Sarah Solemani on life with her new best friend Bridget Jones

“There are some sentences that you think you would never say to your spouse,” she is telling me. ‘Don’t touch that. It’s got poo on it’ is one of them. We’ve been toilet training. Having a child is the most sensory experience a human being can go through. The sense of another human being in my life, she’s only two, is pretty dominant.”

For those of us who know Solemani best from her appearances in the really rather rude and rather good warts-and-all BBC3 sitcom Him & Her, the fact that she is talking about her daughter Soraya’s potty habits feels somehow right. It’s like a glimpse of an episode of the series we never got round to seeing. Just replace Solemani’s real-life partner Daniel with Russell Tovey and you’ve got a sitcom episode just waiting to be written.

But Him & Her – like BBC3 if you believe TV channels only exist if they exist on television – is a thing of the past now and Solemani’s career – and life – has moved on. You may have seen her in Bad Education opposite Jack Whitehall, or The Wrong Mans, opposite James Corden. But now there’s a part in the new Bridget Jones movie and a starring role in the new TV thriller The Five which started on Sky1 last night. 

That’s the reason we’re here in this room in London. And if you ask her about it she’ll tell you. But she’s not all business. She’ll talk about anything. About baby poo, about the fact that having a child is a good reminder that we don’t live in a post-sexist society.

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“Luckily I’m supported by my partner who has never once suggested a lesser workload on my part is the answer which isn’t the case for all my friends.”), about Noel Gallagher (“I met Noel recently. I said ‘I went to Knebworth.’ ‘Did you,’ he said. Me too. Was it any good?’”), or about the iniquities of Nescafe. Just as well the PR has brought in real coffee.  

It’s Friday afternoon and we’re in her home town. She arrives all flashing dark eyes and flashing cleavage. It’s only April, Sarah, you’ll catch a cold I am tempted to say but I don’t want to dent my feminist credentials. 

Anyway, I’m too busy asking her how good she can do a Northern Irish accent. Very good it turns out.“Puberty, paternity, let’s have a party,” she annunciates in her best Ian Paisley. Her mum had been part Northern Irish, you see. Raised as Plymouth Bretheren (though she would become proudly aethiest). Her dad was raised Persian Jewish. You can decide for yourself which is the more exotic element.

She grew up in a “slightly neurotic Jewish family where every animal you see you say shoo to”. Hence the slight nervousness around animals. It’s why she would make a terrible vet.

“I respect animals. I respect dogs but I couldn’t … look up them.” I’m sorry, gentle readers, but she is just a natural tone-lowerer. And we still haven’t got to the Judi Dench anecdote.

Anyway, her parents were teachers. They met in the staff room. Childhood was surrounded by her mum’s ethnic throws masks, Buddhas and plants, by books and a general lefty atmosphere. “I didn’t meet a Tory until I went to Cambridge. I thought they were just on television.”

Unsurprisingly, education was held up as a life goal and Solemani was dedicated to her studies. Did she ever rebel? “We were swots. Our rebellion was: ‘Anna hasn’t done her geography homework. Who’s going to call her mum?’”

That said, she started going out to parties at 14. “I had a London life from very young. They tried to rein that in but I ticked all the other boxes so they had to let me have that one.”

She paints a picture of her teenage self finding her feet in the world, “swaggering down the street like I was Liam Gallagher. It was pre-Iraq, Blair had just got in, British music was a global entity. It was a special time for me.”

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She was interested in acting, too. She applied for the National Youth Theatre, was on the West End stage opposite Linda Gray in The Graduate when she was still in her late teens. A swot and a show-off, you might think.

By then, though, life had changed dramatically. Because when she was just 16 her mother died.

“I don’t think it hit me until I went to university. I was academic and I had the National Youth Theatre which was a light for me in that dark time because I felt very free and very safe and was also discovering something that I could do. I had a lot of support.

“But when I got to Cambridge that went and I struggled with the work and that’s when I felt the closest I ever came to a depressive state. That’s when it hit me. That’s when I needed my mother.”

That need returned when she became a mother herself. She wishes she had her own mum to turn to for advice and support. It’s only natural.

But her mother’s death is almost half her lifetime ago now. “It does affect you but when you’ve been in that dark, hopeless, tragic space you’re aware that it’s all going to end. You’re aware that it will happen.”

Maybe, she says, her drive comes from the depth of her teenage suffering. “Also a gratitude for health and happiness,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d be as happy as I am now. Ever.”

How did her dad take losing his wife? “Oh God, it destroyed him. They say it’s harder for men. I don’t know. I mean, he went mad. He’d probably agree with that. He went a bit mad. He’s fine now.”

The loss was still raw when she went to university. She had always wanted to do the Oxbridge thing, she admits. “I think most people with a competitive streak if they’re really honest with themselves are drawn to Oxbridge.”

That said, you don’t get the impression she really enjoyed her time there. “I spent years after going ‘God, that was full of dicks.’ And it’s only recently that I’ve gone ‘oh God, I must have been such a dick. Maybe I was the biggest dick there.’”

Used to multicultural London, she found Cambridge geographically and culturally restricting. “They’re trying to be more diverse but it’s very overachieving, middle-class white.”

And not very Marxist. All the Marxist professors were at Oxford. As a result, her essays praising Lenin didn’t go down well. But she made friends and developed her fierce work ethic. And she did get to be vice-president of the Footlights. No chance of getting to be president then? She gives me a look. Suffice to say, she was the only woman in the Footlights during her time. 

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Comedy was a serious business at Cambridge. “We were all really passionate and really opinionated about what comedy was.”
Are you still? “I am cautious about the purists who are as disgusted by Mrs Brown’s Boys as they are about the civil war in Syria. I’m not in that camp.”

Hmm, Sarah, I tell her. I might be. 

She was still at Cambridge when she got her first film role, in Mrs Henderson Presents, Stephen Frears’s movie about the infamous Windmill Theatre and its post-war all-nude revues. Solemani was one of the nudes in question. That must have been strange, shuttling between academe and being starkers in a studio? “Really strange. I was reading Hobbes’s Leviathan and then standing naked behind Judi Dench.

“We were so inexperienced. We were just running around and singing songs about Stephen Frears being a dirty old man. Poor guy. He was trying to make this huge film and we were just …” She pauses, then shifts the blame.

“I blame that Natalia Tena,” she continues. Tena went on to appear in Game of Thrones but back then, Solemani says, she was outrageous.
“She would do fanny farts on the dressing room in front of Judi Dench. But you sort of need that. When you’re being naked for that long you need to not give a f***. We really didn’t and I feel terribly apologetic to all the people who were trying to make that film. We were just running around, these bare-faced vaginas.”

While you process that image it should be said that Mrs Henderson Presents was something of a false start for Solemani. Yes, there were other acting jobs but none of them worked and she ended up at the start of her twenties getting evicted and sleeping on her dad’s sofa. She could see poverty out of the corner of her eye. 

To keep the wolves from her dad’s door, she got a job in a call centre. It turned out she was quite good at it too. It taught her how to pitch to producers, she says.

Getting cast as Becky in Him & Her raised her profile substantially. She remains very fond of the programme, can recognise herself in the part she played. This might seem strange given that she admits she’s driven, something you could never accuse Becky of. But in her downtime, she says, she can see echoes. “I have quite a Becky and Steve relationship,” she says of her marriage. “I would say not so disgusting but that wouldn’t be true. We’re foul. Yeah, in my personal life it’s much more relaxed really.”

I’m guessing it’s not just Judi Dench who knows about fanny farts then.

If you missed The Five last night it’s a thriller based on a Harlan Coben novel. Soleamani plays a doctor. It’s a slick murder mystery but, she points out, it has its comic moments. “I’m not interested in drama that just bashes you around the head with tragedy and makes you feel you want to go and have a lie down in a dark room with a paracetamol.” 

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Then there’s the new Bridget Jones movie, Bridget Jones’s Baby. Is she allowed to talk about it yet? “If I say anything I’ll be assassinated on the way home.” She does anyway. “I play her new best friend. I’m the new young friend who wants to have fun and tries to get her laid.”

If it’s as successful as its predecessors it could be something of a calling card for her. “What other British comic female character has a global franchise? Ab Fab’s doing a film now but I can’t think of many other things. People across cultures and countries know Bridget Jones.”

And Renee Zellweger is so good in the title role, she says. She’s a great clown, Solemani suggests. And no one can accuse the films of not finding the fun in feminism. “I guess since the [original] films came out we have seen a rise in a kind of authentic female voice.

With Caitlin Moran and the rise of feminist writers and thinkers it’s nice for that to be accompanied by some light relief.”

Like her heroine Emma Thompson, Solemani likes to mix punchlines with politics. Last year Solemani backed Yvette Cooper in the Labour leadership race in a column in the New Statesman. I’m not sure she’s changed her mind since. “Do I feel Jeremy Corbyn is an authentic man with integrity? Yes. But I’m not into party politics for reassurance of my own ethics. I’m in party politics to seek change.

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And change comes from holding office and being in power. So I guess the jury’s out. We’ve got the May elections coming up but I want to see the surge of support for Corbyn among party members to be echoed by the population at large.”

That might take a while, of course. Still, she’ll not be twiddling her thumbs in the meantime. There are scripts to write, parts to play.

“There’s a long way to go and a lot to do,” she says before she disappears to have her photograph taken. That’s the driven girl who lurks behind the rude girl.  

In the meantime there’s toilet training to be getting on with. 
The Five continues on Sky 1 on Friday nights. Bridget Jones’s Baby goes on general release in the autumn.