British writer and actress Daisy May Cooper spent a lot of time on the internet forum Mumsnet when her marriage was on the rocks. The site is “like Reddit, but for mums,” Cooper said in a recent interview at a London café as he took a drag from a small blue vape.
She was especially attracted, she said, to one of the site’s most popular threads, “Am I Being Unreasonable?”, a community of support for women who doubt themselves in relationships. It became the inspiration – and title – for Cooper’s latest television show, which she co-created with Selin Hizli. The show, which stars both, is available in the United States on Hulu.
Cooper, 36, rose to fame in Britain in 2017 after creating and starring in the BAFTA-winning BBC mockumentary series ‘This Country’ with her brother Charlie. She is a regular on British comedy panel shows, known for her candor and colorful language.
But in November 2020, two months after the birth of her second child, she divorced her husband, moved away and went online to find comfort. She remembered being scared and not sure what her next project might be. “‘My career has defined me, and now I don’t know who I am, or what I want, and these two people depend on me,'” she recalled thinking.
Hizli, a friend of Cooper’s from drama school, was also in the process of splitting up with a long-term partner. The two got back together during this period and began writing the show that became “Am I Being Unreasonable”. A wild and twisty comedy-thriller, Cooper stars as Nic, a bored housewife who forms an intense friendship with a fellow mother, Jen (Hizli).
“We thought, wouldn’t it be great to write something about a friend who is the partner you always needed, especially when your life is falling apart?” Cooper said over a cup of tea, a wall behind her decorated with hearts.
In a telephone interview, 34-year-old Hizli said she wanted to see mothers her age and working-class background on screen. “I had forgotten how important friendship was,” she said, “and how much I needed friends in my life.” In the show, Nic and Jen bond over shots of sambuca and dance to the Spice Girls.
But Cooper and Hizli also wanted to portray the dark side of female friendship. Cooper described intense past friendships “that felt like toxic relationships I’d had with boyfriends,” including a best friend who Cooper said was secretly sleeping with her boyfriend at the time. When she found out, it was like “a Keyser Söze mug drop moment,” said Cooper, who compared the shocking discovery to the ending of the movie “The Usual Suspects.”
“I can only write about what I’m going through, or at least base a character on my own experiences,” she said. Cooper described Kerry Mucklowe, the character she plays in “This Country,” as someone who knows exactly who she is. “Kerry was more of me before fame, and after that Nic was more of me,” she added. As she reached for her vape, Cooper seemed more muted than either of those characters, describing herself as an anxious person these days.
Cooper explored the humor and hardships of growing up in public housing on the edge of a picturesque English village in “This Country” and in her 2021 memoir, “Don’t Laugh, It’ll Only Encourage Her.” In the latter, she described playing board games by candlelight because there was not enough money to turn on the electricity.
She’d always acknowledged her mistakes in making other people laugh, Cooper said, and as she grew up, she aspired to be like TV comedians who gave her parents “moments of complete escape” from their financial struggles. She then channeled those inclinations into writing and acting.
On their first day as students at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, or RADA, in 2007, Hizli recalled a teacher telling them, “They’d chop us up and put us back together.” Cooper, said Hizli, would never have allowed herself to be made again: “She was always unapologetically herself and never felt the need to live up to the expectations of this pretty stuffy drama school.”
Miranda Harcourt, Cooper’s acting coach, praised Cooper’s unusual ability for what she described as both light and dark fire. “There are some brilliant British performers who have the capacity for lightness and comedy but don’t let you see their tragic side,” Harcourt said in a recent video interview from her home in Wellington, New Zealand.
After the success of “This Country,” Cooper and her brother finally had some of the financial stability they were looking for. Their lives changed overnight, Cooper said. “No one tells you how to handle it,” she said. “I think he’s as overwhelmed by it as I am,” she said of Charlie, who burst into tears. “When we were poor, we were so much closer,” she said. “I think money, schedules and work sort of messed that up,” she added.
Her collaboration with Hizli was the result of a similarly intimate bond. On both shows, Cooper said the writing was effortless. “They’re the ones typing on the computer, and I’m just vaping,” she said with a laugh.
Ever since RADA, Cooper has dreamed of starring in a movie and attending a premiere, and so when writer and director Armando Iannucci asked her to play Peggotty in his “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” she said she felt that she had done what she had done. out to do. In a phone interview, Iannucci, who also cast her in the HBO comedy series “Avenue 5,” said Cooper defies convention in everything she does.
“I think I could only do acting for a few more years,” Cooper said, adding that she preferred writing and being behind the scenes. Although several British newspapers recently reported rumors that she had been tapped to play M in the next James Bond movie, she said “there have been no talks at all”. Cooper said she should make the character funny, though she wasn’t sure that would work. “I’ve never actually seen a Bond film before, so I wouldn’t know,” she said with a dirty cluck.
Today, Cooper lives back in her hometown of Cirencester, a historic town in the southwest of England, she said few people leave.
There, “people know me because I’m eating crayons in year 6 instead of being on television,” she said, adding that she’d rather be anywhere else in the world.