Two Aprils ago, Jessica Gunning was shopping in Covent Garden for hairspray. She popped into Space NK, where a woman asked her for a selfie. A line of people quickly formed and on leaving the store Gunning found an even longer one snaking down the pavement. “There must be one of those pop-up shops,” she thought and joined the rear.
To her surprise everyone in the line turned round. “What’s this about?” she asked, puzzled. “What are we waiting for?” The queue had to explain: “We’re waiting to meet you.”
“Oh!” Gunning exclaimed. “Ohhhhh.”
Having worked as a character actress for 16 years, she hadn’t been entirely unfamiliar with strangers’ attention. “Very occasionally — maybe once a month, only in central London — someone might say, ‘How are you?’ ” They usually knew her face from The Outlaws, Stephen Merchant’s BBC comedy drama in which she played a probation officer. A few had seen her as a barmaid in the modestly successful Channel 4 comedy drama Back. “But often they’d think I was Janice from the Co-op or something.”
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When Netflix released Baby Reindeer in the spring of 2024, Gunning had hoped the low-budget drama — presented as “a true story” — would find a small but appreciative audience. She played Martha, a mentally unstable fantasist who stalks a stand-up comedian/barman played by Richard Gadd, who wrote the series and essentially played himself.
“My dream,” Gunning recalls, “was always to be in something that was critically acclaimed. You know, respected and liked and connected to — that’s the bit that I craved all my life. I never thought of the fame or recognition side.”
With Richard Gadd in Baby ReindeerNetflix
Within weeks of its release more than 80 million people across the world had watched Baby Reindeer. Internet sleuths swiftly identified the real-life Martha as Fiona Harvey, a Scottish woman who, like Martha, claims to be a lawyer. Harvey appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, flatly denied having ever stalked Gadd and issued a $170 million defamation lawsuit against Netflix. Baby Reindeer filled global column inches and airtime for months, won Gunning an Emmy, a Bafta and a Golden Globe, and made her face one of the most famous on the planet. Overnight, at 37 she became someone strangers stop in the street “every hour”.
“I can’t really, even in my own head, explain what the whole process was like,” she murmurs, searching for words. “I think it’s going to be looked back on by maybe all of us involved as feeling almost like a dream. Everything that happened, the intensity of it, the unexpected…” The sentence tails away into dazed silence.
Fiona Harvey, the inspiration for Gunning’s character, on Piers Morgan UncensoredUNPIXS
We’re talking in the dressing room of an east London studio, while the usual hoopla of a magazine photoshoot — stylist, make-up artist, clothes rails, photographers — sets up next door. Warm and unaffected but faintly self-conscious, Gunning seems apprehensive about the attention. “I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted to be known as myself.” It’s easy to see why she gets mistaken for Janice from the Co-op.
Now “Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning” is about to be everywhere. This Easter holiday’s big cinema release is an adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, in which she plays Dame Washalot in an ensemble star cast featuring Michael Palin, Lenny Henry, Claire Foy, Jennifer Saunders, Andrew Garfield and Nicola Coughlan. This summer she co-stars with James Norton and Bella Ramsey in Sunny Dancer, an improbably funny British film about a holiday camp for teenage cancer patients.
With Bella Ramsey and James Norton in Sunny Dancer, in cinemas this summer
Last autumn she began filming another British film, Frank and Percy, alongside a trove of national treasures — Derek Jacobi, Sheila Hancock, Stephen Fry, Ian McKellen and Felicity Kendall. An American comedy movie, Anxious People, co-starring Angelina Jolie, Jason Segel and Aimee Lou Wood is also in production. In May we’ll see her in a new Steven Soderbergh movie, The Christophers, co-starring James Corden, Michaela Coel and McKellen again. And just last month Gunning was announced as the lead in a new Hollywood biopic of the Mamas and the Papas singer Mama Cass Elliot.
“To be approached by a big American production to play the lead,” she marvels softly. “It’s a dream come true, isn’t it?” As she says so, however, she sounds like the opposite of a lottery winner and looks daunted, so I ask why.
“I’m confident in how I work.” She describes herself as “a geek” and could easily have filled our two hours together talking about her fascination with stagecraft and reverence for her co-stars’ brilliance. But her confidence, as I soon begin to see, doesn’t necessarily extend to herself as a person.
Sane Seven for The Sunday Times Magazine. Hair and make-up: Dani Guinsberg. Styling: Hope Lawrie. Green dress by Asos Curve. shoes by jimmy choo
Gunning grew up with two younger sisters in the small West Yorkshire town of Holmfirth, where Last of the Summer Wine was filmed, “all cobbled streets and fresh air and hills”. Her father worked for the council and her mother taught English and drama at Gunning’s secondary school. Never a rebellious teen — “No! Because of my mum, the teachers were real people to me” — she starred in school productions, joined a local drama group and was voted head girl, so I ask if she was cool.
“No way. I used to have long pigtails and wear a No Fear cap backwards, so definitely not cool. But I was friendly with everyone and I always liked to be funny. I’m from a funny family, my grandparents were funny, my uncle and auntie, my mum, dad, all of them. So I grew up around a lot of laughter.”
On winning a place at the Rose Bruford drama school in southeast London, Gunning staged a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Holmfirth to raise money towards the cost. Two roles in National Theatre productions after graduating quickly launched her career, but for the next eight years Gunning averaged little more than one job a year — Law and Order: UK, Doctor Who, Holby City — and worked in an office doing admin to make ends meet.
Gunning as a drama student at the Rose Bruford College in southeast London, c 2007Courtesy of Jessica Gunning
Her father badgered her to come up with a plan B if acting didn’t work out, but Gunning was having none of it. “I was, like, why would I want to do that? I want to be an actor. I don’t want to fall back on anything else.” She looks fleetingly bashful. “There’s a natural instinct in everyone that’s either glass half full or half empty, and I’ve always been on the optimistic side.”
Gunning quite liked being able to say she had an office job, “because you don’t want to be, like,” and she adopts a deep Rada voice, “I’m an act-torrrr.” But in 2014 she was making coffee in the office when a bus passed the window emblazoned with an ad for a film she was in called Pride. Seeing her own face beside Imelda Staunton’s, she exclaimed to colleagues, “I’m on that bus there!” “Oh, great,” replied one. “Can you take those to meeting rooms two and four, please?”
“And I was, like, I’m on a bus. And I’m serving coffee in the office — not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that moment made me feel like I need to just be brave and just be an actor.” She quit her job and hasn’t stopped working since.
With Stephen Merchant in the BBC comedy series The Outlaws (2021)
In Inside No 9 with Julie Hesmondhalgh, Steve Pemberton, Mark Benton, Reece Shearsmith and Jack Whitehall (2015)BBC
Landing the role of Martha in Baby Reindeer would be her career-defining big break, but it came at an equally momentous and unexpected point in her private life. In November 2022 Gunning happened to get chatting with a lesbian who casually referenced the moment when she’d realised she was gay.
“And then I was, like…” Gunning mimes a lightbulb moment, “… I’m gay!” It was a stunning revelation. “Everyone around me was gay. I just didn’t think I could be.” Now, all of a sudden, she knew.
“I’m gay,” she blurted out loud, but the woman assumed she was simply stating a known fact, not an epiphany, and the conversation moved on. Later that day Gunning visited a friend. “She opened the door and took one look at me and went, ‘What’s changed?’ And I went, ‘I’m gay!’ ”
None of her friends were surprised by her news. Her family thought it was “great” and were “lovely” about it. The puzzle is why she hadn’t recognised her own sexuality until then. “I think it’s because I’ve never been in a relationship before. With anyone.”
No one at all? “No, not really.”
Gunning as a young girl, front left, with her grandmother, brother and sisterCourtesy of Jessica Gunning
Aged tenCourtesy of Jessica Gunning
I ask what story she told herself to explain why she’d never had a relationship.
“Well, not to get too deep, but it was probably that I didn’t want to go out with guys and so I was finding a way to avoid it. I never knew how to flirt, I didn’t get it. And I was always friends with guys and would set them up with other friends. In a way it was, like, ‘Great, because I’m not interested.’ ”
Matchmaking gave her a purchase on the romantic economy without requiring her to go to bed with anyone? “Yeah.”
Her family wasn’t at all worried about her celibacy and nor was Gunning. “Because my job was my passion and my love. And the characters I got to play, I felt like I maybe lived vicariously through a lot of them. I felt very sexual and I felt very connected to myself, so I was so happy in so many ways. It didn’t feel like I was lonely. I lived with my best mate. I felt fulfilled. So I didn’t feel like I was lacking anything.”
Apart from sex? “Yeah, apart from sex.” Thirty-six years was a long time to go without it. “Yeah,” she agrees quietly. “Yeah.”
Hesitantly, she volunteers, “It might be connected to size. Maybe because I was bigger, I’ve always felt like — it’s hard to word this because I don’t want it to seem like I’m saying it in a negative way, because it definitely isn’t, I didn’t feel like an alien in a negative way — but it was like an otherness. And the otherness, I suppose, looking back, protects me from having to go, ‘I don’t fancy men.’ So I was just, like, ‘Oh, it’s not the time for me,’ or whatever. And then, before I knew it I was in my thirties.”
Chubby from early childhood, she never tried to lose weight. “Luckily not. I don’t think I’ve got that much of an unhealthy relationship with being bigger. I’ve never yo-yo dieted or anything like that.”
On stage at the Emmys after winning best supporting actress for Baby Reindeer in 2024Alamy
I ask if size has always felt central to her identity. “Yeah, I think quite quickly size was connected to my identity. And funniness and all that kind of stuff.” She pauses. “But there was a slight, not defensiveness, but I was, like, is it my identity? Sometimes parts would come in that I’d actively try to avoid if they were just written as a big lady. Sometimes bigger characters can be lazily written, so I kind of avoided a job where it was ‘She enters eating a pizza’ or whatever, or when you’d get the breakdown for an audition and it would say something like ‘Karen, 25, chunky or curvy’. Loads of my favourite characters never have that kind of descriptive word.”
At drama school her dissertation was titled Does Size Matter?, which allowed her to “meet loads of people in the industry to talk about whether it does or not. Those chats made me realise I never wanted it to be like a defining thing. My favourite casting directors or actors or directors are the ones that think outside the box and can see when being bigger isn’t in the character description but just works.”
Mama Cass will be a rare exception. “She is a fascinating woman because she was probably one of the first famous big women.” The movie is an adaptation of a memoir by Cass’s daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, who was just seven when her 32-year-old mother died in her sleep, of heart failure probably brought on by obesity, crash dieting and drug abuse. The memoir debunked the cruel myth that Cass died choking on a ham sandwich, and Gunning shares Elliot-Kugell’s indignation that this falsehood “ended up being the defining narrative. Imagine being reduced to that.”
The singer Mama Cass, whom Gunning plays in a forthcoming biopicGetty images
The plot will include Cass’s love for her band member Denny Doherty, which was always described as unrequited. “But the daughter met him later in life, before he died, and he basically said she was the love of his life. He was just too embarrassed to go out with her because she was bigger. So size is going to be quite a big part of her story.”
Gunning is pleased to be involved in the project at its early stage and can bring her own perspective. “Because sometimes you can make a fat joke and there’s no vulnerability to it, it’s just funny.” She tells me about staying at a hotel near Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, a floor of which had been booked by the New York Jets, an American football team. Two actors were staying on their floor and when Gunning tried to visit their rooms she was stopped by the Jets’ security guard.
“I could see he was, like, ‘I know this lady.’ And he went, ‘You’re one of the chefs, right?’ And it made me laugh so much because of course he’s going, ‘How could this lady be related to the Jets? What job could she do? She must be a cook.’ And I promise you, I find that 100 per cent funny.”
I ask if she’d describe herself as body positive. “It’s all very nuanced and everyone’s different, so it’s hard to speak on behalf of anything, really. I never want to be a spokesperson for anything.” She also doesn’t want to talk about politics, her opinion about weight-loss drugs or the recent Tourette’s furore at the Baftas, and can’t discuss the controversy about Baby Reindeer’s veracity while Fiona Harvey’s Netflix lawsuit remains ongoing. “I don’t think that’s necessarily a relief,” she tells me, but I bet it is.
She has always said that she played Martha as a purely fictional character and tells me that she didn’t research Harvey and had been completely unaware of their physical resemblance until online sleuths outed her. She hasn’t even watched Piers Morgan’s interview with Harvey, seen by more than 15 million viewers. Wasn’t she even slightly curious?
“I felt very protective of Richard,” she says of the show’s creator and changes the subject.
I would bet my house that Gunning is a dream to work with. “I love filming, I love getting to know the crew. We get so close, I always grieve it when it’s over.” Every time she references a fellow actor, her face fills with the same tender affection I see whenever she mentions her family in Yorkshire.
“Obsessed” with her young niece and nephew, she goes home “more than ever now, just to see them”, and has “at least eight, maybe ten” godchildren. “I love children.”
Sane Seven for The Sunday Times Magazine. Hair and make-up: Dani Guinsberg. Styling: Hope Lawrie. Green dress by Asos Curve
Having never been on social media or snapped by paparazzi, she has kept her private life private, so I ask if she now has a girlfriend.
“Oh gosh, I wish I had more juicy gossip. But since I came out, everything happened with Baby Reindeer. So that’s been nuts. I’ve had two ” she begins but stops. “I suppose I’ve just been focused on work.”
Although currently single, “hopefully I’m open to it. I’m a big believer in love.” Has she tried dating apps? “I just like the idea of meeting someone in real life. I’m a bit of an old-fashioned romantic at heart; I’m a bit of a believer in fate and chance.”
Baby Reindeer catapulted Gunning from jobbing obscurity to stardom, so if it hasn’t yet found her a girlfriend I assume it has at least bought her a house. She laughs.
“Materially, nothing’s changed.” She has never owned her own home and still rents a flat in south London. “Materially, I have nothing. But Mama Cass might be a bigger thing, I guess.” I’m pretty sure Hollywood can afford a south London flat, I say, but Gunning shrugs as if she couldn’t really care less about the money.
“Yeah, maybe.”
The Magic Faraway Tree is in cinemas from March 27
Opening image: Sane Seven for The Sunday Times Magazine. Hair and make-up: Dani Guinsberg. Styling: Hope Lawrie. Green dress by Asos Curve