Kat Sadler has her head in her hands. She is sitting across from me, recalling the moment she won a Bafta for her painfully dark BBC Three comedy Such Brave Girls. “I wish I was one of those people who practise their speech in the shower,” the 31-year-old laments, visibly cringing. “You know, people do that. I wish I’d done that or thought about what I was gonna say. I got there, and I was like, I’ve got f***ing nothing.” Dressed in a suit as she picked up the award for Best Scripted Comedy alongside her sister and co-star Lizzie Davidson, Sadler did seem like a deer in headlights. Struggling to remember everyone to thank, she eventually babbled: “I guess, writing’s really hard and this is really nice.” Talking about it a year on, she groans. “It’s a car crash. What the hell was I saying?”
Given the rave reviews the A24-produced Such Brave Girls received from critics and fans alike when it arrived in 2023 – The Guardian called the show a “malevolent delight” – it might seem surprising that the former BBC Comedy joke writer wasn’t more prepared for the possibility of the show winning the highly regarded prize. But as I speak to Sadler a few weeks before season two launches, it’s clear that her self-deprecation is deeply felt. She is fidgety and talks quickly, unassumingly. Her brows are expressive, and near-permanently furrowed.
There’s always a strange feeling when you speak to an actor best known for playing a version of themselves on screen: one of knowing them, while also being hyper-aware that you don’t, really. With Sadler, the connection is particularly hard to shake. From day dot, she has made it clear that the troubled and chaotic single-parent family at the centre of Such Brave Girls is heavily inspired by life with her sister and mum, and their respective mental health struggles. Sadler does not sugarcoat anything to anyone. During that fateful Bafta speech, she was quick to recount the story of the phone call that prompted her to write Such Brave Girls. It was early 2020; Sadler told Davidson she had been sectioned after attempting to take her own life, and Davidson replied by admitting that she was £20,000 in debt. Both burst out laughing.
In Such Brave Girls, Sadler co-stars as moping twentysomething Josie, who’s struggling with her sexuality and threatens to have a panic attack whenever she wants to get out of going to work. Her sister on screen and off, Davidson, is Billie, the attention-seeking ringleader constantly concocting schemes to win back her drug dealer ex. And then there’s Louise Brealey as their domineering, neurotic mother Deb, a woman hellbent on ensuring that the weird, sad daughters living under her roof do not scare off her new man Dev (Paul Bazely).
There’s a scene in series one where the sisters lie on Josie’s bed together. “I guess we just have to remember that most people aren’t wet for trauma like we are,” Josie says, to which Billie replies, frustrated, “But trauma’s all we’ve got.” For the characters, mental illness is a language of its own: suicide threats, toxic relationships and abandonment issues after their dad went out for teabags and never came back are all standard fare. Deb is more of a comic creation, but Josie and Billie are heavily inspired by, albeit more extreme versions of, Sadler and Davidson. Sadler began writing the show in 2020, with real-life events constantly popping up in the script. “My sister will tell me an anecdote about something, and I’ll be like, ‘I’ll just be having that,’” Sadler jokes.
The Davidson family (Sadler is a stage name) grew up on the outskirts of London, where making each other laugh was their personal currency. They had a “real venom towards each other”, when it came to jokes, Sadler says. “[We were] always one-upping each other. It’s quite a competitive house… Mum would always do pranks on us, and we’d always take the piss. You weren’t allowed to have any dignity.” You can sense this attitude in the show’s dark, often abrasive sense of humour, where sex, death and dangerous hair dye jobs are all joked about with equal casual brashness.
With season one, there was some pressure from TV execs, Sadler admits, to tone down the characters and make them more “likeable”. She was staunchly against it. Luckily, so too was director Simon Bird, who had approached Sadler and Davidson about joining the project after watching their 2021 pilot. Considering he had his start playing the mildly insufferable Will on The Inbetweeners, it’s no surprise that Bird got what the sisters were going for. “He’s the first person that’s like, ‘It’s not about that. Nobody cares about that,’” Sadler says. “I feel like we have the benefit of the doubt more [with series two] so we can push the boundaries. That was the fun challenge, just to be like, ‘OK, how do we make things worse?’”
It’s a bold claim: the first series already saw Josie mistaking her crush’s affectionate relationship with her dad for incest, Billie foaming at the mouth while bleaching her hair, and Deb burning a picture of her boyfriend’s dead wife while calling her a “f***ing frigid b****”. But on a show of extremes like Such Brave Girls, making things worse for the characters makes the show better. Many plot points are heavily embargoed, but I can confirm that season two is season one on steroids. Despite the acclaim and the awards, however, Sadler is by no means confident. When I casually bring up a particular plot point from the opening episode I found particularly funny, Sadler replies, “Yeah?” with a relieved, if not entirely convinced look in her eyes. “I’m not secure about series two at all. I haven’t worked out how I feel,” she says. “If someone says they watched it, I’m still thinking, did you like it?” Sadler knows those nerves are a good sign for a writer, “otherwise you’re not going to move the needle”, but that doesn’t make them any less unpleasant. “I was – ” her voice drops to a whisper “ – f***ing petrified. And I continue to be for series two.”
Considering Sadler’s outward displays of nervousness, it’s hard to imagine how she got into comedy in the first place. Davidson was the performer in their household growing up, a musical theatre kid who would go on to work at the London Dungeons and Shrek’s Adventure! before the show came out. In contrast, Sadler was “much more brooding and just sat on my laptop writing sad poetry and didn’t think I was brave enough to do any performing”. She got into stand-up comedy at university (after assuming the society was for comedy fans, rather than prospective performers), but says she never conquered her nerves. She stopped stand-up around seven years ago, and right until the end would down a bottle of Pepto Bismol before getting on stage.
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The internet helped. Sadler would pre-write sets in a blog, which she’d then perform on stage. And she gained a substantial following on Twitter with one-liners which, she admits, she has occasionally repurposed for Josie in Such Brave Girls. When a Twitter thread went viral where Sadler had listed the craziest things she’d done for love, it was a boost, telling her that her own experiences might be more universal than she thought. “And everyone called me a psycho and I should kill myself. But it’s worth it, because I think people that felt seen felt seen!” she jokes, in a mock blasé tone.
There are lots of suicide jokes in Such Brave Girls. Dealing with this issue more “sensitively” would feel inauthentic to Sadler; when it comes to her and her family, “that’s not how we talk”, she explains. “We’re so numb to it in my household that we’re just like, ‘Yeah, what else? Yeah, OK, we all feel that way.’”
When a character gets sectioned in series two of Such Brave Girls, I thought about her Bafta speech. But it also made me consider how, even in our age of talking about mental health, we so rarely go beyond vague platitudes. We’re quick to say that it’s “OK not to be OK” – less so to look at these gnarlier, less palatable versions of mental illness. Psychosis, state intervention – Such Brave Girls is one of the few forms of media showing that these things are more common than you think.
Sadler describes society’s refusal to acknowledge more serious mental health issues as a “real squeamishness”.
“I don’t care if it makes people uncomfortable,” she says. “It was really important to show, bones and all.” She says that, in the plotline in the series, she didn’t want to necessarily have the family be sensitive about it, because that’s not always the reality. “I almost think that can make people feel worse… It can be quite lonely, watching a family band together around someone who’s gone through a mental health crisis. That makes me feel lonely, because that’s not what happens in my experience.”
While fans might be hoping for a third series – and Sadler certainly has ideas for one – the comic wants to go out and live some life first. This could even include acting in something she hasn’t also created. “I would love to get out of my head,” she says. “It might be nice to be on set and just be an actor and be like, ‘This is the gift of the part, what I do with it?’ Rather than being like, ‘I’ve made this, do people like it?’”
In putting her story on screen, Sadler is finally beginning to carve out her own place in an industry that has always felt exclusionary. Still, the nerves, the feeling of not fitting in, are hard to shake. When they won the Bafta, Sadler and Davidson refused to even let themselves bask in it. “We’ve got the biggest mouths, and we never belong at those events,” Sadler says. “We did a victory lap around the venue, and then left, and that was the night. We were just like, ‘We can’t stay,’ because it’s too much pressure.” She groans, again. “It’s too embarrassing, the whole thing.”
All six episodes of ‘Such Brave Girls’ season two are available in the UK on Thursday, 3 July, on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer
