Phoebe Waller Bridge covers the latest issue of Vanity Fair, mostly to highlight how much her life has changed since Fleabag. She’s been in a Star Wars movie, she co-wrote the last James Bond script, and now she’s partnering with Harrison Ford on Indiana Jones’ last ride – she plays Indiana’s goddaughter, and as it turns out, Harrison is a big Fleabag fan. She also inked a lucrative development deal with Amazon Prime several years ago, but she still has nothing to show for it other than a couple of projects which never got off the ground, although she does talk extensively about a Lara Croft series she’s working on (or was working on before the writers’ strike). Some highlights from VF:
Fleabag changed everything: “Fleabag changed my career, and then suddenly you’re so in the moment. And then years pass, pandemics happen, you do a Star Wars, you do an Indiana Jones. It gets more and more surreal.”
Harrison Ford wanted Phoebe for Indiana Jones: She first heard about the project from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who broached the idea at the behest of Ford, who—would you believe?—is a huge Fleabag fan. The two women met for dinner in March 2020. Kennedy told her that James Mangold was on board to write and direct this final Indiana Jones picture, and that he wanted to really lean into what it meant to be an aging adventurer. The idea intrigued Waller-Bridge. “People have this idea of when [a franchise] should end,” she says. “And I always think the interesting stuff comes when you push a little bit beyond the end. What happens after the conversation? What happens after someone gets in a cab and goes home?”
Doing stunt work: “I’ve always been such a lanky, gangly kind of awkward physical person, so I was as surprised as you are. I remember quite early on saying to Jim and Kathleen, ‘So I’ll be doing lots of training for my stunt debut?’ And they were like, ‘I think it would be funnier if you don’t.’ What I love about the character is that she leaps before she looks. And she will just jump on the back of that car not knowing if she’s going to survive or not, and it’s just through her will that she manages to stay on.”
On Harrison Ford: “He made it very clear to me that I was his equal from the first day, and that was very liberating and allowed me to be mischievous and silly.”
She’s not replacing Indy: “There’s no replacing Indiana Jones in any way. But I feel like the character herself—she did feel fresh on the page, and there is a sense of, is there room in the world for someone like this?” She reminds me that Indy was always a flawed, reluctant hero, a professor who’s scared of snakes and gets sore after his punch-ups. “So I do think there’s room for a slightly clumsier, bruised, limping female action star, maybe, in the future.”
Developing a Lara Croft series for Amazon: “God, it literally felt like that teenager in me saying: Do right by her, do right by Lara! The opportunity to have, as we were talking earlier, a female action character…. Having worked on Bond and having worked as an actor on Indy, I feel like I’ve been building up to this. What if I could take the reins on an action franchise, with everything I’ve learned, with a character I adore, and also just bring back some of that ’90s vibe?” The project aroused “big roaring instincts” in her. “And it’s such a wonderful feeling to think you know what to do.”
The industry of reboots and remakes. “I feel like when you’re working in the industry, you’ve got to ride the waves and lean in. There’s room to do something really quite dangerous. And if I can do something dangerous and exciting with Tomb Raider, I already have an audience of people who love Lara and hopefully will continue to. And that is a very unusual position to be in. It’s the old Trojan horse.”
Dropping out of the Mr. & Mrs. Smith series with Donald Glover. “I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it—still care about it. And I know it’s gonna be brilliant. But sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave the party. You don’t want to get in the way of a vision.” Creative collaboration is like a marriage, she says. “And some marriages don’t work out.”
Whether she shows her work to her boyfriend Martin McDonagh: “We don’t really share anything beforehand,” she says. Because criticism would be demoralizing? “Probably a bit of that. And also, I just really, really fancy him. So if you show someone something, and you fancy them, it can become this blur.” Having admired his work long before she met him, Waller-Bridge of course wants him to admire her work as well. “It’s really useful being with someone who I think is a genius, it just ups your game. I would always have wanted Martin McDonagh to think of my work as good, whether I was with him or not. I find out now, either way!”
In some ways, I do think PWB has kind of “sold out” – she’s an artist with an idiosyncratic, original voice and I’m sure there was a temptation to simply stay in that particular lane of creating TV shows, acting in roles which are Fleabag-like, and doing independent films or whatever. I like that she had zero qualms about taking on wildly different things, going to America, working on big franchises and entering the Hollywood studio system in a big way. I get the sense that she’s bitten off more than she can chew, but she’s enjoying the ride and figuring things out along the way. Which is good – it’s interesting to see someone like PWB operate without some longterm career plan.
Cover & IG courtesy of Vanity Fair.
