“It was 1997 when The Full Monty came out, and there was so much hope in the air,” sighs Lesley Sharp. The canny, owl-eyed actor best known for playing DC Jane Scott in ITV’s Scott & Bailey (2010-2016) reminds me that was the year that Tony Blair’s election ended 18 years of Tory rule. At the time, she felt that things were finally going to get better for the working class communities who – like the Sheffield steelworkers celebrated in the film – had been left high and dry by the collapse of Britain’s heavy industry. Simon Beaufoy’s recession comedy fed into the cultural optimism of the period, turning its £2m budget into a whopping £200m profit and becoming the UK’s highest grossing film to date.
“But 26 years later,” says Sharp, “there are still communities all over the UK – not just in the North but in Kent, Sussex, Devon and Cornwall – where people are not being supported by their government. Not financially, emotionally, spiritually or philosophically. There are still so many people who don’t have enough of anything they need.”
Although he had resisted many lucrative offers for a sequel, Beaufoy finally found himself angry enough about the lack of progress to return to his old characters and explore how life had treated them in a new series for Disney+. Sharp – who was nominated for a BAFTA after playing Co-op cashier Jean in the original and who reprises that role in this series – was thrilled to discover that “while the film focused on the wit and warmth of those male characters, the new TV version gives equal space to the women”.
In the 25 years since we watched Jean cheerleading her husband Dave (Mark Addy) as he found the courage to get his kecks off for cash, Sharp explains that the couple’s roles have been reversed. “She was the one who saw what a beautiful, wonderful man he was and helped him rebuild his self esteem after he lost his job. But since then it’s been Dave’s turn to support Jean as she’s gone from being a teaching assistant to a teacher, and then a head teacher.”
But, chatting easily over Zoom from her London home, Sharp stresses that “although on one level Jean has been living the aspirational dream, the job isn’t what she’d hoped it would be. Instead of spending her time supporting teachers and children in the classroom, she’s having to manage a building which is falling down around her ears and is no longer under the aegis of the local council. She hasn’t got one place to go and complain to, she’s dealing with one of those dodgy companies that dodge and fudge and say things are not covered under the insurance. That’s overwhelming for her.”
It’s a problem rooted in reality. Last month the government finally announced it would be investing £450m into school buildings after research from the House of Commons library revealed that overall capital spending on school estate fell by 37 per cent (50 per cent in real terms) between 2009-10 and 2021-22, leaving ageing buildings – including some containing asbestos – at risk of collapse.
Having seen Sharp command the stage as a warrior in the lead role of Kae Tempest’s all-female adaptation of Euripides’ Philoctetes at the National Theatre in 2021, I’m a little surprised to learn that she had little confidence during her own school days. “I was an outsider” she shrugs, “not confident in how I looked or how I was”. Born in Manchester in 1960, she has told interviewers in the past that her sense of “not belonging” springs from being adopted at six weeks old. She was raised by a tax inspector and his wife in Merseyside but tells me she endured “a difficult time as a teenager because my mum was very ill. She died when I was fifteen.”
Although she never joined the school drama club – “that was for the in crowd” – Sharp found solace and escapism in a local drama group she calls a “misfits club”. There a drama coach called Tina Gibb noticed that her new recruit was struggling to process her grief and “without being overly sympathetic, without asking too much about that stuff, she saw what a relief it was for me, to turn up there on Wednesday evenings.” Acting offered an emotional escape valve which has made Sharp a passionate defender of arts on the curriculum.
“It’s not because everyone can or will want to end up on the stage or have their pictures hanging in the Tate. It’s about giving children an outlet, away from the things you might find difficult or that might be making you anxious. A space where they can explore the creative side of life. You can take that with you for the rest of your life.”
It was Gibb who encouraged the 18-year-old Sharp to apply to drama school in London. “I didn’t get in the first time because I was so nervous,” she says. But Gibb encouraged her to stay in the capital, work for a year and re-apply. She got her big screen break in Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) playing Bob’s wife Michelle and later played the hero’s sister in the 1989 film adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel The Rachel Papers. Although Amis never visited the film set, Sharp tells me she was “terribly sad” to hear of the author’s death last month. “I remember when I first read The Rachel Papers and I thought: who on earth are these clever, clever people? Martin was off-the-chart clever. And so elegant and graceful and sort of sweet about the fact his father never read his stuff. I think [his father] Kingsley got half way through one of his books before throwing it against a wall. Martin must have had nerves of steel to become a novelist just like his father, but to do it entirely on his own terms.”
When it came to planning her own future, Sharp tells me she got good advice from Mike Leigh while working on his 1993 black comedy, Naked. “He told me ‘there’s no such thing as ‘a career’ in this business’”. At the time she was “a bit nonplussed by that”. But quickly realised that “acting isn’t a meritocracy. If you work in a law firm you can get your nose down and take the steps to ensure that by the time you’re fifty you’re where you aimed to be at 25. Sitting in that office and earning X amount of money. Our profession doesn’t work like that.”
Naked was about a conspiracy theorist. One of my friends – a big Line of Duty fan – recently asked me if I thought the volume of top-level betrayal in our best loved boxset telly might be responsible for the rise of conspiracy theories in real life. I run the thought past Sharp because the other TV show she’s promoting today – the crime thriller Before We Die, second series on Channel 4 – is loaded with LOD-style double-crosses. But she laughs me off. “No. I don’t think TV drama is responsible for conspiracy theories! I think there are other people out there creating that!”
But she’s very proud to be part of a golden age of female TV detectives. Sally Wainwright (who’d go on to create Happy Valley) was one of the writers on Scott & Bailey which did a great job of showing women balancing the demands of crime-solution and domestic reality. “It was also a fantastically accurate police procedural,” says Sharp. “Before We Die isn’t a police show. It’s a thriller. Hannah is a policewoman, but she’s a woman who’s made a fatal mistake as a mother which has landed her son in mortal danger. Her adversary is a woman whose son Hannah has killed. With it’s themes of revenge, restitution and parental anxiety I think it takes its cues from Greek and Jacobean tragedy.”
Because Before We Die is based on a Scandinavian series of the same name, there’s a relaxed relationship between Hannah, her ex husband and the son with whom they share sneaky fags that can seem a bit un-British. But Sharp flags the messiness lurking beneath the relaxed Swedish arrangement. “The tragedy is that there is this disconnect between Hannah and her son, who got overlooked in the divorce, ended up dealing drugs and involved with international crime gangs. She’s desperate to repair that damage.”
Meanwhile, back in The Full Monty, her character Jean is a mother who has lost a child. It means that her relationship with Dave is at breaking point and that’s incredibly sad because she notes that of all the couples in the original film Jean and Dave were the most respectful and loving. “They’re in a place that’s pretty common,” says Sharp. “There are no great rows. No slamming of doors or ultimatums. Because they can’t talk about their loss their marriage is dying a death by a thousand paper cuts… If you can’t talk about something like baby loss with the only other person who understands then it must be incredibly lonely.” She shakes her head slowly. “But Simon and Alice [Nutter, Beaufoy’s co-writer] wrote about it so well. They put it there and it’s awful. But it isn’t at the forefront of their minds all the time because life doesn’t work like that. Life goes on. There’s still humour.”
For while Sharp may be critical of governments, she is a champion of everyday people. She thinks The Full Monty’s depiction of its characters is accurate. “They don’t sit in a corner and moan,” she nods, emphatically. “They don’t cry and complain. They face their hardship with good heart and warmth. Community spirit. They have a lot of shit to deal with but they approach it with a lot of positivity and great energy.” Sharp smiles, with sparkling conviction. “I think that is very true of the UK. We are able to find a way to have a laugh, even when things are really dark.”
The Full Monty is on Disney+ from 14 June; Before We Die series two is coming soon to Channel 4