Interview: What makes Ashley Jensen so downright Scottish?

Published on Sunday 6 February 2011 12:59

THERE are Scottish actors, and then there's Ashley Jensen. The 41-year-old from Annan flashes her perfect teeth in a posh London hotel, all bouncy blonde hair, 21-carat confidence and the kind of dentistry you don't find in Dumfries.

To look at, she's every inch the LA film star. But then she opens her mouth and you realise the years in the Hollywood Hills haven't had that much of an effect.

Jensen still sounds like she's about to sell you a fish supper. She's as cosy as a Tunnock's teacake and her accent might as well have been cask-matured in a Highland distillery, infused with heather and shaken with Crabbie's Green Ginger Wine.

She's a bit like a walking, talking advert for Visit Scotland, which perhaps is why she is never asked to change her accent for a job. In fact, the opposite happens.

Famously, when she read for the part of Christina, the warm-hearted New York wardrobe assistant in Ugly Betty, the producers were so charmed by her accent they made the character Scottish on the spot.

And with her latest television role in the US sitcom Accidentally on Purpose (it got axed last year, despite rave reviews), it happened again.

"I did the first interview in an American accent and thought I was going to be American until I turned up for rehearsal and they were like (she puts on a perfect American accent], 'Oh, did we not tell you? Just do it in your own voice. It's sooooo much funnier.'"

It's amazing, really. Think of the other Scottish actors who have made it across the pond, from Robert Carlyle to Brian Cox, James McAvoy to Kelly Macdonald.

All of them regularly change the way they speak for a role. But not Jensen. Her accent, like her Scottishness, is not only what identifies her.

It has become her calling card. She's always … "What?" she asks. "Turning up as Ashley in everything?" She laughs, as she likes to do when she's poking fun at herself (self-deprecation, OK!, and the hot doughnuts at the Barras market, are what she misses most about Scotland).

"Maybe people think my American accent is rubbish," she considers.

"But I've been told it's not. They see me as an oddity in America because I've got a 'funny' accent. I'm seen as quirky and different so I can get away with more."

We meet in London to talk about Jensen's latest role in Gnomeo and Juliet.

It's her first film since moving to LA after the mammoth success of Extras, which still plays on a loop there, and Ugly Betty.

Jensen is big news Stateside, stopped by fans, snapped on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, very much part of the Hollywood set.

Well, apart from the fact that the thing she raves about most in LA are the supermarkets.

"I've reached a point in my life where going to the supermarket is a day out," she says when I ask her what she gets up to.

"I love the lighting! The way the fruit is all sprayed with water and people help you with your messages …" She sighs in satisfaction like others would do talking about exclusive pool parties in Philippe Starck's Sky Bar.

"They also deliver your washing machine, take it out of the packaging and plumb it in for you. I mean it!"

How does she feel going from all that back to Annan? "You feel as though you've never been away," she goes on. "It's where you're from. It's part of who you are.

It's been weird moving to America. The confidence of Americans is great but it can also be really annoying … you know, you're a bit fake, you're full of shit."

She laughs, not in the slightest bit bothered at the prospect of offending anyone. "But then I think, well, why not? Why can't I have a bit of that? I'm as good as you are. In fact, I actually know a wee bit more than you about this."

Back home, we've seen less of Jensen – a BBC drama here and there – but that's about to change.

She recently shot Hysteria, a film about the history of vibrators with Maggie Gyllenhaal; in March she plays the lead opposite Max Beesley in ITV thriller The Reckoning; and she has a part in an upcoming Aardman animated film.

Despite having homes in London and Umbria, Italy, she doesn't seem in any hurry to leave Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, the English actor Terence Beesley, their 15-month-old son Frankie Jack and their dog Barney.

Jensen seems to have her sights set on bigger things. "Maybe I would like a few more varied parts," she says carefully.

"That's kind of where I am now. I suppose I can look at it one way and think I'm a bit scared. Or I can think it's really exciting."

Though she comes across as warm and easygoing, she has an underlying mettle.

She left Ugly Betty unexpectedly after 66 episodes (when it was still good) because she needed to "frighten" herself.

Even when she had just graduated from Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh, she turned down the rite of passage job of playing a corpse in Taggart because she felt it was beneath her.

Gnomeo and Juliet is her first animated film. Produced by Elton John and David Furnish, it pretty much does what it says on the tin. As in it's Shakespeare. With gnomes.

It's all good, clean fun (well, depending on how you view an Elton John soundtrack) and Jensen voices Nanette, the bawdy nurse in Romeo and Juliet who in this version becomes a big-mouthed, water-spurting, amorous frog.

A Scottish frog, that is. (Meanwhile James McAvoy, who voices Romeo, speaks something closer to Stratford-upon-Avon).

Even among such British hard-hitters as Emily Blunt, Michael Caine, Maggie Smith and Patrick Stewart, it's a scene-stealing performance. And, as usual, Jensen is very Scottish and very funny.

She never intended to be funny though.

"I did a lot of theatre when I started out," she says.

"It was the Lyceum, the Citz, the Tron and the Traverse. I came to London and did the Royal Court, the National, King Lear at the Manchester Royal Exchange. I did little bits of comedy, like Rab C Nesbitt, but I wasn't predominantly about comedy. It is weird that I've now cornered this wee market."

So did Ricky Gervais, who cast her as his hapless sidekick Maggie in Extras and remains a close friend, see something in her that she hadn't in herself? "Ricky did see something in me," she concedes.

"But I suppose I've never been too sensible a person. People who are very close to me are aware that I've always done funny walks and funny voices and that I can be a bit funny sometimes."

She stops and looks as though she's been caught out talking herself up. And so she puts on another funny voice. "On yes!" she says, now the Shakespearean luvvie. "I've been hilarious!"

Jensen often makes a joke in the midst of saying something serious. It's what makes her a good comic actress – she has won two British Comedy Awards, beating the likes of Tamsin Greig and Catherine Tate for her role in Extras, and been nominated for a Bafta and an Emmy. But it can also make her hard to pin down.

Today, in a nod to Nanette, she is dressed in a frog-green dress, cinched at the waist with a wide belt, her high heels kicked under the table and her stockinged feet tucked under her.

She is sporting a flashy ring with an enormous jewel-encrusted frog on it, just in case – God forbid – anyone should take her too seriously. She looks glamorous and well cared for, with a baby waiting at home for her.

"It's the first time I've left the wee man," she says. "I Skyped him last night to see his wee face."

She also appears to be one of an increasingly rare breed of Hollywood actress: a natural woman. She is over 40, which sadly in LA is shorthand for old.

How does she cope with the pressure to get work done, stay impossibly thin, impossibly young, drop the baby weight, Botox the wrinkles … "You know what?" she says.

"I have never once felt pressurised in any way. I don't know whether I'm hanging out with the wrong people … or maybe it's the right people. But I've been in two shows in America and no one has ever said, 'I think you should lose weight.' I did wonder why American actresses always have this amazing big hair. Do you know?"

I shake my head, thinking her hair is fairly American in size and lustre. "Because they have bits of fake hair stitched into their scalp. It's not natural. In Ugly Betty we all had extra bits to make it look big."

Things might have been different if she had fetched up in LA in her twenties rather than her thirties.

"Maybe I'm just more comfortable in my own skin," she says.

"I don't worry about things in terms of getting a job because I just think if I stop getting work, well, then I stop getting work. If you enter into that world, therein madness lies. If you step outside it and see it for what it is then it's a wee bit healthier."

Having a baby at 40 changed the way she felt about her body too. Mind you, it didn't stop her working. Jensen went back to filming Accidentally on Purpose just three weeks after giving birth.

Characteristically, though, she plays it down. "It sounds a bit crazy," she says, "but I did get to bring my son to work with me. It was actually a very fortunate position to be in."

She is keen to discuss the pressures on women, despite claiming she hasn't experienced them herself. "I'm going to get serious now," she says, putting on yet another accent for the occasion.

"It's a bit of a sad time. Young people are having plastic surgery. It's a wee bit worrying, a difficult time to be a girl."

Now she really does get serious.

"The one certainty in life is that we're all going to die," she sighs.

"And if we're lucky, we're going to die when we're old. So as long as your body works, that's all that matters. I just want my body to be strong. I'm embracing how I look now."

Growing up in Annan, Jensen was always unconventional. An only child, she was brought up by her mother, a teaching assistant who was bemused by her daughter's determination to become an actor but supportive none the less.

Jensen remembers always asking for false noses and face paints for birthdays. "I did have a bit of a thing for dressing up," she says.

"I was Lady Gaga way before her time. I had a wee kettle for a handbag. Didn't everyone, at some point? One of the teachers used to call me Dame Flora Robson because I had this big, long Victorian skirt. And I wore a Peruvian hat. It was the 1980s – people were wearing lots of lace."

Her father left when she was young and in recent years he sold his story to a tabloid claiming she has a sister. But Jensen, living in LA, is cushioned from all this and doesn't read redtops.

She seems to have been unusually sure of herself from a young age.

"It was weird that I always knew this was what I wanted to do," she agrees. The funny voice starts up and she laughs.

"From the moment I dressed up as Miss Piggy at Halloween, I knew … No, I keep saying if it all dried up now, at least I got to here. My mum always says she was proud when I did a wee play at the Tron. And I felt successful when I was able to support myself in a job I loved doing, when I was able to get a mortgage."

Sometimes, she admits, she still can't quite believe she's playing at Hollywood. And getting away with it. She often begins sentences with "if it all ended tomorrow", as though that really is a possibility she should prepare for.

"You take yourself wherever you go," she says. "But I also like it when Ricky calls me up and says, 'Do you want to come to the Golden Globes?' Oh yes! If it all ended tomorrow, to be able to say you had a big fat Hollywood experience is no bad thing. I got to have people doing my hair, make-up and nails, sewing me into a dress.

"It's wildly exciting. And to be honest I probably wouldn't have gone to Hollywood if I hadn't been offered Ugly Betty because I was a wee bit feart. But you have to make yourself frightened. That's what keeps you alive."

That's the thing about being a Scot, Jensen goes on. There's another side to having this accent that has served her so well.

"You can't be seen to be getting too flippant about things," she says, and there are no funny voices, jokes or giggles at her own expense.

"See, that's the Scot in me. It keeps my feet on the ground. But it also means I do sometimes think how did I get here? I think people are going to suddenly go, 'Oh, we made a mistake with her. Send her back.'" And then she starts laughing.

Gnomeo and Juliet is on general release from Friday

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 06 February, 2011