In the sharp and smart new Channel 4 comedy-drama Chivalry, written by Steve Coogan and Sarah Solemani, the acclaimed feminist director Bobby (Solemani), who has to work with Cameron, a classic chauvinist studio boss (Coogan, in a classic Coogan role), explains why her progress in the film industry has been so slow compared with her contemporaries: “I’ve been hacking through this jungle that the most average man can stroll into,” she says with feeling.
“Steve came up with that line, actually,” Solemani, 39, tells me over a breakfast of brisket and scrambled eggs in a deli around the corner from her home in Los Angeles. I’d assumed she’d written it, because she herself has been hacking through the jungle of British TV and film for two decades, to the point where she considered writing her memoir just to title it “Nearly”. “Because it was always TV commissioners telling me, ‘Right, this is so nearly what we want, but … ’” she says. Over the years, she has been pitched by magazines and the TV industry as “the new Lena Dunham”, “the new Amy Schumer”, “the new [insert any big-name female comedian]”, only to then be told by British TV bosses that she was nearly what they wanted, but not quite.
Not that she was unsuccessful: she starred in sitcoms including Him & Her with Russell Tovey (2010-13), Bad Education with Jack Whitehall (2012–14) and The Wrong Mans with James Corden (2013–14); she had a flashy film role as Bridget’s best friend in Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), and she adapted Jo Bloom’s novel Ridley Road, about British fascism in the 1960s, which was screened on BBC One last autumn. But around and in between these gigs, there was, she says, “a lot” of rejection.
“A toxic culture still exists in the industry; one in which the artistic potential of half the human race is constantly undermined,” she wrote in the Guardian in 2017 in the wake of #MeToo. Once, she and the writer and actor Olivia Poulet (The Thick of It) wrote a script, but a TV commissioner told them: “I know I asked for something a bit female, but this seems a bit too female.” “I’ve got that note somewhere,” Solemani says in the tone of one who has kept all of her receipts. I say that it’s interesting that all of the sitcoms she starred in were created by men. Her eyes widen, and she makes an emphatic “believe me, I noticed” nod.
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Solemani grew up in London and moved to Los Angeles six years ago. She has a nice mix of British candour and Californian earnest optimism that slips occasionally into light LA woo-woo-ness (we take a brief detour into the importance of “celebrating oneself, like, ‘I did a good show’, ‘I did a good bedtime with the kids …’”). She is a longtime campaigner for the decriminalisation of sex work, and in 2016, when she turned up for the premiere of Bridget Jones’s Baby, she carried a placard demanding creches on film sets. Coogan is no slouch when it comes to campaigning either, having taken on the British tabloids in the phone-hacking scandal. But his reputation as what people used to call a roué precedes him on both sides of the Atlantic, and he was once cited by Courtney Love, of all people, “one of my life’s great shames”, along with crack cocaine. In Chivalry, he and Solemani have the same enjoyable odd-couple dynamic as Coogan’s collaborations with Rob Brydon on The Trip.
That Coogan wrote that particular line about how much harder it is for women in the entertainment business suggests Chivalry was as successful behind the scenes as it is on screen at “engaging in a dialectic”, as Solemani puts it. “Now in the culture, people don’t talk to each other. We announce our standpoint, we shout at opposing views and we affirm each other’s politics. We don’t have the kind of gritty debate that makes you question your viewpoint, and that’s what Steve and I both wanted in the show,” she says. Solemani spent years getting rejected, whereas Coogan, she says, “has been famous and rich for most of his adult life – he even had a statue in Norfolk”. Did working so closely with her make him question some of his experiences?
“I think that’s for him to say,” she says carefully. “But that journey is definitely in the show.”
Chivalry opens with Bobby reluctantly taking over a film project after the previous director – a sexist of the old school – dies, and she tries to remake it as a little more female-friendly. The show has been described as a #MeToo satire, but that’s a description that makes Solemani wince. Because it doesn’t explain what the show is satirising? “Yes, exactly,” she says. “And that was one of our challenges. We were constantly walking this tightrope between wanting to give something to everyone in the audience – from the most woke feminist to some old dinosaur – but without minimising what the movement was, which was a declaration of systemic abuse of women.”
Far be it from me to punch up a comedy writer’s words, but this description does not make Chivalry sound like a barrel of laughs. In fact, it is very funny, and more nuanced than I was expecting. The show satirises the extremes on both sides, from Cameron describing his twentysomething assistant as “the love of his life” but admitting he doesn’t know her birthday, to the actor who gets intense counselling from the set’s intimacy supervisor (Aisling Bea) to cope with a sex scene, while the initially supportive Bobby rolls her eyes impatiently. Eventually, she pushes the intimacy supervisor aside so she can just finish the damn scene. “Don’t feel like you’ve betrayed the movement,” Cameron says consolingly, much to Bobby’s irritation. What makes this scene even more interesting is that Solemani has written in the past that she felt deeply exploited when acting in sex scenes. Chivalry shows the occasional tension between not treating actors like pieces of meat, but also needing them to do their job.
“There’s a lot of hypocrisy running through the show, and we wanted the characters to navigate that,” Solemani says. The show is far more nuanced than most discussions of #MeToo, let alone most sitcoms that look at battles between the sexes.
Coogan and Solemani have been engaging in a dialectic about the #MeToo movement since 2019, when they were on the set of the Michael Winterbottom film Greed, in which Coogan plays a Philip Green-like tyrant and Solemani plays one of his minions. Coogan was aware of her feminism and so, she says, “he would totally wind me up” about the #MeToo movement.
In what way? She hesitates to answer, cautious again.
Would he say, “So am I still allowed to say this? Or do this?”
“Yeah, yeah, all of that,” she says.
Was Solemani the only one on set willing to spar with Coogan, given that he was the star of the film and the power dynamics that comes with?
She pauses and then answers carefully: “I think on every set there’s a hierarchy, and maybe people who have been number one on a call sheet for a lot of their lives, maybe they forget that hierarchy exists. But he’s actually very good with actors, so it wasn’t like no one could talk to him. So no, I wouldn’t say I had bravery to stand up to him that no one else did,” she says.
I ask how they made the move from debating #MeToo over lunch to thinking, “Hey, this could be a really funny sitcom!”
“Well, it was just this huge cultural shift, and the intensity of that needed comedy. We came from different perspectives, and a lot of our dialogue was like: ‘It’s gone too far, it’s not organised.’ ‘But a movement never is strategised. It’s going to be messy. That’s what a movement is, and it’s necessary.’ And from that dialectic, we both knew we needed to laugh about it, and off we went,” she says.
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Solemani has been writing about sexism in the entertainment business for a long time, and has been experiencing it for even longer. When she was 19, she went to a fiftysomething director’s house for what she thought was a work dinner. He asked how she felt about on-screen nudity, and then suggested she strip for him to prove it. She lied and said she had her period. She didn’t get the job. “It was a decade before I realised what an abuse of power this had been, and how I’d normalised it,” she later wrote. After graduating from Cambridge, where she was “the one woman” in the Footlights, she struggled to get a job, whereas the boys she knew – including Simon Bird and Joe Thomas of The Inbetweeners – seemed to soar off effortlessly. She ended up getting a job in a call centre. But since #MeToo, she says, things have changed.
“It’s night and day, it really is. I was in a writers’ room and a studio representative came in to explain that if you invite a colleague to lunch, or even dinner, that is a working engagement, nothing more. And I thought, ‘Finally, that behaviour is over.’ I was crying! Some people feel policed, but for women, it feels safe. Plus, there is a greater curiosity [from TV commissioners] about the female experience. Before I used to think, ‘I don’t want to frighten them off with female stuff’, but now I have more shows in my head than I can write.”
Solemani’s life looks pretty great now, a far cry from call centres and creepy directors. In 2016, she was hired to write for the HBO show Barry, and so she and her family moved to California. With that credit under her belt, her agent sold several of her old scripts, which had previously been rejected or stuck in development, including Ridley Road. She is visibly bubbling with excitement about all the projects she currently has on the go, none of which she can talk about yet, but one will be a feature film, which she will direct.
With the proceeds from her newly sold, once-rejected scripts, she bought a house in one of the prettiest neighbourhoods in LA, around the corner from where we are meeting. Her husband, who works in sustainable investment, and young daughter and son are waiting for her, eager for their Saturday morning trip to the beach. “So I don’t want to spend too much of this interview complaining, because I’m now making everything,” she says with a delighted laugh. I ask if things changed for her because she moved to the US where more projects get made, and she says no, it’s because the times have moved on. Things, she says, have really, really changed.
But does she think she could have made a show about a feminist director and the #MeToo movement if Coogan hadn’t been her co-writer?
“Oh God, Hadley,” she says, momentarily taken aback by the question. But she quickly finds her footing again. “No, I don’t think I could have because what I wanted was the dialectic … ”
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Solemani is the older daughter of a father who was raised Orthodox Jewish and a mother who was raised Christian but became an atheist. “I think because they’d grown up with these quite oppressive family structures, they were like this island of resistance together. I remember a really embarrassing time we were on a train in Paris and a guard told them they had to move because a school trip needed their seats, and they staged a protest: ‘No, we will stay! We refuse!’ And all these French people were telling them to move. They really prided themselves on these small acts of resistance.”
Her parents instilled a steel rod of self-belief in her. When she was working at the call centre and told her father she was considering giving up on her dreams of writing, he told her: “You mustn’t, because you have talent.” The last thing her mother said to her before she died was: “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but it’s going to be incredible.”
Solemani went to one of the top grammar schools in the country, and that also helped to build her ambitions, although she has recently been wondering whether that was a short-term help but long-term hindrance.
“The school’s attitude was: ‘You can do anything!’ But that can also sound like: ‘You’d better do something!’ It’s a fine line, and as I’ve got older I’ve wondered whether what serves you to achieving A* GCSEs might not work when you later have to learn how to establish boundaries and decide how much of yourself you’re willing to give,” she says. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer when was 42. Solemani was 12 and her sister was eight. She died four years later. “She was such a brilliant mother, too. So I missed out on that, and I also missed out on having a mother to blame.” The week after her mother died, she was accepted into the National Youth Theatre. Soon, she was playing Elaine in a West End production of The Graduate. “It was such a dark time and my dad was in such agony. I wanted to move into the light, and this was the light,” she says.
How does she think that awareness of death from such a young age affected her in the long term? “It’s a big question, and I’m reflecting on it a lot now. I think that’s a classic thing of experiencing mortality. Life is now, it will end. What are you going to do with your time?”
Despite her father rejecting his Orthodox upbringing, Solemani says she always “felt Jewish”, even though her family in Israel don’t regard her as such. (Traditionally, Judaism is passed down through the mother.) One of the nice things about moving to the US, she says, is “patrilineal Judaism is recognised. I’m just as Jewish as Barack Obama is black.” Solemani’s husband is Jewish, and the two of them spent four years studying Hebrew, reaffirming their identity. I ask how much that played a part in her writing of Ridley Road. “Loads. I couldn’t have written that show had I not done that intense learning about my faith and had the dual perspective of being an inside outsider, coming from a family that didn’t grow up with Jewish culture,” she says.
Like Chivalry, Ridley Road set a fictional story within real social shifts. In it, Vivien (Agnes O’Casey) moves to London’s East End in the early 60s and, with the encouragement of her uncle Soly (Eddie Marsan), she starts a relationship with the (nonfictional) neo-Nazi leader Colin Jordan (Rory Kinnear), in order to spy on him. The reviews were largely positive, but there was some criticism, saying the depictions of British fascism were overblown.
“The response to that show really woke me up to antisemitism in Britain, because people would say, ‘It really wasn’t that bad back then.’ Well, it was bad for the Jews who saw Nazis walking in front of their homes. One review which really upset me said Eddie Marsan ‘shouts’ a particular speech. He didn’t shout, he whispered. But there’s something about the Jewish testimony of pain that makes some people assume it’s exaggerated, or they’re being lectured. It was very revealing,” she says.
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The more I talk to Solemani, the more I can’t figure something out. She’s so smart, so aware of the rights and wrongs of the world. And sure, things are great now, but why did she keep slugging it out in the entertainment business, dealing with prejudiced rejections and lecherous older men for two decades before things finally went her way? Why not just quit and focus on activism? She laughs and says she knows what I mean but she just really, really likes writing.
I ask her how she finds living in California. “It’s good, but there have been times when it’s like, ‘Oh my God,’” she says. “During Covid, the schools were closed for a year, and then it was peak Trump incompetence. Then there was this weird plague of mosquitoes and everyone was like, ‘This hasn’t happened for a hundred years.’ Then the fires came and you couldn’t breathe outside, but you also couldn’t meet anyone inside. Then the house started shaking: there was an earthquake. Then I really was like, ‘Why am I here?’” she says, still sounding a little shaky at the memory.
She turns around and looks out the window of the diner at the sunny day. The sky is clear blue and the palm trees are barely rustling in the warm breeze. “But, you know, every place has its challenges, and this one really is a place of extremes. And now,” she says with the smile of one who has come through the fire of the pre-#MeToo entertainment world and the fires of southern California, “things are good”.
• Chivalry is on Channel 4 at 10pm on 21 April.
