Tanya Reynolds on leaving Sex Education: ‘I like to think Lily is on Pluto with Ola & they’re just fingering the f**k out of each other’

I Hate You hilariously traces the messy stages of life (do we ever get to an unmessy stage of life?!?) and what that has looked like for Tanya I ask? “I’ve left my twenties now and I’m really quite happy about that,” she responds immediately. “My twenties felt like I was walking around wearing a pair of shoes that just did not fit properly and I had been hobbling around for 10 years. When I turned 30 and it was suddenly like, ‘I’m in these memory foam lovely made to measure clogs and this is lovely!’” Wonder what brand those shoes are? Would love to try them on! 

“My twenties were just 10 years of anxiety, dithering – so much dithering – and just so much mess caused by the dithering,” Tanya continues. “With absolutely no self-esteem, no clue what I was doing but I feel like I’m doing things well since I turned 30 last year. I’ve made a pact with myself to just do things with a bit more conviction. This messy period, which for me was just my entire twenties, was just an absence of steadfast conviction. It was a lot of not really trusting myself and not really knowing what I’m doing and just being a bit of a high functioning mess really.” I for one hard relate. 

“When I turned 30 I wanted to start being the woman that I’ve always wanted to become. I felt like it was time to stop playing. A lot of people get frightened about turning 30 and, but I was really excited about it because it felt like a whip, a ‘come on girl, get your sh*t together.’ I’m a lot more trusting of my instincts, myself, my decisions and believing myself now. I spent a long time gaslighting myself about everything just, ‘oh, you don’t really feel that, ‘ or ‘you don’t really think that.’ And now I’m like, ‘no, I do think that, and that is what I’m going to do!’” 

I wonder if Tanya’s career coinciding with the long overdue representation of messy, complicated women on screen has helped alleviate the pressure to be perfect, too. “A hundred percent,” she answers. “It is different now because we’ve had such excellent shows like Derry Girls. Traditionally in the past it was always boys that were allowed to be grotesque and comedies that were male led had permission to be silly, stupid and just funny like The Inbetweeners – with characters that were unlikable and it was so great to watch. Whereas with women, traditionally, there has always been a lot more responsibility on our shoulders to represent the best version of womanhood and represent women in a pristine way and that’s got exhausting. It’s one of the things that I really loved about I Hate You was like, ‘finally we can just do something funny and silly, that isn’t loaded with anything more serious.’” 

Then again, Tanya has never wanted to play to type and you can’t get more varied than going from playing the revenant’s sassy wife, Mrs Elton opposite Anya Taylor-Joy in the latest movie adaption of Emma to popping a crown on to play Queen Victoria in the latest adaptation of Oliver Twist, Dodger. “The goal is just to be as versatile as possible,” she says. “The more fun, hilarious, ridiculous, interesting, challenging the better. I could never have expected to play the roles I have done when I was at drama school. I remember getting my headshot done before I went to drama school and I was like, ‘I want to be taken seriously. I want people to see me as Juliet and a very serious actor.’ I showed my principal my headshot that I’d chosen and he laughed at it. I looked very good. I looked like me on an excellent day. And he laughed at me and was like, ‘that’s not you!’” 

“The roles that I ended up playing were really great for making me unselfconscious,” Tanya adds. “They helped me not take myself so seriously and you can’t really take yourself very seriously when you’re playing these characters. And superficially in terms of looks I’ve become incredibly –  and I have gone on a journey and it’s been harder at times – at peace with the way I look and that’s come from playing characters where you can’t think about looking good. I’ve never had to play anyone glamorous or beautiful or anything like that. That kind of takes the pressure off. It’s a horrible thing to even say that women have to think about these things, but sometimes you do, you think, ‘how am I looking in this shot?’ And it’s nice to not have to think about that because I’m playing a character that is so much more than the way that she looks. It’s made me in my personal life put a bit less pressure on the way I look because no, I’m more than that.”