“Fleabag” came out of a pretty dark place.
In a new interview on BBC Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour”, the acclaimed series’ creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge discussed the forces that inspired her now-iconic character.
“When I was in my 20s and I was feeling quite cynical, when I was standing on the precipice of being too cynical or becoming a little bit depressed about the pressures of society, and starting to wake up to the reality of the pressures that women are under — men as well, but particularly women — I felt that if I looked down over the precipice, into the chasm below, at the bottom was Fleabag wearing lipstick and looking up at me,” Waller-Bridge said.
“It was the worst-case scenario of a kind of spiral of self-loathing and judgment,” she added.
The 34-year-old also talked about trying to portray the life of a woman in a patriarchal society.
“‘Fleabag’ was really about a woman who felt she was really valued primarily by her sexual desirability,” she explained. “And I really wanted to write about that in a way that was accessible and funny so people didn’t realize that’s what it was about until it sneaks up on you.”
