March 9, 2014 - Express.co.uk - Sarah Parish INTERVIEW - Wants to join Downton Abbey, Twenty Twelve

Actress Sarah Parish: 'I'd love to join Downton Abbey'

SNEAKY, spiteful or just plain sadistic, Sarah Parish has built a career on being the woman we love to hate. But the actress would trade it all for the chance to wear a pinny in Downton Abbey, as James Rampton reports

By: James Rampton

Published: Sun, March 9, 2014

Actress Sarah Parish admits that she would love to play in Downton [GETTY]

Sarah Parish can’t keep the smile off her face.

 “Just this morning,” she beams, “I was in the car on the way up from Hampshire thinking,
‘I really do have a super life.’” The 45-year-old actress, who shares a country home with her actor husband James Murray and their four-year-old daughter Nell, couldn’t be happier with her latest career break.

“I keep getting these roles as horrible bitches – which is weird because I think I’m quite nice in real life – and I’d been evil for so long that I really wanted to do something funny. Then this came along and I was absolutely thrilled to get it.”

“This” is the new BBC sitcom W1A. The eagerly awaited follow-up to the Olympics satire Twenty Twelve, it sees the Beeb boldly taking aim at itself. Bungling boss Ian Fletcher (Downton’s Hugh Bonneville) moves across from the Olympic Deliverance Commission to a new post as the BBC’s “Head of Values”. Other familiar faces include PR from hell Siobhan Sharpe (Jessica Hynes), while the scripts promise to poke more fun at today’s culture of management by bluff, bluster and bickering. It’s a world that will be familiar to many, where the more people talk, the less they say.
“I play a ferociously ambitious BBC executive called Anna Rampton,” reveals Sarah. “She’s one of those people you get a lot in the corporate world, who try to intimidate you with their lack of communication. Anna hasn’t a clue what she’s doing but she has learned the very clever trick that if you say very little in a fierce way, people will always think you’re right. And if you let other people babble on, they’ll end up messing up before you do. Anna is a very high-powered player who moves jobs a lot before she gets found out.”

Given that we last saw Sarah in BBC1’s fantasy drama Atlantis as Queen Pasiphae, a wicked tyrant who condemned her own daughter to a grisly death, even a scheming executive counts as light relief.
Interviewed on set, Sarah certainly looks the part in Anna’s dress-to-kill uniform of pale silk shirt, smart blue trousers and impeccably coiffed brown hair (as he wanders past, W1A’s producer mutters: “I keep thinking I should be pitching ideas for new series to Sarah, she looks so convincing.”)
But there the resemblance ends. We’re meeting in a make-believe BBC office called the Frankie Howerd Room, where the walls are emblazoned with the legendary comic’s catchphrases including “Titter ye not!” – an injunction that Sarah happily disregards.

She roars with laughter, in fact, especially when asked if she might like join Mr Bonneville in the cast of Downton Abbey. “Oh I’d love to!” she trills. “I saw Julian Fellowes at a charity carol concert last Christmas. I nestled up to him and gave him the ‘Downton eye’, but I’ve yet to be cast, either upstairs or downstairs. I’ll go either way – I don’t mind. Though actually, as I’ve played a lot of regal parts lately, I think I’d like to go downstairs.”

Sarah plays in BBC's sitcom, W1A [GETTY]

I wouldn’t relocate – I don’t have a dream of working in Hollywood.

Sarah Parish

With memorable roles in the likes of Atlantis, Mistresses, Merlin, Doctor Who, Cutting It and Monroe, Sarah has carved out quite a career for herself in the UK. So would she ever fancy her chances on the other side of the pond?
“I’m the wrong side of 13!” she jokes. “I wouldn’t relocate – I don’t have a dream of working in Hollywood. Anyway, every time I get a part out there, I get cast at least 10 years older than I am. When I made Hatfields & McCoys with Kevin Costner, I played a character who ended up aged 71.
“Basically, I’ve never had a great time in Hollywood because it’s so age-obsessed. As a female, you simply can’t relax into your acting because it’s all far too youth-based. Having worked on both sides, I think the British industry is much less ageist. The UK feels more hospitable towards older actresses.”And there’s one more very good reason why Sarah will be staying put. “Jim and I are not in the position where we can pick and choose our roles, but for our daughter’s sake we try to make sure that one of us is always at home.” (James, 39, has appeared in the likes of Primeval and Death in Paradise, and later this year joins the cast of fantasy series Defiance on the US cable channel Syfy.)
Four-year-old Nell is Sarah and James’ second child. Their first, daughter Ella-Jayne, was born prematurely in 2008 with a heart defect, and sadly she lived for only eight months.
In her memory, the couple have since raised funds for the children’s intensive-care unit at Southampton General Hospital.
Not surprisingly, Sarah is deeply serious about her responsibilities as a mother, and for once the laughter stops. “Recently I was working with someone whose children don’t watch television at all during the week,” she says.
“That made me think, ‘Oh gosh, now I feel like a bad parent,’ so I’m trying to wean Nell off the Disney Channel and back on to CBeebies because I think their programmes are more educational.”
Then, like working mums the world over, Sarah admits to feeling guilty that she is ever away from hearth and home at all. “You do constantly feel like that as a woman,” she says, “and everything becomes a compromise. You get in after working hard and you feel so guilty for not being there that you work even harder at home. But you can’t have it all – of course you can’t – so I always feel grateful for what I’ve got, rather than wanting anything else. Although I try to pack in as much as I can.”
 

She certainly does. As well as her flourishing acting career, Sarah co-owns a ballet-based exercise centre in west London and she has ambitions as a writer – though she admits that putting pen to paper can be an almighty struggle. “I’d literally do all my accounting, clean the entire house and scrub the loo till it gleamed before sitting down to write,” she says. “I was intending to write a sitcom in Los Angeles while Jim had a job out there, but before I’d even opened my pad, I got offered a part in Poirot. So I thought, ‘Stuff the writing – I’ll do the Poirot!’”
If Sarah gets her wish, the writing might have to stay on hold for a while longer – at least if the public takes W1A to its heart the way it did Twenty Twelve. “It’s a joy to come to work every day and do such brilliant scenes,” she says. “It’s such a shame the shoot only lasts four weeks. Hopefully it will be re-commissioned – unless Anna has already moved on to ITV. But I hope she stays at the BBC – I’m enjoying her so much, I don’t want it to end.”
So who has Sarah based this tough-nut character on? The actress laughs off the idea of revealing her sources. “Did I base her on anyone? You’re sailing close to the wind there,” she chuckles. “There are three or four people I took little bits from to create the character of Anna – but if I told you who, I’d have to kill you.”
Concluding that life could hardly be sweeter than it is right now, Sarah reflects that, “Of course, you never know when it will all dry up. But for the moment, I’m loving it.”
W1A starts on BBC2 soon.

March 8, 2014 - Express.co.uk - Sarah Parish (TROLL/LADY CATRINA) joins Hugh Bonneville in Twenty Twelve sequel

Sarah Parish on starring with Hugh Bonneville in Twenty Twelve sequel

SARAH PARISH joins Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes in Twenty Twelve sequel W1A, a comedy that sends up TV bosses

By: Kirsty Nutkins

Published: Sat, March 8, 2014

WIA, Wednesday, March 19, BBC2 [BBC]

When comedy series Twenty Twelve hit our screens in 2011, in the run-up to London’s 2012 Summer Olympics, many commented on its uncanny knack of precipitating real events. Following a fictional, haplessly incompetent Olympic Deliverance Commission as it prepared for the Games, the BBC’s sitcom’s opening episode portrayed the PR disaster of the malfunctioning countdown-to-the-games clock.
Hilarity ensued when the real clock in Trafalgar Square stopped a day after the episode aired. The second episode showed a busload of Olympic delegates lost in London, an event mirrored a year later when buses carrying journalists went astray.
So it’s a brave move by writer John Morton to base his spin-off within the BBC. The four-parter, called W1A after the location of the Beeb’s HQ in central London, sees Hugh Bonneville reprise the role of commission head Ian Fletcher, now newly appointed as the BBC’s Head of Values.
It’s dangerous, surely, for a sitcom to make fun of its parent broadcaster?
“I’ll admit it’s bold – the BBC has been a good sport about the whole thing,” laughs Hugh, 50. “W1A operates in the same way as Twenty Twelve in that it satirises the absurdities that go on within management structures – we’re not having a dig at the Olympics or the BBC per se.” 

Sarah joins Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes in WIA [BBC]

I told my agent that my next role had to be one where I at least cracked a smile. I was so bored of being evil, mean and depressed

Sarah Parish

This time, Ian and his team have to “clarify, define, or redefine the core purpose of the BBC across all its functions” and to “strengthen its future position, in particular for licence fee renegotiation and charter renewal in 2016 and 2017”. No mean feat for the manager and his incompetent colleagues.
One of these is motormouth PR executive Siobhan Sharpe, played by Jessica Hynes, whose highfalutin ideas and complete lack of common sense made her one of Twenty Twelve’s best-loved characters.
As well as a number of guests, including Carol Vorderman and Clare Balding, Sarah Parish will join the cast as Head of Output Anna Rampton.
The actress was last seen as evil queen Pasiphae in Atlantis and was also in Cutting It and Mistresses.
“I told my agent that my next role had to be one where I at least cracked a smile. I was so bored of being evil, mean and depressed,” she laughs. “When this came up, I jumped at it. It was exactly what I wanted to do.”
Anna’s role is one that she’s massively underqualified for, says Sarah.
“She does a very good impression of being good at her job,” says the actress, 45. “She’s very direct and she makes decisions quickly… but unfortunately, they always turn out to be the wrong ones.”
While Sarah has relished being involved in a light-hearted project, it was definitely a change of pace for her. “At the end of the day, everyone’s a bit frazzled and exhausted,” she says. “The scenes go at such a pace and every word has to be absolutely right.”
The schedule was equally exhausting for Hugh, who had to fit it round filming ITV drama Downton Abbey and other roles, notably The Monuments Men, the movie starring George Clooney and Matt Damon which was released last month.
“It was fabulous,” says Hugh, of working alongside such iconic actors. “I got a call from my agent about 18 months ago, asking whether I wanted to be in a movie with George Clooney. They said they’d send me the script to have a look at and I said: ‘Don’t bother sending me the script. I’ll do it!’”
With such roles being offered to him, is he keen to continue in his role of Downton’s much-loved Earl of Grantham? “I’ll keep trundling on until [Downton writer] Julian Fellowes tells me it’s time to go,” he says. “I’m not planning to jump ship any time soon.”
With plans for more episodes of W1A in the pipeline, Hugh hopes it’s as well received as Twenty Twelve.
Does he think there could be scope for a few more series and another career change for Ian? “I hope so,” he says. “John Morton’s writing captures so wonderfully the nonsense so many of us speak in everyday life. We think we’re communicating, but actually we’re just obscuring what we’re supposed to be saying.”