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with frustrating gaps between
good roles, she began to write her
own. In 2007, she formed theater
company DryWrite with her best
friend and frequent director
Vicky Jones. The first kernels of
Fleabag, the play and the series,
were scattered there around 2009.
Waller-Bridge soon began
adding some significant non-
theatrical credits. She booked a
series regular gig on Sky1 comedy
The Cafe and a supporting role in
Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher
biopic The Iron Lady, where she
met Olivia Colman (Fleabag’s
Godmother). The Oscar-winning
star of The Favourite recalls being
instantly drawn to Waller-Bridge’s
sense of humor. When DryWrite
had an opportunity to take Fleabag
to the 2013 Edinburgh Festival
Fringe, Colman was among those
who contributed to its Kickstarter
campaign — which raised $6,000.
Fleabag, an hourlong stage
monologue that starts as a riot-
ous meditation on sex and spirals
into a revelation of gut-dropping
betrayal, was dubbed “rude”
a nd “fi lt hy.” Time Out wrote that
Waller-Bridge would “almost
certainly [be] going to go to hell
for it.” The project minted Waller-
Bridge the star of the festival,
earning the Fringe First award
and, soon after, a run at London’s
Soho Theatre.
“I had gone thinking, ‘Brilliant,
I’m going to have an hour of wet-
ting myself laughing — Phoebe is
the funniest person I know,’ ” says
Colman. “Instead, she pulled the
rug out from under my feet and
broke my heart.”
BBC brass were among those
in the audience at Edinburgh and
again during the London run,
and Waller-Bridge was offered
a TV series if she could manage
to translate her free-standing
one-woman show into a pilot. It
became one of two series she sold
in the festival’s wake, both pre-
miering in 2016. Broader comedy
Crashing debuted that January on
the U.K.’s Channel 4 to critical
approval. Its reception was tepid
compared to the rapture that
greeted BBC’s Fleabag that July.career with two Emmy nomina-
tions and a Golden Globe win, and
supply a new breakout in co-lead
Jodie Comer. For all of the people
who laud Waller-Bridge — and
they are many — few speak about
her as effusively as those who pay
her to write. “The only note you
give Phoebe is, ‘You can lean into
the weird,’ ” says Barnett. “She
wants to subvert. She wants to
surprise. She wants to play in this
highly charged space between
laughter and deep feeling.” Adds
BBC’s Allen, “She does homework
on the bus on the way to school,
but it’s always there. The only
other person who has the ability
to turn around a whole draft in a
weekend and it’s perfect is [Black
Mirror’s] Charlie Brooker.”
In March and April, while
Waller-Bridge was in New York
for nightly performances of
Fleabag — Anna Wintour and
Adam Driver were among those
spotted at the sold-out run — she
was secretly polishing the script
on the still-untitled Bond 25, said
to be Daniel Craig’s final turn in
the role. It was Craig’s suggestion
that she give the project, belea-
guered by delays, some sharper
dialogue. The fifth credited
screenwriter, she joined direc-
tor Cary Joji Fukunaga, co-writer
Scott Z. Burns and usual Bond
maestros Neal Purvis and Robert
Wade. Sources paint Waller-
Bridge’s pay at around $2 million
for her incremental work on
the script. Not too shabby for a
punch-up. Her hiring speaks to
an awareness that Bond needs to
better serve female characters in
his post-#MeToo debut.
“There’s something about“My only worry was that it was
being pigeonholed as sexually
depraved, filthy, outrageous and
shocking,” says BBC comedy chief
Shane Allen. This concerned
Waller-Bridge also, as the show
made its way to the U.S. via
Amazon Prime Video. “I’m not
saying it wasn’t a show about sex,”
she acknowledges. “What’s inter-
esting is that when women write
about sex, suddenly sex becomes
the headline, the theme of the
whole show.”ONE OF THE CHATEAU HOSTESSES
approaches our table — not to see
if the salad went over well but to
give Waller-Bridge her number.
The confessional familiarity of
Fleabag, minting Waller-Bridge as
the internet’s latest best friend,
has made it so that she can’t even
enjoy a staged interview without
being solicited for a hang. No,
wait, she asked for that number.
“Yeah, last night actually,”
says Waller-Bridge. “There was a
massive wedding and she was so
stressed. We kept telling her, ‘Just
fuck ’em all off and come have
a drink!’ ”
Even as she tucks a near-
stranger’s number into her pocket,
Waller-Bridge notes she’s becom-
ing more private. She politely
takes a pass when asked about the
aforementioned “we.” (She’s in
L.A. with playwright and film-
maker Martin McDonagh, 49; the
two have been romantically linked
since his 2018 awards-season run
for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Missouri.) Conscious of her grow-
ing fame, some of her inner circle
have even started telling her to
stop taking London’s Tube — “my
idea place!” — but she’s committed
to not giving it up completely.That she can still find the
occasional semblance of ano-
nymity has much to do with the
choices Waller-Bridge made after
Fleabag hit. Motion-capture work
for a Star Wars movie is not the
stuff of tabloid fodder. But when
she was invited to audition for
original directors (and Fleabag
fans) Phil Lord and Chris Miller,
she was excited by the novelty of
acting without actually appear-
ing on camera. And Killing Eve did
not land Waller-Bridge’s face on
the sides of buses, but it proved
crucial in bolstering her profile.
Before her protracted deliberation
over a second season of Fleabag,
she was approached by BBC
America to develop and write the
series based on Luke Jennings’
spy novella Codename Villanelle.
Network president Sarah Barnett
had lost her bid on Fleabag to
Amazon when the BBC initially
courted U.S. partners, so Waller-
Bridge was the exec’s top pick to
adapt the cat-and-mouse story of
a British intelligence desk jockey
and an irreverently psychotic
assassin. In a genre so bloated
with machismo, both characters
being women sold Waller-Bridge.
She delivered a first season that
helped define a low-profile net-
work, recharge star Sandra Oh’sFrom left: Sandra Oh, story producer Jenny Robins and Waller-Bridge on the set of season
one of Killing Eve. Airing on both BBC America and AMC for season two, the drama saw its
ratings grow 67 percent and Emmy noms up from two to nine.“WHEN WOMEN
WRITE ABOUT SEX,
SEX BECOMES THE
HEADLINE.”
WALLER-BRIDGE, ON FLEABAG