Lucy Punch is running half an hour late. “We’ve had a hard morning’s rehearsal,” explains the company manager for Great Britain. Punch is taking over from Billie Piper as the unscrupulous phone-hacking tabloid queen Paige Britain when the National Theatre’s satire transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
It’s just six days before curtain-up. I’m expecting some actressy meltdown, but in fact she’s just popped out for a tuna sandwich. “Otherwise I might have fainted on you,” she laughs.
Punch’s eight years in LA don’t seem to have changed this London girl a bit. Not only does she eat – and get her own food, rather than sending an assistant – she is refreshingly free of vanity in her roles. Few actresses as pretty as Punch would sacrifice their looks for laughs, from the pinkish dreadlocks she wore as Doc Martin’s receptionist to cutting her own hair, deliberately badly, for the film Stand Up Guys with Al Pacino and Christopher Walken.
“Trying to look cool and lovely in comedy is a recipe for disaster,” she explains. “You have to let go. Yes, afterwards, when I watch myself, I mind! I go [she suddenly screeches] ‘WHY didn’t they tell me? WHY did I make that FACE?’”
In her biggest film to date, Bad Teacher, where she plays Cameron Diaz’s overly perky nemesis Amy Squirrel, she accosts the principal in the gents’ toilet and sits on a urinal to talk to him (Punch’s idea). In Dinner For Schmucks, she improvises a seductive scene with Steve Carell into a booty-spanking, bottle-throwing riot. She farts and vomits her way shamelessly through this year’s comedy Someone Marry Barry. And in the upcoming film adaptation of Sondheim’s Into The Woods, she does get, briefly, to act alongside the great Meryl Streep – only so Punch can be thrown by her to a hungry giant as a snack.
She’s played the Ugly Sister four times (yes, she’s counting), and a gaggle of hookers, most memorably in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. When Nicole Kidman pulled out at the eleventh hour, Punch stole the film as a gold-digging Essex girl actress-slash-prostitute who ensnares Anthony Hopkins. Allen allowed her to improvise comic turns and change his dialogue. It may be because she scared him.
“It was so last-minute I’d only spoken to him on the phone. I was doing my costume fitting, and suddenly there he was – you know, someone so familiar to you – so I was like ‘Hi!!!’, and just hugged him. I was in costume so I looked horrific, with this huge fur coat and heels that made me six-foot-two. Woody’s whole body went stiff, he was trying to peel me off, and then I kept stepping towards him going ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ as he was backing away. I was informed by the first assistant that he doesn’t do bodily contact.”
Yet though Punch has a startling number of film and TV credits – as random as “Rebel Appliance” this year in the cartoon Robot Chicken, a favour to friend Seth Green – she’s never had a really meaty lead role. Until now.
Great Britain has a wonderful ensemble cast, with particular plaudits owed to Philip Glenister (PC Hunt in Life on Mars) as a foul-mouthed editor and Aaron Neil as a hopelessly incompetent Met Police Chief, but Paige Britain is the glue that binds them; she is almost never off-stage.
Utterly consumed by ambition, Paige will stop at nothing to succeed: she betrays colleagues, seduces police chiefs and destroys lives without a second thought. In Shakespearean terms, she is Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and Richard III all rolled into one. And yet, as the lead character, she must also hold our sympathy.
“You don’t need to work hard at the comedy,” says Punch, “because the lines are so funny you just need to say them straight. More challenging with a character that is so vile and odious is to keep her charming and engaging, someone the audience is backing. Finding that has been a challenge. For me, I’ve thought of the audience as my co-conspirators, my friends.”
One of the beauties of the production is how it makes the audience complicit in the unfolding nightmare of phone-hacking. In the original National Theatre staging at least, the audience is reflected back at itself in the glass walls of the newsroom; and Paige tells us she wouldn’t be chasing these intrusive stories if it wasn’t what we the public wanted to read. Punch admits she’s as guilty of that as anyone.
“I’m not a celebrity, so I haven’t experienced the paparazzi – only when they mistake me for somebody else! – but it is a terrible thing. When I was working with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake on Bad Teacher, the pair of them could see a mile off if there was a photographer lurking behind a tree and get them carted away by security, they were so honed in on it; you have to have eyes in the back of your head. I think it’s awful, but nevertheless if I walk past a newsstand and there’s a picture of someone, I think: ‘Ooh, what’s that?’”
Punch admits it’s been tough to join the production late: the other main cast members haven’t changed from the National Theatre run. She has a cousin who works on the Independent, who coached her in journalistic ways, and, she says, “It’s a cliché but getting the shoes really helped. I have these big, chunky heels, and they change how you walk, it helps you physicalise the character. I always think about how the character would dance, to get their physicality right and specific. I did think twice about taking over from someone, but it’s such a wonderful play, and I was ready for a challenge. Though there are moments when I go, ‘WHAT was I THINKING?’”
She’s being summoned back into rehearsal. Time for just one more question: why did she go into acting in the first place? For the first time, Punch is lost for words. It’s as though I’ve asked why the sky is blue. “I just never wanted to do anything else.” She thinks for a bit. “It’s a way of being, like, liked. If you can make people laugh, you know you’re getting it right; it’s an instant pat on the back.”
Punch’s unusual mix of sexy and funny, hard and soft, ditzy and driven would seem tailor-made for this complex role. As for the instant pats… she’s going to need a strong back.
Great Britain transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, on 9 September 2014.
