Phoebe Waller-Bridge on Fleabag, Indiana Jones and working with Harrison Ford
Writing for television may be Waller-Bridge’s happy place. But performing stunts involving tandem skydiving with Harrison Ford? Consider her addicted.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an excellent conversationalist. Even right after lunch on a plain old Monday, during which she’s done nothing more taxing than go for a manicure (for a photoshoot tomorrow). “I’ve been in a writing cave for ages and I sort of crawled out of it this morning to get my nails done,” she sums up, speaking at the same fizzy and voluble clip – like a maid of honour who knows she has the whole wedding hanging off her every word – that she will maintain for the entire interview. Writing for television is her happy place.
“Being able to really fill the tank and to start creating again has been wonderful,” she says. But it’s also nice to occasionally leave the cave and step bleary-eyed into the light. “I feel like a human being,” she agrees. “And you are actually the first person I’ve spoken to at length in a while. So anything can happen.”
It’s fun to talk to Waller-Bridge. Within seconds, she’s already cracked a joke at both her expense and mine – “I thought you were going to say, ‘I don’t think you were invited’,” she interjects slyly, when asked about the 2018 Sydney Festival run of the stage version of her ode to anti-heroines, Fleabag, in which she did not appear – and once you get her chatting, chatting, chatting it’s like watching Picasso crack the paints out.
She’s so splendidly good-humoured, so thoroughly brilliant, it’s impossible not to be charmed. The past few years – pandemic notwithstanding – have been “extraordinary,” she enthuses. Waller-Bridge won a brace of Emmys for Fleabag and signed a US$20 million a year deal to make television for Amazon. Somewhere in the middle there, she was cast as the female lead in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and final instalment – or so star Harrison Ford says – in the long running franchise full of adventure and derring-do.
“I never imagined in a million years I’d get an opportunity to be in Indiana Jones.” She pauses, a perfectly timed beat of anticipation. “I think lots of people were quite surprised,” Waller-Bridge jokes, Waller-Bridge-ishly. ’Twas the night before lockdown in March 2020 and Waller-Bridge was having dinner in London with Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm and stewardess of the Indiana Jones series. “It was one of those things when you just realise, ‘Oh, my life might completely change. My life is changing in this conversation,’” Waller-Bridge remembers. “It all went in sort of slow motion.”
She left the restaurant in a daze and went home that night with, she has joked, 10 bottles of wine to read the script. She loved it. “It was almost like those 1940s rat-a-tat scripts that just go like the wind, and every other line is just an incredible witticism.” But she was also, she says, deeply touched. “There’s something innately moving about coming back to a character that we’ve known in one version of his prime, and then coming back later,” she explains.
It’s been just over four decades since we first met the part-time archaeologist (and fulltime dashing hero) Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dial of Destiny sees Indy go once more unto the breach. “We’ve been with this character for so many years, gone through so many 66 adventures,” Waller-Bridge says. “I was very moved by that idea … of a last adventure.”
Getting older is something Waller-Bridge thinks about a lot. Or rather: “all the time, and never, at the same time”. It’s why Dial of Destiny’s decision to stare ageing right in the face resonated so keenly with her. “I still feel about 11 years old, and I certainly did on the set of Indiana Jones, but I really love the process of getting older,” Waller-Bridge reflects. “I’m so grateful for what it affords you. Less grateful for what it affords your skin and face.”
“It was one of those things when you just realise, ‘Oh, my life might completely change. My life is changing in this conversation’”
Waller-Bridge turns 38 next month and she relishes every second of life experience. “I definitely feel that getting older, I feel like the value of things and people, relationships, and everything in your life suddenly comes into focus in a way that they may not have done in your mad 20s or teens.”
In Dial of Destiny, Waller-Bridge plays Helena, Indy’s goddaughter who gives him the old razzle dazzle back and drags him out on one last quest. “She’s a very mercurial, mercenary minded slippery fish,” Waller-Bridge muses, with more character twists than a Christopher Nolan film. “I just loved how changeable she was and how many masks she had and how manipulative she was. It was incredibly fun to play.”
She also loves to deliver a good line, which might be the most Waller-Bridge thing about her. (There’s nothing Waller-Bridge loves more than the thrill of having nailed a bon mot.) “I think she’s someone who enjoys having the line and saying the line … She’s pleased with herself about it.” The best one? “I’m not going to give that away!” Waller-Bridge yelps.
The comedy she could handle – but the stunts were definitely something new. In Dial of Destiny she has to do some absolutely mad things, like fling herself from the back of one rickety rickshaw to another and tandem skydive with Ford. It all looks like the most marvellous fun. “Now listen,” Waller-Bridge begins. “This is where it all comes together for me. I had no idea how much I was going to love stunts and I’m completely addicted.”
Hanging off the side of a cliff? Crawling through tombs? Doing “something called ‘dry for wet’”, where you stand on a box in your scuba gear and “do incredibly slow – the only way I can describe it is – interpretive dance to make it look like you’re underwater” … fantastic! “So often with acting it’s like, you move a mug halfway through a scene and you’re locked into that because you’ve got to do it a million times over and over and over. And you’re so aware of the minutiae of what you’re doing,” she explains. “When you just have to throw yourself in the back of a car, there is something so freeing and thrilling about it.”
The producers stressed to Waller-Bridge that Helena should never be “too slick”. “And I completely agreed with that, thank god,” she laughs, “because that would’ve been funny in a different way. Because my attempts at slick always go wrong.”
Waller-Bridge kept her cool in her first meeting with Ford, though. “He phoned me first, and I got a voicemail.” She does her best Ford growl: “‘Hello Phoebe, this is Harrison Ford’.” They talked about the story, and why Ford felt it was right to come back to the character after so many years. “And that he liked Fleabag, which was lovely,” she adds. (The image of Harrison Ford sitting down to watch Fleabag is just unspeakably delicious. “I know,” she replies. “Tell me more about that, Harrison. How much did you relate to it? He said he totally did.”)
They met in earnest after a day of costume tests in director James Mangold’s office. “He just opened his arms and really warmly went, ‘Heeeyyy!’” she laughs. The pair sat down and “read through the script, had a laugh, and then had a whiskey – and then spent nine months pretty much doing the same thing.”
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in cinemas on June 28.
This article appears in the June issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.