Jessica Hynes (Stevenson)

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'I went mainstream. It really wasn't me'
Jessica Stevenson, best known for Spaced, is now obsessed with feminist history. She discusses Botox, motherhood and changing her name with Gareth McLean.
Friday May 25, 2007
The Guardian

The woman formerly known as Jessica Stevenson has been baking. As she opens the door of her terraced house, a warm breeze of biscuit-scented air hits me. "Hello," she says, and then, as I remark on the aroma, "Oh god!" She runs to the kitchen. "I should have taken them out by now."

Despite her charred biscuits, Stevenson-as-was seems quite the homemaker, combining her writing and acting (she plays the Doctor's love interest in tomorrow's Doctor Who) with raising three children. Now 34, she is married and, in a move that some might find surprising, adopted her husband's surname, both personally and professionally. Her surname is now "H-Y-N-E-S", she spells, grinning. "Adam and I have been together a long time - I first met him when I was 18 - but we haven't always been married. Now we are and I really felt I wanted to change my name."

Anyway, on the rare occasion she gets recognised on the street, she says, people never seem to remember her name. "Usually, they say, 'You're Cheryl off The Royle Family.'" Notwithstanding the disconsolate Cheryl (so often the butt of Jim Royle's cruel one-liners), Hynes is best known as Daisy Steiner, the self-proclaimed "writer" with high ideals but low productivity, who appeared in Spaced, Channel 4's cult sitcom. She co-wrote Spaced with Simon Pegg, who is now doing very well for himself, thanks to the success of the films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Hynes describes Spaced as one of the most thrilling experiences of her life. "I was really young and I had a defiance and a naivety. Simon, Edgar [Wright, the director] and I all had a fierce energy and excitement. We never had enough money so we were forced always to completely go right up to the wire. I doubt anything I would embark upon now would have that same energy."

Although it would, of course, still be irreverent. Hynes says she has a subversive streak too strong to ignore. "When I did something a while ago that was pretty mainstream, it really wasn't me." The project in question was the BBC1 sitcom, According to Bex, in which she played a put-upon PA. It was pretty awful, and, afterwards, she left her agent and decided only to pursue projects she really believed in. "I learned a lot from that. I'd much rather be poor doing things I want to do than have a bigger house and doing things I didn't."

Doctor Who, of course, is both mainstream and often subversive. In the next few episodes, Hynes plays Joan Redfern, matron at a boys' boarding school in 1913. For reasons too complicated to explain here, the Doctor is living under the name John Smith, unaware that he is the Doctor. Hynes gets to kiss him - but this is not what drew her to the role. She describes the character as "Magnificent. Intelligent, kind, good, and unaffected. She's liberated in a way that women today, shackled by their self-obsessions, aren't. Women now define themselves through their lifestyle, by their shoes and sofa throws. One hundred years ago, women defined themselves much more by their character and their interests."

Hynes has been researching the suffragette movement for a potential project, making the contrast between women then and now starker still. "I wondered how women - so enthused, so galvanised, so passionate - could have organised one of the most successful political campaigns in British history. Compare that with now when they are obsessed with scented candles. Not to say that all women are like that but it's still depressing that politicised, sophisticated women are few and far between. It's a direct result of rabid consumerism."

She is also disparaging of the contemporary obsession with looks. She has said in the past that she'd "rather be sane and ugly than mad and beautiful", and, returning to Edwardian culture, she notes that, back then, "there were all sorts of people, but they weren't having plastic surgery at 25 or Botox in their lunch hour. It's a kind of madness."

Have women traded one kind of oppression for another? "I don't think they've necessarily traded it, but that's what they've been sold." Since Spaced, Hynes has kept herself busy with acting jobs - a Marple and a Midsomer Murders on telly, and the films Confetti and Magicians (the last of which is in cinemas at the moment). She is most passionate about writing, though, and has just finished the film Learners, her second collaboration with the director Francesca Joseph, with whom she worked on BBC2's acclaimed Tomorrow La Scala. And, obviously, she has been bringing up her kids. She disputes the idea that the pram in the hall is the enemy of good art.

"I had my first child just before we made the first series of Spaced and I was back at my computer when Gabriel was two weeks old. I wrote the last four or five episodes of Spaced when I was pregnant and I was extremely creative. You access different areas, I think. That was also probably because I wasn't smoking, drinking or drinking coffee."

Hynes is, she says, happier and more energised than ever before. "When I did According to Bex, I was at a low ebb. Now I'm actively pursuing things and feeling really optimistic." She's adopted a new attitude to motherhood too. "There seems to be an epidemic of guilt among mothers. It's not about anything in particular but you just feel guilty. I've made a conscious decision to give all that up because it seemed to really cloud my experience of motherhood. I've given up on guilt like I gave up smoking. It's totally unhealthy, completely counter-productive, has no nutritional value whatsoever and I really don't enjoy it. Guilt is obstructive to love."

So Hynes is looking to the future with near-manic energy. Chief among her tasks is to try to secure publication of the children's book she's been working on, Ants in the Marmalade. She is typically self-deprecating about this. "I've written a children's book and I'm looking for a publisher ... " She half-smiles, half- grimaces. "God. I am Daisy Steiner".

· Doctor Who, tomorrow, 7.10pm, BBC1.

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Jessica Hynes: out of Spaced and into another dimension
The British comedy star describes herself as an ‘older, fatter, seedier Kate Winslet'
Hugo Rifkind
31st January 2009
The Times

"The vout!” says Jessica Hynes, who used to be Jessica Stevenson, leaning forward and slapping a table in the bar. “The vout!Rooty macvoutyness! The vout! Do you see?” Sort of, I say. Only I'm not sure it will make a lot of sense on the page.

“The vout!” cries Hynes, the star of Spaced and The Royle Family and, more recently, Son of Rambow and Faintheart, her latest outing - a comedy based on battle re-enactments. She's talking about the jazz legend Slim Gaillard, who appears in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but who also, it turns out, once spent six months living in her mum's cellar in Brighton.

“He turned up when I was 7 or 8,” she says. “He was into the vout of life. And I don't know what that means, but he said it with such conviction! The vout! And now I feel I'm infused with the vout. That's what it's all about. The vout! I feel I have the vout! And I got it from him.” This bit is going to look really weird, I tell her. And Hynes laughs and slaps the table again. Because I think that's what she wants.

To be honest, she is not the woman I expected her to be. Many of her characters are frumpy, put-upon women, but I'd expected to meet Daisy from Spaced, a sort of adorable, overgrown Lisa Simpson. Hynes is not Daisy. She's spikier than that, a little more brittle and far more intense. She talks with exhilaration, whether it's about her family, or the aubergine dish she tried to cook at Christmas, which went wrong and ended up as a weird sort of chutney. You wouldn't want to argue with her.

Hynes is used to people thinking they know her before they do. “I went to Glastonbury last year,” she says. “I've usually gone with my family, but this year I said to my husband, ‘I want to go by myself'. I suppose it might be the start of my midlife crisis. So I went alone, without a tent and justslept around a campfire. And I met people who kind of recognised me and maybe found it strange that I was wandering around Glastonbury on my own. But at the same time they acted as though I'd just come with them. It was extraordinary. Because otherwise, you know, it might have got quite lonely.” With her own heroes, she admits, she'll do the same. She was in Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests at the Old Vic last year, and she found herself behaving most inappropriately with Kevin Spacey.

“I think I found myself slightly wanting to be his best friend,” she says. “Like a lot of people do. I had to pull back. Getting a little overexcited. Acting slightly inappropriately enthusiastic at his presence, you know?” I tell her I once saw Spacey walk out of a lift and a woman I was with was so excited that she reached out and tweaked him on the nipple.

“I didn't do that,” she says. “Never. I've never clung on to anybody's nipple. Not in that way. Write that down.” That's her most Daisy-from-Spaced characterstic, probably, the way she lapses sometimes into the kind of screwball repartee that her old collaborator Simon Pegg has made his career out of. “I like to think of myself,” she says, at one point, “as an older, fatter, seedier, less successful Kate Winslet.” You're older than Kate Winslet? “Oh, that's nice. It's nice that you're querying that. Certainly fatter and less successful, yes. But older?” I didn't mean... “Let it go.” That sort of thing. It's fun, but you're always going to lose.

Hynes has three children, aged between 3 and 10. She has known her husband, Adam Hynes, since she was 18. Although they were married in 2002, Jessica Stevenson became Jessica Hynes only a year ago. When I ask her why, she starts to tell me about belonging and identity, about wanting to be the same as her husband and kids. Then she stops and gives a guilty guffaw.

“Oh, look,” she says. “To be honest, it was done slightly on a whim. I told a family friend and he was appalled. He said, ‘What have you done?!' And I said, ‘I know! I regret it! But I can't go back.' Because that would be even more mad, wouldn't it? Oh God. Look, it's done, now, OK?” You wouldn't get that sort of candour with Cheryl Cole (née Tweedy).

There's a wildness here. “I used to play out a lot as a kid,” Hynes says. “A bit wild, yes. Would I have got an Asbo? I did give Russell Beany a black eye once. I was tough. I needed to be.”

Born in Lewisham in 1972 (three whole years before Kate Winslet), Hynes was the child of hippy parents who moved down to Brighton and then promptly split up. She and her sister were bounced over to San Francisco with their mother to live with their grandparents, and then bounced back again, without their mother, to live with their father and his new girlfriend. “But they weren't particularly keen, either,” she says. “So eventually our mother came back. Yes, I do remember it. Quite clearly. I was 5.” Back in the Brighton family home, still a hippy but now without Hynes's father, her mother started to take in lodgers. Some were travellers, some were professional chess players, but most were, in some way, involved in jazz. That was how Gaillard came to be living in their cellar. With his vout.

“My sister and I became full-on latchkey kids,” she says. “Walking to school alone. My sister always returning. Me, I'm afraid, not. I think I had a sort of crazed ebullience about me.” By eight-ish, her mother would start ringing around, trying to figure out where she was. Sometimes she'd be playing alone in the park. Sometimes she'd be round at the house of her mother's friend May May, a black woman from Chicago, married to another jazz musician. Hynes cries a little when she talks about May May. I'm not sure she notices. “That was my home from home,” she says. May May died a couple of years ago.

“You could turn up at their house and she'd always feed you,” Hynes says. “And there was always a party going on. Good parties. Children were just there. Which is what I was doing. Pogo-ing up and down to Prince, aged 7. But then falling asleep under a pile of coats and waking up at five in the morning, thinking . . . well. Running home through the cold streets. My sister would just take herself off to bed. I thrived on it.”

It sounds like a wobbly time. Hynes says this was how she learnt to act. “If we'd been through a rocky patch, that was my role. To cheer everybody up.” Later, at school, a teacher told her she should act professionally. She took herself off to acting classes and, eventually, joined the National Youth Theatre. Her first big job, she says, was in a corporate video, in which she played a secretary. She remembers sitting in the bar, afterwards, in some company's corporate headquarters, drinking her first margarita. “I remember thinking, Ahhhh!' I must never forget this moment! I've made it!” And she had. She jobbed around for a few years, then came The Royle Family, then came Spaced, and then came everything else.

There's a slight tightness in her voice when she talks about Pegg, but maybe she's just bored with being asked about him. They're still in touch, she says, a bit. Only the other week somebody sent her a ukulele song about Spaced and she sent it on to him.

“I found it very difficult immediately after Spaced,” she admits. “That finishing, I stumbled and fell. My momentum stopped. I just wasn't sure how to rediscover my creative thrust.” Having met her, it makes far more sense that their collaboration came to an end. As it turns out, the character from Spaced she most identified with was Brian, the crazy artist downstairs. Unlike Pegg, she's just not a very mainstream sort of person. It's jazz, probably. It's vout.

Outside the Groucho Club, James Corden from Gavin and Stacey is smoking a cigarette. “Aha!” he says. “It's Jessica Hynes, née Stevenson!” “Oh f***,” says the actress, after they've had their showbiz hug. “You see? It'll never end. I should have just changed my chequebook.”