Posh pissed English woman – that’s me, smoking,” says Sarah Parish, taking a drag on an imaginary cigarette. The laugh she emits moments later, throaty and faintly lascivious, sounds like a car engine turning over.
The archetypal role she’s talking about, in films and TV, is in the likes of Christmas staple The Holiday (2006), as the sozzled Daily Telegraph editor to Kate Winslet’s lovesick columnist; patchy romcom The Wedding Date (2005), as the perennially worse-for-wear TJ; and across three series of BBC drama Mistresses, as a GP whose penchant for the wine rack is as liberal as her approach to medical ethics.
“I wasn’t playing far from type,” she says, recalling times spent in the late Nineties staggering through Soho House, drink in hand. “We were of an age where we could do a whole day’s filming, then go out and get drunk, and get up the next day and still look good. Which, of course, can’t happen now.”
We’re in Toynbee Studios in east London, where Parish is rehearsing for her new play, Eclipse, which opens in Chichester on Friday. Settling into her chair, dressed in a blue and white chunky pinstripe shirt, jeans and Nikes, she offers me a tea and gestures towards a medley of biscuits and chocolates. As advertised, she is exceedingly warm, not to mention free of ego.
At 57, Parish has hit a sweet spot halfway between driving ambition and the imperative to savour everything she does. “I don’t know whether I’ve got enough time in my life, now, to do things I might not really want to do,” she says, with mellow contentment. “I’ve got maybe 20 years. What do I really want to do? What’s going to feed me and make me want to get up in the morning?” Theatre, she says, ticks a lot of these boxes.
Eclipse is the first stage play by John Morton, creator of W1A, Twenty Twelve and Twenty Twenty Six, those wonderful deadpan BBC mockumentaries of British institutional life. Of course, Parish and Morton go back a while. He gave her Anna Rampton, the near-monosyllabic Director of Better in W1A, whose “Yes. No. Exactly” has become a kind of cultural shorthand for institutional evasiveness.
Set in the kitchen of a Devon rectory, Eclipse has a simple premise. Parish and Spooks star Rupert Penry Jones play a brother and sister fixated on banalities – talking about the toaster, bins, roads – while their father lies dying in the next room. “It’s the last 24 hours of somebody’s life,” Parish explains. “And it’s how families are with each other around death – the bad behaviour, the good behaviour, the revelations.”
If Eclipse sounds morbid, Parish is quick to add that it’s very droll, full of observational comedy. “He doesn’t write jokes,” she says of Morton. “He just writes characters that are real and recognisable in a way that becomes very humorous. I hope it’s funny, anyway. Otherwise we’re just finding ourselves funny.”
I ask about one of the hot-button issues in theatre right now. Last month, speaking on Radio 4, Lesley Manville declared it insulting when theatregoers photograph curtain calls, urging them to “clap or don’t clap, but don’t just stick your phone in our face”. Parish isn’t so sure.“You’ve got to have your phone to get in, but then you’re suddenly telling them, ‘No, put your phone away.’ I understand what Lesley’s saying, but these people have paid 200 quid to sit in the audience. I kind of go, this isn’t the precious memory you’re supposed to keep in your head. This is a bunch of actors going, ‘I hope you enjoyed what I did.’ Personally, I don’t mind if somebody wants to take a picture of me.” But, she adds, it’s “unforgivable to get it out while someone is performing”.
What troubles her more is the hammering successive governments have given the arts. “It’s so detrimental to life, to the way countries are run, to human beings,” she says. “To take money away from the arts – the one thing people need in terrible times.”
The consequences, says Parish, fall hardest on working-class kids. “The first things that get scrapped in schools are drama and music and arts. And if the outlets are not there for them, what are you going to do? I do still think it’s pretty manipulated by the middle class.”
What Meryl Streep is to imperious suffering, or Cate Blanchett is to glacial authority, Parish is to women who wield enormous amounts of control – and then start to lose it. A classic example is Bancroft, the 2017 ITV psychological thriller in which her hard-bitten detective – who has spent decades concealing a murder – is slowly, inexorably found out. If Parish always had one of those “oh, I know her” faces, thanks to parts in Broadchurch and Doctor Who, it was Bancroft, out of nowhere, that made her a household name. The series was a huge, unlikely hit. “It snowed really, really heavily the day before it aired,” says Parish. “It was January, nobody had any money, nobody was going out – and then Bancroft came along and got amazing viewing figures. It was incredible.”
Since her late forties, Parish has been consciously seeking out, in her words, “edgier roles”. She found one in Industry, the twisted HBO/BBC banking drama created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, in which she played Nicole Craig, a formidable senior financier. “She’s a bloody predator, a grotesque,” says Parish, “but they write these people so well. They don’t buckle and go, ‘Oh no, we better put something sentimental in,’ to make sure Nicole is not that bad. None of that.”
The role’s most notorious scene – in which Nicole masturbates a callow young trader in the back of a limousine – required Parish to work opposite Harry Lawtey, 30 years her junior. While she has mixed feelings about intimacy coordinators – vital in some situations, she thinks, while in others you don’t need to be “constrained by the minutiae” – for that scene she was grateful. “In the Nineties, it could get pretty awkward. The director would go, ‘Right, and then you get to this bit, and then, you know, you just have sex.’ I was like, ‘Blimey.’” She pauses. “It’s important young actors feel safe, that they feel held and protected.”
Parish grew up in Yeovil, Somerset, the youngest of three in a musical household. Her father was a helicopter engineer, her mother a deputy headteacher who ran the school drama group. Her brother John, meanwhile, is a longtime collaborator of the visionary singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. Most recently, he produced Aldous Harding’s new record. Parish recalls a young Polly Harvey coming round on Thursdays, when John was teaching her guitar. “She didn’t talk that much – quite shy, quite private. But I remember thinking, ‘She’s interesting.’”
Parish herself wanted to be a ballet dancer. She auditioned for the Royal Ballet School when she was 11, but managed to forget her kit in the boot of the car. At 17, she arrived in London, where she sold fake gold chains in a Wood Green shopping centre, cleaned flats at the Barbican, and attended a now-defunct drama school, ALRA.
Parish went into the industry, she says, already convinced she didn’t belong – “I am an imposter, I should not be here” – sitting in audition rooms alongside Rada and Drama Centre graduates, who breezed in radiating a confidence she had no idea how to replicate. “I don’t come from a famous family. I don’t come from London. I didn’t go to a posh drama school… I should have been a little bit more confident that I could do it.”
In the late Noughties, flush from the success of her hit hairdressing drama Cutting It, Parish flew over to the US for pilot season, hoping to land herself a series. “LA,” she says, “is a funny place. You never feel like you can relax. If you go out to a restaurant, there could be somebody there who could be a director. You’re always on point. And I found that really difficult. I’m quintessentially very British, and I think that doesn’t help.” The sycophancy made her skin crawl. “I feel very uncomfortable with a lot of smoke being blown up my arse.” And then there was the sexism. “Whenever I went over there, the guys were having a f***ing great time. But all the girls looked like they were about to have a nervous breakdown. And I just felt there was something really grubby about it. I was so glad to get out.”
After she came back and got pregnant, Parish was struck by tragedy: she and her husband, actor James Murray, lost their daughter Ella-Jayne at eight months old. She had been born with a rare genetic condition and a hole in the heart. “You are living by your fingernails,” Parish told The Times. “And then it’s over.” The couple went to volunteer in orphanages in Cambodia and Vietnam, before having a second daughter, Nell, now 16. They set up the Murray Parish Trust – now renamed Imagine This – supporting the mental health of seriously ill children and their families. Last year, the King awarded them both MBEs.
As our conversation ends, Parish finds herself circling back to the thing that seems to motivate her the most: theatre. We don’t have community any more, she says, and “no one really goes to the cinema any more. Theatre is like cinema used to be. It’s just that community feel of sitting with other people and enjoying one experience.” She thinks about AI. “Theatre could be our last chance of actually going to see a human being,” she says wryly. “They’re coming for your job. They’re coming for my job. And it’s terrifying.” Then the engine backfires, mid-laugh. “We’re all f***ed.”
‘Eclipse’ is at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre, from 8 May – 6 June; tickets here
