Lydia Leonard may not be a well-known name, but she has played many of them. From Tony-nominated turn as Anne Boleyn in the West End and Broadway productions at Wolf Hall to as Jackie Onassis on stage and Virginia Woolf on television, not to mention her upcoming appearance as Cherry Blair in The Crown, the 40-year-old becomes incredibly famous and impressive women entirely in her footsteps. But none of them turned out to be as scary as her last role.
“It was probably the most nervous I’ve ever been,” says Leonard, leaning anxiously over the picnic table in front of a café in East London. – Well, terrible. She is getting better again. “I mean, excited.”
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Whether Leonard is actually nervous, terrified, or excited — or some combination of the three — would be perfectly understandable. She is about to play the lead role in the British remake of Call My Agent !, the French comedy series that became a worldwide hit during the pandemic. The show’s star, Camille Cotin – who plays the cool talent agent Andrea with a sour tongue – has ranged from domestic success to worldwide acclaim in the show’s four series. In the UK version renamed Ten Percent, Leonard plays Andrea’s character, Rebecca. She is also one of the many admirers of the French actor – and this is her legacy that Leonard is most worried about living. “I was really in love with Camille Cotin,” she explains.
As enchanted as she was by her Parisian colleague, Leonard knew she had to wipe all traces of Cotin out of her mind, to break away from the original show immediately, “because it’s not helpful if you come close to something about yourself.” This was especially important given that both characters are very much cut out of the same fabric: both Rebecca and Andrea are incredibly confident, strong women with a chaotic love life and the ability to intimidate junior staff – and often viewers as well. (Not much cut from the same fabric is Leonard, who is palpably nervous and tends to guess herself: she is constantly reviewing the answers to even the most innocuous questions.)
To really leave his mark as Rebecca, Leonard sought inspiration in his own life. Instead of experimenting with agents, she recalled a collection of Soho hardcore media women she befriended through her cousin in the early ’00s. “I would ride in their coats when I was 24 and they were in their 30s. It was all about expenses and alcoholic lunches. ” She even worked briefly for one of them at the time, answering a phone call from a media company, and directed the insolence she witnessed in her image of Rebecca.
“When I was young, you succeeded when you were the head of FHM. This has never been my dream ‘
In fact, translating a show that felt typically French (chic, witty, but also often melodramatic and farcical) into something recognizably British was the mission of the entire Ten Percent team. They wisely attracted John Morton – the screenwriter behind the comedy series Twenty Twelve and W1A, known for his distinctively tense and jargon-laden dialogues – to turn the stylish original into a comedy in the workplace full of anxiety. “We’re not as cool as the French, so it’s a little more unpleasant,” Leonard said.
However, the United Kingdom managed to compete on the front of the star power. The sumptuous list of cameos of the French version – Juliette Binoche, Monica Bellucci, Isabelle Huppert – has been replaced by a number of big British names, including Emma Corinne, Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West. The main cast is just as impressive, starring Jim Broadbent, Jack Davenport and Maggie Steed as three of the other agents.
Yet the show’s initial appeal remains the same in both versions: there is something irresistibly aimed at seeing actors play agents who desperately quarrel, defend, advise, and often manipulate other actors. And while this makes the agent’s life seem extremely stressful, you feel most sorry for the actors. The first two episodes of the British version portray the action as dizzyingly uncertain and full of rejection: a storyline includes old friends Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams who believe they were cast in the same role: a potentially devastating ego problem for which agents they have to find a miraculous solution.
Call for casting … Leonard plays Rebecca, with Prasana Puvanaraja, Maggie Steed and Jack Davenport in Ten Percent, the British remake of Call My Agent! Photo: Bron Studios / Rob Youngson
Leonard can certainly connect; she says she never truly believes she actually has a role until it’s safe on set. “And even then, you think you’ll probably be fired at least for the first week – as long as you don’t have significant things in the box that you know will cost them too much to shoot again without you.”
Less connected, Leonard believes, is the plot of the first episode of the show, in which Kelly MacDonald loses a role in a Hollywood blockbuster because she looks too old. The plot is almost a scene-by-scene remake of the opening episode of the French version (the historical rainbows diverge later in the series), in which film star Cecil de France is almost persuaded by an agent to undergo cosmetic surgery to secure a role in a film. of Quentin Tarantino. Leonard says nothing like this has happened to her. “No, no one told me personally to make adjustments,” she replied quickly.
Cosmetic surgery is a sensitive topic for Leonard – but not for the reasons you might expect. In 2017, she gave a newspaper interview in which she talked about her replacement by Rebecca Hall in the film version of Frost / Nixon. (She played Frost’s partner Caroline Cushing in the original theatrical production, and while her co-stars Michael Sheen and Frank Langela were cast in the Hollywood adaptation, she wasn’t.) optimistic about her chances, saying, “No, honey. It’s about bone structure. Now I will not be the one to tell you to have plastic surgery… “The article quotes Leonard’s response as:” I thought: well, it sounds like you’re telling me to have plastic surgery! “
That, Leonard says, is “nonsense.” Or rather, a joke that did not contain the printed retelling; her agent was not serious in her suggestion that her client go under the knife. Leonard was “quite upset” about the interview (not surprising, considering she’s still on the same agency and from the drama school). This is partly why she looks so anxious and unlike Rebecca today: she says she is afraid to talk to reporters about the incident. (Before our meeting, she went swimming in an attempt to calm down.)
Lydia Leonard… “Nobody told me to make adjustments myself.” Photo: Linda Nylynd / Guardian
And yet, is it so outrageous to believe that an agent can offer surgery to his client? It still happens in ten percent. Leonard thinks this is probably a thing of the past. “Let’s remember Call my agent!” “It was written the last few years,” she said. “You hear about people who are told to lose weight and what not, but hopefully [nowadays] it’s quite inappropriate for anyone to offer. ” (A few weeks later, Leonard asked for a phone call to clarify her thoughts. Since then, she has spoken to her agent about the cosmetic surgery joke, who told her that although the proposal was not serious in her case, they “Absolutely encouraged to say such things to people – so it is appropriate, not as if it did not happen. “)
Whatever the exact pressure of the industry on women, it’s hard to get away from the fact that acting is a profession that can be designed to make people feel as self-aware as possible. “Part of the job is to look in the mirror for two hours every morning while someone is doing your makeup, or to look at yourself on the big screen – that’s definitely not good,” Leonard agrees. Her new tactic is to watch her performances on her phone, as the small, low-quality picture makes it harder to analyze the finer details. “There’s enough distance: I can understand that they’ve told the story well, and I shouldn’t go into this thing too carefully.”
Leonard is no stranger to self-examination; she has been doing it all her life. In fact, that’s part of the reason she wants to be an actor in the first place. The original seed was sown, she thinks, with its alliterative name. “Parents of friends would be like, ‘Lydia Leonard!’ That sounds like an actor! ”Then there was her obsession with Winona Ryder (“ I had a lot of pictures of her on my wall ”). Most important, however, was the layout of her children’s bedroom at her family’s home in Hampshire. “It’s a bit psychotic, but I had a really big mirror in the corner of my room and I had a lot of conversations with myself about it – I made faces and voices. Very narcissistic and crazy. ” The kind of setting that could easily encourage acting awareness of how you are.
After an initial refusal – she spent the intervention year traveling with a backpack and working at Selfridges – Leonard got a place at Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which has a reputation as a hyperselective greenhouse for serious acting talent (past graduates include Daniel Day-Lewis, Olivia Coleman, Jeremy Irons and Naomi Harris). It sounds like a lifetime opportunity, but Leonard is reluctant to sing the praises …
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