In the beginning, Penn Badgley assumed his new co-star in the smash-hit Netflix thriller You was a lot like her character. This, jokes said co-star Charlotte Ritchie, was “somewhat rude. Because it shows he did no research about me.” If he had, Badgley would quickly have deduced that the Londoner was nothing like Kate Galvin, a ruthless British heiress, who – for some godforsaken reason – decides to marry his serial killer protagonist Joe Goldberg. Instead, the 35-year-old has cemented her place in the British comedy firmament with her perky, subtly goofy screen presence and impeccable comic timing, as showcased in beloved comedies from university life opus Fresh Meat to the BBC’s ingeniously silly supernatural sitcom Ghosts.
At first, Ritchie was nervous about joining You. The drama, then three seasons in, was already a colossal hit, adored for its knowingly ludicrous premise, bizarre twists and Badgley’s virtuoso portrayal of an apparently empathetic femicidal maniac. On set, Ritchie was impressed by Badgley’s ability to segue from “smart self-awareness” to serial killer mode. “His eyes go kind of wide and his face goes totally blank and inside I was like: Oh my God, that’s so horrifying!” she says.
She “struggled at the beginning of filming – the classic imposter syndrome of coming into something so big”. It didn’t help that, upon arriving on set, she “really felt like nobody knew who I was or what I’d done”. Thankfully, that didn’t last. “I have to say I was really chuffed because Penn got Covid. That’s not why I was happy. But he started watching Ghosts and he really loved it. And it was so nice to get to share that with him, because Ghosts is so important to me.” (That said, Ritchie admits she still hasn’t seen Gossip Girl, the 00s teen drama that made Badgley’s name.)
I’m speaking to Ritchie – who is just as friendly, unassuming and mildly awkward as fans might assume – on the day the fifth and final season of You is released. She has decamped to New York for promo, and is currently in a swish hotel room overlooking Central Park. To celebrate the show’s swansong, Netflix created an immersive version of Mooney’s, the bookstore Joe manages and Kate later buys for him, and whose basement – unbeknown to her – houses a large glass cage used by Joe to entrap his victims. Ritchie didn’t get to meet many actual fans at the event – it was an influencer-heavy crowd – but excitedly recalls encountering some devotees in the wild. She was out getting pancakes when she chanced upon a group of girls discussing You. “It turns out they thought I looked a bit like the girl from the show. And, quite unlike me, I was like: hey, you guys talking about the show? It was so lovely. Actually,” she abruptly puts a lid on such earnest enthusiasm. “One of them hadn’t seen it. I might have ruined their breakfast.”
Speculation about the end of You has been rife: would nightmarish “nice guy” Joe get his just deserts or live happily ever after with Kate, who returns to New York with him and his son Henry at the end of series four? (Critics, it must be said, weren’t hugely impressed with the eventual answer.) I won’t give away our antihero’s fate, but it’s no spoiler to say that the show closes with a meta comment on the viewers’ complicity in his crimes – after all, we’ve been lapping up the antics of a murderer for years. Ritchie endorses this take, but only to an extent. “The best way to shut down a toxic character – or an attention-seeking psychopath – would be to not pay them attention. But just as you think he could have some redemption, he says: well, I guess [the blame is shared] because you guys love me so much. Heaven forbid he just takes responsibility for his actions, and realises we’re watching because we want to see him punished.”
As for the actual denouement, Ritchie has spent the last year keeping stumm. “I didn’t want to ruin it for people. Like when Dumbledore died in Harry Potter and someone put a big banner on the bridge.” She mentions this as if it’s some epochal world event; I have to say I have no idea what she’s on about. “The day after the book came out, someone skim-read it then [made the banner],” she says, still palpably outraged. “I thought: you suck!”
As it happens, Harry Potter was one of the starting blocks for Ritchie’s career. As a schoolgirl, she can be spotted sitting behind Harry and Ron in a Hogwarts classroom in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – though she is determined to play down her role as an uncredited extra (“I am student number 4007 and I’m waggling my eyebrows for about five minutes”; when she saw the finished scene she “thought I really overacted and was pretty ashamed”). Ritchie had become enamoured with acting – particularly of the comic variety – as a child: “I remember really clearly making someone’s grandad in the front row laugh at a sketch I did at primary school and thinking that felt great. And I can’t work out if that was an ego boost thing or a control thing.” Was she the funny one among her peers? She makes a face: “All my friends would say nooo, no.”
In fact, Ritchie soon set off on a different path, joining classical girl group All Angels, whose first album became the fastest-selling classical debut in UK chart history. Sixth form saw her ricochet between concerts at the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 and lessons. The juxtaposition was surreal: after an evening on stage she would find herself “in double history thinking: What?! Did I imagine that?” She didn’t mention her showbiz escapades to her friends, having “learned at a young age that telling hilarious stories about my acting adventures was only really interesting to my mum”.
It sounds like an awful lot for a child to handle, yet it’s only now that Ritchie is “beginning to realise that the pace of life I thought was normal in my teens and my 20s was too much. But at the time I was running on adrenaline and I thought anxiety was a sign of doing really well.” At her selective, “high-pressure” girls’ school, Ritchie was a conscientious student, and unsurprisingly these instincts didn’t leave her at university. She was cast as Fresh Meat’s Oregon – an ordinary girl with an eye-watering determination to appear edgy and cool – in her final year at Bristol. The show was a big deal, but her perfectionist tendencies meant that after a hard day’s filming, Ritchie spent her evenings ploughing through her English dissertation. “Looking back, I do wish I hadn’t worked so hard on it. No one’s ever asked me what I did or got.” I seize the opportunity. “It was about how the movement of time manifests in language,” she says, baffled by the brain power of her younger self. “I don’t know how I managed to get that together. And I got a 2.1. I was pretty chuffed.”
Despite her excellent performance in Fresh Meat – and the excellence of the show in general (it was, after all, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and his writing partner Sam Bain’s follow-up to Peep Show) – success wasn’t immediate. “I don’t even know if I got one job between series one and two. I’d met other actors who had been going to LA to do a pilot season, and I remember asking my agent, should I? And she was very sweetly like: I don’t know if this is the right time. You’ve done one thing.” To the casual observer, however, it looks as if she has been in high demand ever since, with lead roles in sitcoms Siblings and Dead Pixels, a four-series stint in Call the Midwife, an appearance on Taskmaster and cameos in comedies including Stath Lets Flats (she did an Edinburgh fringe sketch show with creator Jamie Demetriou when they were both students).
While she may feel “lazier” these days, there is seemingly no let up. Ritchie has just starred alongside Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth Olsen in the dystopian fertility drama The Assessment. Next, she’s joining Tom Burke and Steve Coogan in Legends, the true story of the UK customs officers who infiltrated drug-dealing gangs in the 1990s.
But before all that, she’s entering her detective era thanks to ITV thriller Code of Silence. Written by Catherine Moulton, who recently penned twisty hit The Stolen Girl, it follows Ritchie’s DS Ashleigh Francis, who enlists Rose Ayling-Ellis’s deaf canteen worker to lip-read on an investigation. Getting to run the gamut of police procedural tropes felt “quite monumental. It was really fun to say things like ‘stand down’ or use a walkie-talkie.” She frowns at her example. “That’s so basic, I can’t believe I said that.” But Ritchie was also keen to prevent her permanently exhausted Francis from becoming a stock character. “There’s details you can put in – I had her eating like a million sweets because she’s never slept enough and she’s had enough coffee. So there’s always a Haribo on the go or some strawberry laces.”
If the actor herself is feeling at all worn out, she’s hiding it well. She says she feels reinvigorated – partly thanks to her experiences filming You: New York “ambition and optimism” has rubbed off on her. “I think I discovered a bit of go-getting in me while I was here. I definitely came back to London with a spark.” Does what she’s aiming to go and get stretch beyond her flourishing acting career? “Actually yes, but if I say it then I won’t do it so I’m going to try and do some of it this year and if we speak again I’ll tell you …” She sighs at her own obfuscation. “That sounds so mysterious – basically yes but I haven’t quite worked out what it is …” I am left none the wiser, yet also reassured: her time on slick US sets may have given Ritchie a new lease of life, but the bumbling Britishness that has made her one of our comedy queens clearly dies hard.
Code of Silence is on ITV1 on 18 May; You is on Netflix now.
