Jessica Brown Findlay was a nightmare flatmate. At least, that’s what she remembers of her time as a student, just a few years before a role in Downton Abbey changed her life. Back then, there were no thoughts of having the perfect property, or making lifelong unbreakable bonds with the people you lived with – if it had a bed, it had a chance. “You had to make quite big compromises because there weren’t specific student digs in London,” she says. “You just had to find a group of people in a space with somewhere to sleep and make it work.” Still, the soon-to-be actor was adamant that she’d make the space she was paying extortionate rent for, her own – whether she had the go-ahead of her housemates or not. “I need to make myself at home within a day or two,” she continues. “I put everything up on walls, I put a rug down… yeah, a nightmare.”
This practice of immediately marking her territory is one of a few ways she sees similarities between herself and her character Tiffany in the new Paramount+ series The Flatshare. An adaptation of Beth O’Leary’s 2019 bestselling novel, the six-part romantic comedy introduces us to Tiffany and Leon (Anthony Welsh), strangers who share a one-bed flat and communicate solely through Post-it notes. Their workaround for only having one sleeping space is bizarre but strangely efficient – Tiffany, a freshly heartbroken and unmotivated journalist, has the flat overnight and on weekends, while night-time care worker Leon has the place from 8am to 8pm. This way, they never have to meet and risk things getting awkward.
