Zawe Ashton interview: 'I lucked out with Vod and Fresh Meat in a big way'

Ahead of presenting Channel 4’s Random Acts, the actress/director tells Catherine Gee about London’s gentrification, smashing the glass ceiling – and why you should always wear a hat while writing

It’s enormously comforting that someone as versatile as Zawe Ashton still describes herself as “a play-the-hits girl”. This is a woman who has successfully turned her hand to acting, directing, producing, screenwriting, playwriting, editing and presenting. To that burgeoning list we may soon be able to add author (“the book deadline is looming”).

“I hate when there's a band that you've loved and you go and see them and it's like only the really new experimental stuff from the current album,” she says. “There's room for growth but there's always room to play the hits.

The 33-year-old is most famous for her breakout role as the anti-mainstream, drug-dealing student Vod in Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s comedy Fresh Meat.

Vod was the antithesis of Jack Whitehall’s archetypal poshboy JP – to whom she was a “ledge” for being astringently funny and doing precisely what she wanted. In a show that veered skilfully between raucous humour and stirring pathos, she was the stand-out character.

Just about every feature written about Ashton remarks on how unlike Vod she really is. But that’s because there really is almost nothing of Vod in her. This seems obvious; she is an actress after all. But the entertainment world is filled with people famous for playing versions of themselves – or at least keeping some of their own mannerisms. Ashton’s voice, her demeanor, her clothes, her hair, even the way she moves her eyes, are all completely different.

In person, she’s engaging and voluble, smart without being overly pretentious, and drily witty without being acerbic. We meet in the offices of a TV production company in Shoreditch during the heatwave last month. She’s feeling slightly sensitive having been at the launch party of Random Acts, her new Channel 4 series, the previous night, but does not remotely look or sound it. Instead, she’s a picture of daytime elegance in a flowing monochrome dress.

She mentions being a “play-the-hits girl” because she’s more than happy to talk about being associated with Vod. Despite having done so much before, during and since Fresh Meat, she still loves this brilliantly blunt comic creation.

“There was an interview with a guy from a soap on the radio the other day and he said, ‘If you're about to go into a soap for a long period of time and you have some input on what your character's name might be, take it. Because that name will be shouted after you in the street for years to come.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god that is so true!’ I lucked out in a big way.”

Her latest project is distinctly more highbrow than Fresh Meat. Random Acts is a TV series made up of short films, six per episode – that Ashton now presents (and writes her own words). It’s the third full series, the first two having debuted on Channel 4 last year. But the showcase strand itself has been around for years, and its website has hundreds of films on it from budding young filmmakers (as well as bigger names such as Riz Ahmed, Shia LaBeouf, Ian McKellen and Kate Tempest). Ashton has her own short in it too  – a beautiful, romantic piece made for her fashion designer friend Osman. “It is a fashion film – yes that's an actual genre,” she says.

Born and raised in Hackney by two teachers – though her father later became a commissioning editor of education programmes for Channel 4 – Ashton began her acting career while she was still a child and went to the Anna Scher Theatre School before studying drama at Manchester Metropolitan University. Though she’s fiercely proud of her east London roots, she’s recently found herself in two minds about whether or not she wants to stay. “As all my friends say, I'm never going to leave. And I probably won't,” she says, before promptly changing her mind. “I probably will. But it's my heart and soul.”

One of the things that bothers her, like so many in London, is the creeping gentrification, which is slowly but surely pricing ordinary earners out of the areas that have long been their homes. Hackney’s independent cinema, the Rio, one of a handful left in London and where Ashton worked for years, was a source of heartbreak last year when the management became embroiled in a dispute with the staff over low pay and job cuts.

“Staff who had been working there for 20 plus years were penalised for unionising because of threats to their living wage and lost their jobs,” she laments. “If I can't go back to the Rio, Hackney's just kind of over for me. I do think about moving out of London a lot, whether that's LA, whether that's Margate with half of the other Hackneyites. London is my home but in among all these other transitional elements of my work now I think a change of scenery would be quite nice.”

She has only recently returned from the States, in fact, having directed and presented a short documentary on the artist Lorraine O’Grady that forms part of the Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition at Tate Modern.

“I'm basically in a polygamous relationship with writing, acting and directing [at the moment],” she says. Having done episodic television for five years, up until Fresh Meat ended in 2016, she’s now embracing the chance to mix it up. In 2015 she also starred in a now-cancelled Channel 4 comedy series called Not Safe For Work about a dysfunctional office of civil servants in Northampton. It was mordantly funny, with a great cast (Sacha Dhawan, Sophie Rundle, Jo Hartley and Anastasia Hille among them). So Ashton is understandably disappointed that it wasn’t renewed.

“Can we start some kind of petition to bring it back?” she asks. “It's become a sort of weird cult classic. The cast was incredible. It was probably the only show tonally in that very, very dark comedy drama that had two non-white leads. And all the women were cast first in that show, which I've never heard of before. It's a real shame that's not coming back.”

Since then, however, she’s guest-edited an episode of Woman’s Hour, appeared in both Tom Ford’s Bafta-nominated Hollywood film Nocturnal Animals and Sky Atlantic’s civil rights drama Guerrilla and narrated Channel 4’s hip-hop documentary Public Enemies: Jay-Z vs Kanye. She’s also been writing the book that’s subject matter is still To Be Announced.

The creative process is often a temperamental, erratic one and inspiration can come in the most unusual of places. It isn’t always a case of simply sitting down and doing it – and everyone has a slightly different way of teasing out their ideas and putting them into a laptop or onto a screen or a canvas. For Ashton, her process is “haphazard” but "there's method in the madness".

“It feels like every project asks for its own space,” she explains. “So there are times when only a very very small room-like space will do and I'll have to just find a tiny desk somewhere maybe in the corner of a cafe or friends of mine have these fantastic desk spaces that they loan out.”

It can also be the place. She’s drawn inspiration from travelling to places such as Morocco or New York. Or it can be as simple as sitting down with old-fashioned pen and paper and letting the ideas spill out through the ink. Then, sometimes certain garments or fabrics are required.

“If I'm wearing the wrong clothes I can't think,” she says. “It sounds so weird but it just has to be the right fabrics and like the right feeling on my body. Hats feature a lot because I feel like I have to try and keep the ideas in my head. I don't want them to filter out into the atmosphere.

“I saw a guy in a cafe in Soho wearing what looked like a coat hanger that he'd configured into a small crown. It was bronze. And I was like, 'What are you wearing on your head?' And he said, 'Oh, that's my receptor'. And I said, 'Out of all the people who have probably come up to you today, I get what you're talking about.’”

Last year, Ashton starred opposite Orange is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael in The Maids, Jean Genet’s psychosexual play about the two eponymous women who play sadomasochistic dress-up games in their madame’s bedroom while she is out. It marked Ashton’s second time working with director Jamie Lloyd, having also appeared in the similarly explicit Salome by Oscar Wilde. And starring just three women – two of whom are black women– it was an extraordinary event in London’s West End.

“It dawned on me when I saw the posters outside and I get goosebumps now,” she says. “Your very presence on that stage is political, when you're three women standing up there without men defining your context. It makes you realise how many times you are on stage and your context comes via the male presence. And without that – without being sexist – it's a completely different ball game.”

It also attracted a more diverse audience than usually seen around the auditoriums of central London. “There were people lining up at the stage door at the end and some of these were 16-year-old girls and boys and saying that's the first play I've ever seen,” she says. “And that's the best feeling. It was also hilarious because we were like, 'Well don't expect them all to be like this’.”

The Maids was a bold, tenebrous play – and the critics, by and large, were impressed. Reviewing in the Telegraph, Dominic Cavendish said Ashton’s “deadpan impassivity [was] well suited to the adopted mannerisms of high command and the character’s dark, vengeful undertow”. But it was certainly not a play that left its audience on a feelgood high. “Sometimes theatre can present rather than really truth-tell,” she says.

“And we all have a lovely time when we're presented with a nice idea of something and we can all go to the bar and all have a lovely glass of Sauvignon Blanc – you know who doesn't love that? But there's quite a different experience when you go to the theatre and you feel like you've really been taken out of your comfort zone. One of my favourite quotes about art [by Cesar A Cruz] is: 'Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.' And that's kind of a phrase that I live by.”

When I interviewed her co-star Aduba last year, on the well-trodden topic of diversity in TV and film, she rightly pointed out that while she’s happy to answer those questions, really it’s the gatekeepers – the casting directors and producers – to whom they should be posed as they’re the ones with the power to make those choices. So does Ashton want to become one of those gatekeepers?

“It's an absolute priority,” she says without pause. “It's what drives me and what drains me at the same time. I don't know if it's something that I would naturally gravitate towards because I've never had the luxury to feel like that. It's always felt like a responsibility of mine to change the industry in which I've worked since the age of six. But I think Uzo is absolutely right, we are not the ones with the problem... I'd love to do a round table where it's a mixture of actors, commissioners, casting directors and producers and really say, 'Come on, let's just get it all out in the open.'

Pleasingly, she, Aduba and Carmichael are still mates, and when Aduba came back to London in June to promote the latest season of Orange is the New Black, the three of them had a catch-up dinner near Trafalgar Square that coincided with the anniversary of the show’s end.

As much as Ashton may say she doesn’t feel as though she’s famous – something drilled into her at the Anna Scher school where words like “star” and “celebrity” were banned – with a career as rich and prolific as hers, she clearly has a knack for getting to know the right people and making sure her talent is out in the open. But, I ask, if she were to write her own headline for this article, what would she put?

“God, I don't know. I have no idea how to ever sell myself in a snazzy way.” She pauses and leans back in her chair.

“Maybe what I said earlier: that art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. That's my general tagline. But I don't think it could really get closer to me than a headline that was used when I was doing some press for The Maids last year that had my face and then above it in quotation marks: 'TK Maxx is the happiest place on earth'.” She’s laughing while saying this but she did later write a whole column on her love for the high-street discount shop. “Yeah, that was the closest.”

Random Acts begins on Monday 21 August on Channel 4 at midnight