In a new Vogue profile of Fleabag writer, creator, and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the author and the artist wander Central Park in search of a boathouse. The setup of the piece feels a bit precious and tony—Waller-Bridge is described as a “larks-and-diversions person” who enjoyed The Joker, was raised by a venture capitalist-turned-photographer, and is related to baronets. But like the upper-middle-class character Waller-Bridge plays in Fleabag, Waller-Bridge, the person, still seems incredibly relatable, even though we have nothing in common.
For one, the interview touches on a central theme of Fleabag: the loneliness of adulthood. Waller-Bridge talks about how adults become more secretive as a way to deflect judgment from friends and family—something I did not realize I do until she said it:
“It’s so true, isn’t it? We used to share so freely,” Waller-Bridge said as we discussed the lockdown that ensues when people start pairing off and nobody wants to admit what’s going on inside their relationships. Drama in your love life doesn’t feel like failure when you’re young, she said. “Because the stakes are so low.
She also explains how difficult it is to find the “right” approach to writing about the erosion of women’s rights without coming off as shrill or hysterical. She admits she left more controversial jokes out of her Saturday Night Live monologue because she didn’t know how to tell them:
“Just about the abortion laws, the kind of stuff you can’t get your head around. The fact that the world has gone backward in this way, and actually in some frightening sense, in so many ways, women have a louder voice, are more empowered these days, and then in these other really insidious ways, blatant ways, we’re being marginalized again. How do you fight that? Because if you rant and rave, if you try and make a noise, you’ll be labeled noisy. You have to be careful of that. You have to find ways to protest. I’d really like to write something about that. I don’t know what it is yet.”
She adds that she avoided the jokes because she was worried about going for shock value without saying anything honest: “Sometimes you feel it’s braver to say something outrageous, and it’s not always. Sometimes it’s braver to say the vulnerable thing,” she tells Vogue.
Waller-Bridge found similar vulnerability in The Joker, a film with a violent protagonist some worried would incite violence:
In her little bit of free time, she’d gone to see Joker, which she thought was “absolutely brilliant.” “I think the reason people got so uncomfortable is because it feels too true, too raw,” she said. “I was watching it and thinking to myself, God, if this came out a year into Obama’s time in office, I don’t think we’d be feeling as worried about it.”
While The Joker felt neither raw nor true to me, Waller-Bridge’s focus on thoughtful vulnerability remains very appealing, as does she.