Remember,” Emily Atack addresses herself, mock-solemnly, “this isn’t a therapy session. This isn’t a therapy session.” She’s fresh from a photoshoot and looks exactly like her character in the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals: lush, blown-out, long blond hair, huge features gleaming with gloss and sparkle, a fitted black suit straight out of the 80s, pointy shoes … “Can I take my shoes off?” Of course you can take your shoes off, I say. Of course I would like nothing more than for you to treat this like a therapy session.
Atack had a baby boy three months ago, and yesterday, she says, “I left my partner and Barney sleeping in the morning, day one of the promo, and it was so beautiful and calm, my beautiful baby and lovely partner, and I thought: ‘I don’t know if it gets much better than this.’”
As adorable as her new-mother softness is, first we need to rewind to a year ago, and the set of Rivals. At that point, she hadn’t even got together with her partner, the nuclear physicist Alistair Garner, though they did know each other from childhood. She was playing Sarah Stratton, a classic Jilly Cooper heroine/antiheroine. The sexual and class politics of Cooper’s writing are complicated: Stratton is a young woman in a hurry, who lures a loathsome Tory MP out of his marriage then cheats on him constantly, with the ex-world showjumping champion Rupert Campbell-Black, naturally (keep up, non-Cooper-fans – this is stuff you’re going to need to know).
“Women like her have been villainised for ever,” says Atack. “If they’re the mistress, they’re a slut, they’re thick, they’ve got nothing to offer but their boobs, their sexuality.” In Cooper’s books, though, Stratton (and others like her – there are heaps of mistresses) is neither villainised nor mocked, even while all the touchstones for mockery seem to be in place (she’s constantly getting caught naked, for instance). You can see she’s on the make, but you’re rooting for her anyway. Atack is perfect in the role, with her unusual mix of guilelessness and self-awareness; indeed, the casting is wall-to-wall brilliant, from David Tennant’s slimy Tony Baddingham to Bella Maclean’s Taggie. “It was the best job I’ve ever done in my life,” Atack says.
Nevertheless, looking at the 80s through a modern lens is a tricky business. “You have to do it right; you have to do it carefully,” she says. “I wouldn’t have said yes to it if I didn’t feel it was going to comfortably portray these situations.” In Rivals – indeed, across the whole Campbell-Black saga – men sexually assault women, and yet those same women immediately fall in love with them; even the most sympathetic, non-predatory men are still a patriarchal nightmare, and you’ll really ruin it for yourself if you think too hard about the limits of female solidarity and the expectation of its non-existence. Rivals works because of the performances, Dominic Treadwell-Collins’s whip-smart script and also, because there’s no point pretending the 80s weren’t like that. “There’s a generation of people my mum’s sort of age who say, ‘Oh yeah, I got groped all the time,’ for whom that is completely normal behaviour,” Atack says. “That’s why it’s very difficult sometimes to discuss it with your parents – for me personally, anyway.”
Atack, 34, grew up in Bedfordshire, somewhere between showbiz aristocracy and royalty – her mother, Kate Robbins, is a singer and actor; her dad, Keith Atack, a singer with the 70s band Child. Paul McCartney is a cousin twice removed; her aunt is Amy Robbins, who’s been in pretty much every British TV show you could name. “We grew up in privilege, you know: we had this huge house. But we went to just a regular school, and we hung around with boys, smoking and drinking, with my parents’ celeb mates going: ‘Why aren’t you sending them to a private school?’ My parents really didn’t want that. They wanted us to be classless. Do people say working-class any more? I went to school with working-class people, so in my head I was working class. Driving around in a shit Nova with naughty boys, I was known as the posh girl, but I was not posh.”
In 2007, when she was 16, her parents had a “really awful divorce – we lost everything. They’re best mates now, so it all had a happy ending, but at the time, it was really, really difficult. We lost the house, my brother had to go live with my aunt and uncle. I dropped out of school. Me and my sister [Martha] moved to London, lived in a flat on our own and we didn’t see our parents very much for a while.”
Leaving school was not a big deal to Atack. “I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew I didn’t need a maths GCSE for it,” and anyway, she says disarmingly, “all I was interested in was snogging boys. They literally took over my life, they were all I could think about. I was quite vain.” She landed a part, almost immediately, in a show called Blue Murder, “playing a footballer’s girlfriend, a bit naughty, a bit boisterous and aggressive. Fine, just put loads of makeup on.”
And then The Inbetweeners: it’s arguably even more bizarre to look at this show, and Atack’s role, from a modern vantage point, because it wasn’t even that long ago (it was broadcast between 2008 and 2010). I’m struggling to imagine a role in a family-ish show, now, being called Charlotte “Big Jugs” Hinchcliffe; as winningly as Atack plays her, the character had no arc of her own and existed purely as a vehicle to lampoon the hapless sexual awakening of the four male leads. But she fought hard for that part: “I was a very vulnerable teenager, but there was an air of kind of naive confidence in me. I thought, ‘I need this job, I need to pay my rent.’ And from there, my life changed for ever.”
The Inbetweeners was an immediate success, and Atack was welcome everywhere.
“All of a sudden, I was getting recognised in the street; when I went to clubs and bars with my fake ID, because I was on TV, they’d let me in, bring over a big bottle with a firework in it, because you’re the girl from The Inbetweeners. I really enjoyed that people were really fun and nice to me.
“This is where I get confused,” she continues. “And I was confused then. I didn’t have a clue. I was told, ‘You’ve got a photoshoot today’ and it would be for Loaded magazine, or for FHM to promote series two of The Inbetweeners. So I was all, ‘Yep, clothes off, bikini on. Whatever.’ Genuinely, I had no problems with that – I enjoyed those shoots. I was celebrating my youth and my sexuality in beautiful locations, wearing gorgeous underwear, with lovely crews of people and photographers, and I fucking loved it. It was great. I naively didn’t think what narrative was being painted for me.”
What came next, as she detailed in the 2020 BBC documentary Asking For It, was a torrent of online harassment and abuse, from fat-shaming to cyber-flashing. “People go, ‘How can you not expect it? You’re stood up there in your pants, going, ‘Look at me!’ But in my head, I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t putting myself out there in an overtly sexual way. Genuinely, I was just doing a photoshoot to promote my work.”
In a pattern that will be familiar to observers of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, for whom dog-whistle racism in the tabloids turned into an onslaught of racial harassment on social media, the red tops would write an article about Atack’s character, or her dating life, or her weight, and it would unleash hell (back in the 00s, on chat forums; later, on Instagram and Twitter). “I’d never had an issue with my weight before,” she remembers. “I’d never even given it thought that I was overweight. I was a child, really. I was tiny. I must have been a size eight. And there was an article saying that I was overweight, then another, saying, ‘But it is good that, for once, we’re seeing a curvier girl playing one of the sexy roles.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Am I curvy?’ I couldn’t believe it was even a topic.” Then screeds of people would be saying, “‘She’s clearly very overweight, this girl’, ‘She needs to lay off the bacon sandwiches.’ All of a sudden, my weight was a thing. And since then, my weight has always been a thing.”
It made her insecure, “but the word I always land on”, she says, “is ‘confused’. When it came to press and headlines, I was either ‘flaunting my ample assets’, or they’d deliberately try to get the most hideous photo of me with chins, bending over, so they’d say, ‘Pals fear for Emily as she gains weight.’ But then, on the other hand, I was being put on the front cover of FHM as the sexiest woman in Britain. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t know if I was really beautiful or really ugly. The thing I was seeing in the mirror started to disintegrate and change. I’d obviously been seeing something different to everybody else. I just didn’t understand.”
It was the same pattern with her love life – the 2010s featured endless round-ups of her dating history, always slightly insinuating. Did she know about so-and-so when she was seen with Seann Walsh; did she think Jack Grealish was single when they exchanged numbers? It was all sour, antiquated, scarlet-woman stuff, and even when she started dating Garner, “there were so many articles which were really hurtful, trying to make out there was something untoward about my relationship. There were headlines saying that I was dating my cousin, which is very damaging, very awful. We’re not related in any way. I think some family members found that very tough.” (Garner is Atack’s aunt’s husband’s son by a previous marriage; so technically a step-cousin, if that’s even a thing.)
“It’s anger towards women,” she concludes. “Men are so angry with sexy women. It’s like, ‘We’ll give you a little bit of power, but not too much. Here, you look nice on this front cover, but also, you’re a fat, ugly pig.’”
After The Inbetweeners, she did 13 films at a lick, “playing very similar roles: I was always the bit of totty.” She was living in Kentish Town in north London with a gang of friends who had regular jobs, and felt blessed: still with the fireworks in a bottle whenever she went to a club, “a jobbing actress, living off cheese boards and cheap red wine”. These mainly British caper movies (Get Lucky, Outside Bet) “always promised, ‘This is going to be the film that will change your life for ever, that will send you to Hollywood,’” but Los Angeles was pretty brutal. “I remember I went to one meeting and she said to me: we’re not even going to think about seeing you again until you’re a size two [the UK equivalent of a size six]. I was so thin, and I was so hungry, and it wasn’t good enough. So I thought, ‘I need to go home and have a cheeseburger.’”
Appearing on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2018 was a turning point, and not just because, as she describes, “not too many people thought I was a bell-end, so I did really well in the jungle” (she was the runner-up the year Harry Redknapp won). That led her to write a one-woman standup show, and landed her a TV comedy series, The Emily Atack Show.
“Even though that was one of the best times of my life, I still got torn apart by men saying, ‘Women aren’t funny.’ You think people don’t say that any more; well, they do. If you look like me, if you wear fake tan and eyelashes and you watch Love Island, you can’t do comedy, you know? But that’s why I did my one-woman show, Talk 30 to Me, because I wanted to create comedy for those girls. It was for the false-eyelash-wearing, Love Island-watching, prosecco girls. There was no comedy for them.”
No question, Atack has come out on top. Rivals is the show of the year (for my money), work life is great, home life is great, her eyelashes are great – but what a trial she’s had to get here. “I’m really standing firm in saying there is a massive issue here: misogyny isn’t going anywhere,” she says. If living well is the best revenge, the best revenge against ambient, broad spectrum misogyny has to be living well as the bombshell in Rivals, surely?
• Rivals is available exclusively on Disney+ from 18 October.
