Lucy Punch has no idea that a Christmas special of a popular show can be a very big deal. “Really? I haven’t had a Christmas in England for years.” Last year’s Gavin & Stacey, I tell her, was a cultural extravaganza on a par with a royal wedding. “Was it? Oh, wow.”
For my part, I had no idea that Punch is a big deal in America. To British fans of Motherland and its spin-off, Amandaland, Punch, 47, is the quintessential nightmare London mum, recognisable to anyone who has ever stood at a primary-school gate. Her character, Amanda, is the smug, glossy one in designerwear who makes the flustered mums in Primark joggers feel inadequate. We all know an Amanda.
But Punch left London for Hollywood almost 20 years ago, where she has worked alongside the biggest names: Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Naomi Watts in the Woody Allen movie You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp in Into the Woods, Steve Carell in Dinner for Schmucks and Al Pacino in Stand Up Guys. She lives with her partner, the British artist Dinos Chapman, and their two sons in LA’s glitzy Laurel Canyon, a location that could not be less like unlovely Harlesden, to where Amanda has been exiled post-divorce in Amandaland.
Clockwise from top left: with Samuel Anderson as Mal in the Amandaland Christmas special; on stage with Jerry Hall in The Graduate, 2000; with Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, 2011; with Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin in Stand Up Guys, 2012
ALAMY
The school gates of London were so far from Punch’s real life, for a long time she didn’t even realise Motherland had become a big deal in Britain. The BBC comedy drama wasn’t broadcast in the US, “so I never really had much of a sense of people liking the show until towards its end”.
She might wish she had remained in the dark, because when the producers suggested making a spin-off, promoting Amanda to the new show’s lead, Punch panicked. “I expected there to be a sort of disappointment of it not being Motherland. And missing all those brilliant characters, the beloved characters in that show.”
She also worried that “people love to hate Amanda. Putting that character front of centre, would it work? Would people care about her? I genuinely had a lot of fear about how it would be received.”
Punch herself, despite the impressive acting credits, had never been a leading lady. “I’ve never been front and centre before.” When Amandaland came out in February she was “far too nervous” to read the reviews, but they were so glowing her agent sent her the headlines. “There was one that went something like, ‘Lucy’s finally made it at 47’, and I realised I hadn’t let myself think of it like that. It made me realise it was a bigger deal maybe than I’d allowed myself to think. And I’m obviously so grateful it has happened, because it’s a huge deal for me.”
We’ve met outside a photographic studio in Hackney. Her trademark mane is hidden under a woolly hat, so I don’t recognise her until she calls to me across the courtyard. Punch has that mysterious, chameleon-like gift, common in character actors, of looking completely different in every role she plays. It’s bitterly cold, so we decamp to a café where she buys us cakes and coffee.
Turtleneck, £100, Emello. Coat, £2,870, Lanvin
PHIL DUNLOP
Double-sleeve turtleneck, £390, Toteme. Velvet trousers, £1,200, Tory Burch. Ankle boots, £490, Jude. Rings, Punch’s own
PHIL DUNLOP
She is friendly, smiley, warm and chatty — and impenetrably opaque. I have interviewed MI5 operatives more forthcoming about their private selves than Punch, who takes care to reveal very little. Her inscrutability may be partly due to unfamiliarity with the media spotlight — or to her self-image as a character actor, not a celebrity. Alternatively, it might all be down to her personality. But it’s hard to work out what that personality might be.
The personalities she performs are seldom pleasant. In the past she has joked, “If the character is smug, bitchy, trashy or has dubious morals, call me!”, and, “Quite often I’m, you know, the posh bitch.” Actors who perfect a particular kind of role often, in my experience, share some of their fictional characters’ traits, but there is absolutely no evidence of this in Punch. She puts the typecasting down to her “beady eyes and pointy nose”, which seems like the only plausible explanation.
Amandaland’s central relationship is Amanda’s mean-girl “friendship” with the dowdy, adoring Anne, whom she uses but despises. Their toxic co-dependence is taken to new comic heights in the Christmas special, when Anne gatecrashes Amanda’s family gathering in the Cotswolds. Although farcical, the dynamic between them is so believable that I ask Punch if she drew on her life experience to play it. “You might not have that sort of relationship now, but you might have known of that sort of dynamic when you were a teenager. That’s what it feels like to me. Teenage-girl friendship. Status and snipes and criticism and power play and manipulation.” Was Punch a bitchy, mean-girl teen? “I wasn’t. But I was a teenage girl.”
Punch grew up in west London, the daughter of a father who worked in advertising and a mother in market research, and went to the private girls’ school Godolphin & Latymer. “It wasn’t that mean and bitchy, but it was a competitive and very academic school, and I was always sort of on the edge, a slightly outsider type of person, until I did National Youth Theatre, which really transformed things for me.”
She studied history of art at University College London, but dropped out when Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French offered her a part in their 1999 sitcom, Let Them Eat Cake. The show ran for just one series, and Punch didn’t cross paths with Saunders again until she was cast as Amanda’s aunt in the Christmas special. “She’s a complete heroine of mine, so I was starstruck.” Saunders steals the show, so I wonder how the rest of the cast could keep a straight face on set. “Well, she was just laughing all the time and very generous and laughing at everyone else.” Joanna Lumley plays Amanda’s cuttingly snobbish mother, but, Punch says, she “is a dream. Joanna’s absolutely amazing, I love all our scenes together.”
The English class system is played to perfection in the show, but Punch says: “I hate all that sort of class stuff here.” She had plenty of work as a young actress in London — on stage alongside Jerry Hall in The Graduate and in Midsomer Murders, Poirot and Doc Martin on TV — but moved to LA in 2006 because, she has said, “I kept getting cast as posh idiots.”
A part in the American sitcom The Class, created by the team who made Friends, promised early stardom, but it ran for just one season, after which the work dried up. By 2010 her mother was advising her to retrain as a chiropodist, but in the nick of time Woody Allen cast her in his movie, and she has barely stopped working since. She and Chapman have been together since 2014, but the couple are so private that as recently as February a British newspaper described him as her “mystery husband”. They aren’t married but have a nine-year-old son, Rex, and a four-year-old son whose name remains undisclosed.
With her partner, the artist Dinos Chapman
OWEN KOLASINSKI/BFA.COM/SHUTTERSTOCK
“I think I’m just a fairly private person, and private even with people who are close to me. I also feel that anything interesting about myself is the last thing I’d want to share in an interview.” She adds hastily: “It’s not like there’s anything particularly interesting.”
Looking worried, she adds: “I’ve made it seem like there’s something. It’s just, it’s just — oh, now I’m getting tongue-tied. I don’t know. I just think we’ve all become so accepting of a lack of privacy in our lives, and there’s so little left. There’s no more secrets and there’s no more mystery, and I think that’s weird and sad. It seems like only your thoughts, only what’s in here,” and she taps her head, “is safe.”
She sounds quite detached from her life in LA. “I don’t feel like I belong there at all. LA’s a very transient place. I’m more comfortable feeling in-between.” We’re meeting the day before Thanksgiving, but “we’re just skipping it”. Her family are with her in London.
They have rented a home in the capital while she films season two of Amandaland, and her elder son is enrolled in school here for the duration, as he was when she filmed the first series. “He likes having a double life — he can dip between schools here and back there. We’re a little sort of travelling circus.”
No show has captured the particular social culture of the English primary school gate with more pitiless accuracy than Motherland. Its writers, who include Sharon Horgan, of Catastrophe fame, tried to make an American version but the pilot episode bombed, so I ask Punch why. “It’s a bit like the English Office, where it’s a little bit nasty and unfriendly and there’s not a lot of sweetness.”
She has previously said that 50 per cent of the school mums in LA are Amandas, so does she think Amandaland is better suited to a US remake? “I think it maybe would translate better, especially Amanda’s character, with all her chutzpah and wanting to win and succeed. Her ambition and reinvention might make her a more relatable type there.”
• The star of Amandaland is needy and shallow — and I love her
What Punch doesn’t mention is that, unlike most of the Motherland cast, she looks like the sort of gorgeous leggy blonde Americans expect to see on their TV screens. Her skin is so flawless, I ask what she has done to look this good. “I don’t do anything. Look.” She wiggles her eyebrows and pulls elastic expressions. I tell her I was hoping for hilarious LA anecdotes about placenta infusions. “Truthfully, the past few years, I haven’t been working as much, and I haven’t felt like I could afford to spend money on stuff on my face.” Then again, she goes on, she’s not sure she would want to. She tells me about going out recently with a girlfriend for cocktails in an LA bar. “And the women were all so gorgeous, they did look beautiful. It’s not that you don’t think they’re beautiful. But it’s almost slightly AI. Me and my girlfriend just looked more human. I understand for, you know, movie stars there’s a huge pressure, but I think that you need to have some humanity in your face. And that’s really important for a character or comedy actor. I can’t do anything to my face because I feel like that’s not what’s got me jobs.”
In the Christmas special Amanda’s children — now in their early teens — spend the entire journey from Harlesden to their great-aunt’s home outside Cirencester glued to their phones. Saunders plays a classic, old-money English country lady whose grand house is covered in dust, freezing cold, overrun by ungovernable dogs and — to the teens’ consternation — wi-fi free. Amanda is cheerfully indulgent of their phone addiction, so I ask Punch about her own smartphone policy for her children.
“Most of my friends have older kids, so I’ve seen what they’re dealing with. And that’s really terrifying to me.” Is she hoping to keep them off social media until they turn 14? “That seems so young to me. I would be like, when he’s 18 …”
Shirt, £665, and trousers, £750, Petar Petrov. Ankle boots, £490, Jude
PHIL DUNLOP
They are about to spend their first family Christmas in England, because she’s filming through December, and her brother is flying in from his home in New York. “Before I had kids I didn’t really celebrate Christmas. I would go with my brother to Costa Rica or Cuba or somewhere and have an anti-Christmas. Now, obviously, with children we take it up a hundred notches and spend far too much money and try to make it really lovely.”
As a former Christmas refusenik, does she enjoy it? “Through them I do. I really do, actually. I love it for them and I love them doing it. I throw a bit of extra money at it and then hope everyone has got enough and is happy with all their bits and pieces.”
• Amandaland and my life as the daughter of a narcissist
Like her fictional character, she will be having a country Christmas, at her mother’s house in Sussex. Her mother’s suggestion to her unemployed actress daughter that she retrain as a chiropodist sounds exactly like the sort of thing Amanda’s mother would say, so I ask if she is anything like Lumley’s Amandaland character. “No! She’s not at all. No, she’s the sweetest. She’s absolutely lovely. She’s very social and adventurous — she’s got vim and vigour, so she’ll be hosting.”
Will Punch, I ask, be cooking? She looks at me as if I must be mad. “No.”
The Amandaland Christmas special is on BBC1 and iPlayer at 9.15pm on Christmas Day
Hair Gordon Chapples. Make-up Phoebe Taylor using Shiseido
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