said, ‘It’s a wrap.’” The cast had been working together for six years. “It was the thing we’d all done the longest since being at school. Our year was mapped out by it, it was so comforting. So we were all apprehensive about filming with new people, a new crew.”
She needn’t have worried, of course. After Ghosts there was more telly, with Black Mirror, Miracle Workers (with Steve Buscemi and Daniel Radcliffe, “The nicest man in the world”) and, this year, Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman’s mischievous new film Wicked Little Letters. Next, there is Seize Them!, a comedy road movie set in the Dark Ages, about a queen (played by Aimee Lou Wood), toppled by a revolution led by an axe-wielding Nicola Coughlan. When the queen becomes a fugitive, only Adefope’s Shulmay, a secretive former servant, can help her. For all the physical horrors of filming, wading through mud in a gown, this was her first lead role and she loved it.
On her phone, Adefope has a list entitled “career goals”. “Actually, some of these things are too embarrassing to show you… ” she says, “But one of them is: be in something on HBO. And I’m doing that, so that’s quite fun!” It’s The Franchise, from Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci, about the chaos of making a superhero movie, due to premiere this year. However, it feels very much as if Adefope is at a turning-point in her career and on the verge of becoming really quite famous. She is not blind to this – it troubles her a little, like a wasp hovering.
She remembers making a decision. She was filming a scene round a table, where no one could move from their seats because the camera angles were so precisely set. Between takes, Adefope was eating a banana and when the director was ready to go again, the makeup artist offered to throw away her banana skin. “For a moment in my head, everything stopped. I was like, ‘This is it.’” A crossroads. “If I give her my banana skin, it will only get worse. I will expect it. And one day I will eat a banana and hold out my hand for someone to take the skin automatically.” She said no, she’d go to the bin herself, thank you. “It’s better this way, isn’t it? I’m quite obsessed – I see it around me. I’m in close proximity to people who are living that life. Like, lunch comes around and nobody knows how to make a decision. At my core, I am the baby. So I need to put some effort into not giving in.”
Perhaps she should have just handed over the banana skin, in retrospect, but, “I’m overcompensating because I don’t want to turn into a monster. I’m so used to watching people do annoying things, because I’m mining it for comedy.” I am reminded of her podcast, Fanmail, in which Adefope plays an insufferable version of herself reading fan mail and interviewing fellow celebrities. When Steve Buscemi called in, he pretended all the Miracle Workers cast were with him, having stayed over after a party to which she’d not been invited.
One result of her growing fame already is that she can’t simply have a laugh on social media any more. A few years ago, in response to a picture of a comedy gig featuring 23 famous white entertainers, she tweeted: “Someone’s dreaming of a white Christmas.” It became, I think the correct term is, “a whole thing”, with the Mail and others reporting is as a “race row”. A similar thing happened recently when, at the National Comedy Awards, she gave the announcement of Ricky Gervais’s award (he wasn’t there to receive it) a solemn standing ovation. The papers ran a story saying she was “‘Outraged’ – it’s always like I’m ‘raging’ at something, like I’m lecturing someone, like I’m really angry, rather than just being silly,” she half-laughs, but then stops. “I don’t regret making the joke. I’m not saying it’s easier for me, but I don’t have the same fear that a white person might have, which definitely holds people back from saying things.” What is that fear? “There’s the fear of humiliation, or cancellation or being seen as wrong or prejudiced. Maybe this is too hopeful, but I feel like we’re kind of past that fear of cancellation now? We’re more willing to let people try. I don’t think the internet is the place to try to resolve things, but I’d prefer to say that I tried?”
Ten years ago, she says, she might have thought about how to get Netflix specials like Gervais’s removed, where celebrity comedians punch down at minorities. “Or maybe I’d have tried to convince everyone else how bad they were, and everything would be fine. But now I know, there’s always going to be an audience for that kind of comedy. So, it’s definitely more productive to just make more good stuff, encourage more people to write their own stories, so that those aren’t the archetypes of standup.” She thinks. “I don’t want to burn bridges with Netflix, obviously. But – it’s Netflix, they’re not my friends! They’re going to make the thing that makes the most money. I think we just have to make what we think is good. And hope that people receive the message we’re putting out rather than trying to fight to convince them.”
In her time in the industry, she’s seen a shift. There was a moment when producers “realised they had to be ‘more diverse’, so they started casting diverse actors. But they didn’t see it through to the end and think about actually writing more diverse characters. They don’t do all the steps!” What are the steps? “Step one is casting more diverse people. Step two is writing actual parts for them. And then… there are a lot of parts out there that are ‘black person rolling their eyes at white person’. Which can be really fun, but it’s a passive character, whose role is just to observe. The white person is getting to do all of the fun stuff and lead the action.” So there’s the third step. “Writing a character who’s a black person and is also problematic and unlikable. In the UK, we haven’t got to that point yet, of casting people to be a fully realised character rather than to tick a box.”
In her early days of standup, regardless of what she was performing, Adefope would get up on stage, knowing her friends were out there in the audience (the opposite of her character Gemma), and “I’d just feel so… fearless. Nothing mattered.” She remembers thinking, at the time, “I can’t wait till I’m doing this for real. But even then, there’s a tiny part of your brain that knows that this is the most exciting time of your life, when you’re most unencumbered by insecurities.” As time has passed, a certain pressure has built. “The pressure to make everything perfect, not to take risks.” She looks a little mournful for a second. It’s the realisation that, for all the glamour ahead, she’ll never be nobody again. “Whatever I make now, even if I do it with my friends, we’re never going to get that feeling again. Which is really sad. But – we can keep chasing it for the rest of our lives.”
Seize Them! is released in UK cinemas on 5 April
Stylist Vivian Nwonka; photographer’s assistant Mike Mills; hair by Dionne Smith at 7even Management using Denman Brush; makeup by Min Sandhu at The Only Agency using Mac Cosmetics; shot using Airspace locations
