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Joanna Scanlan: ‘I have called myself an alcoholic at times’

Joanna Scanlan - Rii Schroer
Joanna Scanlan - Rii Schroer

When Joanna Scanlan won the Bafta for Leading Actress at the beginning of the year, she made an acceptance speech that was so moving it reduced fellow thesps to tears. “Some stories have surprise endings, don’t they?” said the 60-year-old, in front of an audience of Hollywood luminaries that included Benedict Cumberbatch and Salma Hayek.

They might have thought that the Wirral-born actress was talking about her winning film, After Love. A gritty drama, made on a shoestring budget, it sees Scanlan take on the role of a convert to Islam who discovers that her recently dead husband had a secret family. But Scanlan has an even more compelling story of her own, one that she hinted at in post-win interviews, when she thanked the NHS doctor who told her – when she was just 29 and in the midst of a breakdown – that if she didn’t do what she loved, she would never get well.

“His name was Dr Bloodworth,” she says, when we meet to record the new series of my mental health podcast, Mad World. Scanlan has never spoken in detail about the dark events that led to her becoming one of the nation’s best loved actresses, from her breakout role in The Thick of It, to her current incarnation as Ma Larkin in The Larkins, an ITV adaptation of The Darling Buds of May.

She greets me cheerily in her wind cheater (she has come to the Telegraph offices alone, travelling from her home in Croydon on the train), and it is hard to see her as anything other than the jolly, warm woman who has lit up our screens for the best part of two decades.

Yet beneath lies a tale of depression so dark that she has previously only been able to skirt around it.

Joanna starred in The Thick of It as Terri Coverley - Des Willie
Joanna starred in The Thick of It as Terri Coverley - Des Willie

Scanlan is nervous to talk about it now, but thinks it is necessary. She is not looking to elicit sympathy by talking about her experiences of depression. She is simply trying to explain the long, complicated process that led to her standing on that Bafta stage last February, at the top of her game – a moment that might never have been had she not been able to get help for her mental illness.

“If I was to launch with a Mad World sort of generalisation,” she says, smiling, “it’s that you can’t do this alone. You can’t keep well alone.” She has forced herself here today, just as she forced herself this morning to do a strength and conditioning class on Zoom. “You’ve got to build the muscles that can move you from the place of isolation,” she says, when I ask her how she keeps the darkness at bay. “The desire to do duvet days, [to] smother yourself in custard and not pick up the phone at all. To be able to move from that into some exterior existence with others requires tools.”

She had what she describes as  “a very idyllic childhood” in North Wales. “We were outside all the time. I had a lot of animals around me, a lot of nature.” Her parents, Pat and Mike, were hoteliers. “They were young and busy and they were out a lot,” and when she was just six, she was packed off to boarding school. “It was particularly harsh, of course, in those days,” she says. “The damage is absolutely huge and needs a lot of work to unpick.”

Yet she has a go at unpicking it for me, as much as you can in a studio with a person you have never met before.

“This is a very important moment in my life,” says Scanlan, “one of those moments where I made a choice, which was never going to stand me in good stead for the rest of my life.”

What was that choice? “Well my parents dropped me off and said goodbye in the car park, and I actively remember the moment of saying ‘I will not cry, and I will never cry’. I pivoted towards the school, walked towards it, and thought ‘I’m going to make a great success of this. I’m going to turn it into something wonderful.’ And of course, I didn’t because I couldn’t cry. At boarding school, weeping in the dorm at night was not something anybody tended to do. It didn’t get you anywhere. And I decided I was never going to be homesick.”

Her mother wrote letters, but she never replied. “I just refused. Not consciously, of course. I was just so angry at some level, but couldn’t feel the anger because I couldn’t make the tears.” Instead, Scanlan “totally shut down”.

Joanna joined Bryony Gordon to tell her story on the Mad World podcast - Jeff Gilbert
Joanna joined Bryony Gordon to tell her story on the Mad World podcast - Jeff Gilbert

She was bright enough to pass exams, but behaved “extremely badly” to the point that she was expelled at 13. “One of the motivations for behaving badly was that you got time to spend with an adult. You’ve got this opportunity to be told off by a grown-up. And I craved some kind of grown-up conversation.”

She moved to another boarding school, closer to home, where she flirted with acting and was popular. “I didn’t have any problems making friends.” Her eyes almost twinkle. “But at the same time, I didn’t want to be there. I was a bit older and it got a bit more …” she searches for the right word. “I guess there was a kind of sinister side to it,” she says, finally. “I don’t know about you, but when I hit my teens, that darkness came into my world in a way that was really unfathomable.”

As a 14-year-old, she remembers “feeling suicidal”. She tells me about the time she locked herself in a school bathroom, before taking pills “with this attempt to kind of just to kill myself”.

“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever mentioned or even remembered it,” she says. “It was so normal to have to manage really huge, dark emotions. I can’t remember another occasion when I did that [attempted suicide], but I did behave in ways that took me into very dark places. The doctor was called a couple of times. I remember being put on Valium and feeling so disassociated that I decided not to take them.”

She remembers having a bottle of Clinique toner that was actually filled with gin “and I would have these little soirees [in her dorm room].” She laughs. “No, they would be the opposite of soirees.”

Alcohol was a big part of her childhood. “My father started life running a brewery. One of my grandmothers was an alcoholic who did, in fact, stop drinking when she got into her mid-60s, but by then a lot of damage had been done to the people around her and herself. Alcoholism was a big part of our family life. So I had [role] models. I did not like being a child. I did not like having no autonomy. I was desperate to be allowed to make choices about my own life. And having a drink was a huge part of that, as was smoking.”

Joanna starred opposite Bradley Walsh in ITV’s The Larkins - Sam Taylor
Joanna starred opposite Bradley Walsh in ITV’s The Larkins - Sam Taylor

Scanlan stopped drinking and smoking 30 years ago. I ask her if she considers herself an alcoholic. “I have called myself an alcoholic at times,” she nods. “Yes. In certain situations I have said I am an alcoholic without having gone through a lot of what many of my friends have gone through. And that is simply because I was 29, rather than 39. If I’d carried on, it would have got worse and worse.”

It became bad enough. She went to Cambridge, ostensibly to study law but really because she’d heard about the Footlights theatre group and wanted to have a crack at acting. As it was, she spent most of the time in her room drinking. “And that was really as a consequence of the trauma of encountering men. Which in my girls’ boarding school, I’d not really done.”

When she arrived, in 1980, it was the first year her college, had taken women. There were 39 of them. “We were known as the 39 steps,” says Scanlan, almost disbelieving. “There was this whole thing about climbing the 39 steps, and you can imagine what that involved. I mean, some of the very worst things that could happen did happen.”

Today, all she can bring herself to mention is the time a man broke into her room in the night by climbing through the window. “I woke up to find this person lying on my floor. I said ‘what are you doing?’ They were drunk, obviously. They sat on my bed and just looked at me and said ‘God, you’re so beautiful’. And as a vulnerable girl, [with] the desire in me to want to be desired, matched with the means by which men had access to me …” she stops. “That was something I couldn’t navigate.”

I ask what she said to the man on her bed. “I can’t remember. I can remember how I felt which was extremely confused. I didn’t know whether I’d been violated or whether I had been seduced and potentially had a boyfriend, which of course I wanted. Was this an action of derring-do, that I was supposed to admire? To be honest, you can hear in my voice now that there is still some sense of confusion. I know for the younger generation today there are many more conversations about consent and what that means.”

But Scanlan, and the 38 other women at her college, didn’t have those conversations back then. “You can look at it in so many ways,” she says. “You can say, oh, it’s just 18-year-old boys having hi-jinx. Or you can say, this is actually malicious intent. And I’m somewhere in the middle of that. But to me, it was a tremendous shock.”

She switched to a history degree and threw herself into all the university drama societies that were now at her fingertips. “That’s what the privilege of that kind of education is,” she says. “It’s access to resources.”

After Love
After Love

She loved acting but when she graduated she wrote endless letters to agents which largely went unanswered, so instead she took a job with a pension at Leicester Polytechnic where she lectured in drama. Then she slipped into a deep depression that would last for almost all of her twenties. “Not really coping, and in proper, proper depression,” she nods now.

Her GP referred her to a research programme at Guy’s Hospital that involved cognitive behavioural therapy. “It was the first time I’d had to talk about my emotional life at all. And actually, now looking back on it, it is a shock to me that there was no vocabulary. You were unhappy or upset, or seemingly lazy and unmotivated. That was the only vocabulary I remember, which was sort of: pull your socks up. Snap out of it.”

When she wasn’t working, she spent most of her time at home, drinking, “hopelessly lying in bed, not able to do anything”. Scanlan describes it as “parallel existence” where she would occasionally glimpse “a tiny, tiny chink of light, but I couldn’t prise that open to make it much wider”.

Then, at 29, “I had this massive, massive collapse. I woke up with what I thought was a hangover, or flu, went to see my parents, went straight to bed, woke up the next morning, started crying. And that went on day after day. Floods of tears. This physical feeling of a headache, sore throat, aching muscles. My mum took me to see the doctor, and a couple of weeks later they said I had chronic fatigue syndrome. And I just didn’t get better for months and months.”

She knew she had to go back to basics. She gave up booze and cigarettes, started doing yoga and took a photography course. But her anxiety was still running riot. It was the early Nineties, the height of the terrifying Aids campaign, and she was convinced it was this disease that she had.

Scanlan is astonishingly frank and articulate about this time of her life. She thinks her anxiety about Aids was in part due to sexual shame “which is not surprising given that I’d had a very religious upbringing and I had also lived through a period of time that was post-Pill and pre-Aids”.

Convinced she had been misdiagnosed, she was sent to see a consultant – the doctor who would change her life. “Dr Bloodworth, I think he is still alive,” she says, when I ask. “Maybe I should take the Bafta round to him?” A smile.

Dr Bloodworth ran a number of physical tests on her before he decided to embark on a different tack. “He asked me a couple of questions. He said: ‘What do you dream about? Did you ever have a desire to do another job?’ So I said ‘Well, I did hope to be an actor at some point.’ He paused for a moment and then said: ‘If you don’t go back to acting, you will be ill for the rest of your life.’”

Scanlan pauses. “It went like an arrow into my heart. I thought ‘I’m afraid that might be true’.” She says that the “nugget that is applicable to everyone” is that you have to do what you want to do, rather than what other people want you to do. “And finding that out is a very big part of growing up. I mean, I was still very immature at 29 and a lot of people get there a lot sooner than that.”

But a lot of people never get there at all, I say.

Joanna won the Best Actress award at the Baftas for her role in After Love - Karwai Tang
Joanna won the Best Actress award at the Baftas for her role in After Love - Karwai Tang

It’s tempting to write something here about the rest being history, but that doesn’t quite sum up the hard work that Scanlan has put into both her recovery and career. She started with stints in programmes like Peak Practice, before winning the role in 2005 that would cement her in the nation’s consciousness: that of the apathetic clipboard-wielding civil servant Terri Coverly in The Thick Of It. She has also written TV, with her friends Jo Brand and Vicki Pepperdine; their delicious 2009 comedy Getting On winning her a Royal Television Society award.

Now, at the age of 60, she finds herself feted by the Hollywood great and good. Not that she is allowing herself to get too carried away. Indeed, on the night of her win, all she really wanted was to go back to her hotel room for a cup of tea with her husband, an accountant called Neil whom she married in 2009. She has spoken in the past about how they met too late in life to have children, but they are clearly very happy, with a reasonably down to earth existence on the outskirts of south London.

Scanlan is well now. “That said, it can blindside you. You think you’ve got it sorted and you’ve not going to have this deep depression or anxiety, and then you wake up in the morning and it’s there.”

But the spiral of depression gets smaller, “and hopefully it is going in the right direction”. Life, she believes, “isn’t about being happy”. “I honestly don’t think the purpose of our existence is to be happy,” she says, “but I think it is to be authentic, and to be there as part of a community. And that means engaging with the darker elements in oneself.”

She is grateful she has had the opportunity to do that. “You need to know yourself in order to be able to act. Trying to do that when you’re 18 or 19?” She smiles in wonder. “My goodness, I couldn’t.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Joanna Scanlan on Bryony Gordon’s Mad World podcast using the audio player at the top of this article, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.