In Simon Godwin’s riotous, rowdy new Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, Phoebe Fox wanted to give her Olivia a bit more to do. “There’s a whole scene in a drag club and a massive fight breaks out,” she explains cheerfully. “On the sly, I said to the guy who choreographed the fight, ‘Look, I know I’m nobility, so I wouldn’t, but do you think I could get a punch in there?’” He happily obliged. “So I walk in, deck a girl, and then start speaking. I loved that.”
Fox, 29, is curled up on a sofa at the National. Previously, she says, she would have spent days worrying about things like interviews, but she’s starting to relax at last. “It’s taken me years to build up the courage to start calling my bank. The idea of calling someone I don’t know …” She tails off. “It’s quite bad.”
Much of Fox’s TV career has seen her playing stoic, wealthy women. “I’m always playing bloody aristocrats!” Recently, she was Vanessa Bell in the BBC’s Bloomsbury soap Life in Squares and starred in Stephen Poliakoff’s second world war drama Close to the Enemy. Is it because you look posh? “Do you think I look posh? I have one of those faces. I don’t know. I always play people from the 1940s, too. Something about the way I look screams ‘aristocrat, 1940s’. It’s so strange, because I’m not.”
The role most similar to her in real life, she says, was last year’s adaptation of Zadie Smith’s NW. Fox played Leah, a young woman hiding the fact that she didn’t want children. “All my mates from school loved it. They take the piss out of me in everything else: ‘Oooh, you sound well posh.’ And it was nice to wear jeans.”
Fox – a regular Fox, not one of the acting dynasty Foxes – grew up in west London. Her mother and father were both jobbing actors and “there wasn’t a lot of money around”. She did school plays and made camcorder films with her sister who, she says, is far too sensible to have gone into acting, having seen the “uncertainty” of her parents’ life. But Fox was taken with the theatre and, from the age of five, it was the only thing she could imagine doing with her life.
It took a while for her abilities to match her calling. She wishes she’d done National Youth Theatre, “but the idea of going to meet new people at 13 was horrendous”. She was an awkward, anxious teenager. “My mum said later that I didn’t fit my own face,” she smiles. “I had horrendous teeth. I had 10 years of orthodontist treatment, everything you can think of.” Even now, she’s prone to covering her mouth when she speaks. “So I would have loved to have been a child actor, but I was not a great actor at all. It seems audacious that I decided to pursue it as a career.”
But Fox was determined. She was rejected for drama school two years in a row, making it on her third attempt. “My mum took me to my first Rada audition and I did that thing where I just started falling asleep and yawning on the train, because my body couldn’t handle the idea of going in and auditioning. You just learn how to pretend you’re feeling confident when you’re not. And the more I pretend, the more it comes true.”
Eventually, things fell into place. In 2011, she was nominated for outstanding newcomer at the Evening Standard awards. She lost to Kyle Soller, her husband. The pair met at Rada. “I have to be wary because I talk sarcastically about how it was so terrible, and then it comes across like I was really burned by it. He deserved to win. But it’s not something I’d like to repeat.”
By 2012, she was playing Cordelia to Jonathan Pryce’s Lear at the Almeida, a performance the Guardian’s Michael Billington described as “refreshingly ballsy”. But it was her turn as Catherine in Ivo van Hove’s lauded A View from the Bridge two years later that made her a big deal. They took it from the Young Vic to the West End to Broadway, and she ended up as Catherine for the best part of two years. By the end, it was taking its toll. “I felt fucking depressed,” she says. “I found it really hard to extract my own life from what I was doing on stage. I found myself bawling my eyes out off-stage, freaking out on my parents. There’s something about that play.”
In the end, she says, it took a straight-talking friend to come to her rescue. “I’d started wearing black and listening to Ryan Adams,” she says, with a mild cringe. “Another actress in New York said to me, ‘Stop that – wear bright colours, listen to some happy music.’” She went for Carly Rae Jepsen, and learned “a massive lesson”. “If you’re going to do something for that length of time, you’ve got to find a way to look after yourself.”
By contrast, Twelfth Night is a blast. She’d never seen it before, nor had she read it, so she had no idea how her Olivia was supposed to be. “It’s only now people keep telling me this isn’t how she’s normally played. I hadn’t realised I’d stepped so far outside the normal interpretation.” The fact that she’s ended up doing so much Shakespeare has been a surprise to her more than anyone. “I like Shakespeare, but it’s not my bread and butter. It’s not what fires me up about acting at all,” she says. “A lot of the ingenue parts leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion.”
That’s not to say she’ll be steering clear of Shakespeare in the future, though, just that her ambitions are less fixed. “I’d be well up for having a crack at one of the big male leads. I like to do the whole gamut of emotions on stage – big crying, shouting, hair-pulling.” Throwing a few more punches? “Yeah. I’d love to play an assassin. Proper fighting. That would be well fun.”
• Twelfth Night is at the Olivier, London, until 13 May, with an NT Live broadcast on 6 April.
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