Daisy May Cooper: ‘People told me I’m not funny any more because I’m not fat’

The creator and star of ‘This Country’ tells Annabel Nugent why ‘judging anyone’s body is wrong’, and talks about early poverty, her literary podcast, and the damage done by Rada

Daisy May Cooper: ‘Judging anyone’s body is f***ing wrong’ (Getty)

When Daisy May Cooper signed up for the dating app Hinge, she used a fake name. Finding romance as a famous divorcee was proving to be a “bloody minefield”, and she figured using an alias might help, which it did. The actor-slash-TV-writer soon matched with the man she’s currently seeing – a man who, she is thrilled to say, “did not know who the f*** I was” despite the multiple photos on her profile. “It’s just that nobody recognises me now,” Cooper chuckles over a video call.

Only three years on from This Country and already there’s not much about Cooper that is recognisable – even to her. Now 36, she bears little resemblance to Kerry, the delightfully deadpan, jersey-wearing braggart of the hit BBC mockumentary she wrote and starred in with her brother Charlie across three critically acclaimed seasons and one hysterical special. Her life certainly looks nothing like it did then, back when she and Charlie would write by day and clean offices by night. It’s depressing, but not surprising, that it’s Cooper’s physical transformation that got people most riled up when, earlier this year, countless articles circulated documenting her “unbelievable!” weight loss. The internet, bored and mean, latched on.

“Judging anyone’s body is f***ing wrong.” Cooper makes that clear from the get-go. “But I know me, and I know that I had put on that weight when I was desperately unhappy,” she says. “I was having problems walking up the stairs, and then when I got pregnant there was a worry I might have gestational diabetes. I was putting my health at risk and I was so miserable that I could not stop eating; it’s like being an alcoholic or a drug addict. I was trying to fill that hole with something, and as I became happier, the weight started dropping off because I wasn’t having to do that.”

Cooper adds that the scroll of “horrible messages” she received about her appearance on This Country didn’t help. “But then I lost the weight, and people told me I’m not funny any more because I’m not fat.” She rolls her eyes and grimaces. “For f***’s sake, you can’t win. You just need to stay true to yourself.”

If you hadn’t noticed, Cooper has retained one quality over the years: disarming frankness. In turn, it has lent an air of casual intimacy, the kind typically reserved for best friends. Or strangers you meet in the pub loo. Her candour extends to her Zoom presence. Cooper is seemingly fresh-out-the-shower, with a bare face and her blonde hair combed back up and away from her forehead. There’s also that signature laugh, a wheezy cluck recognisable to anyone who has spent more than 10 seconds with her, such as Katie Price, one of six celebrities who appear on her podcast Educating Daisy – and Cooper’s favourite guest yet.

It’s Cooper’s first stab at hosting a podcast, and her latest move towards a less on-camera future. On it, she welcomes celebrities who try their hand at redressing her lifelong hatred of reading. Price, for one, espouses the anthropomorphic prowess of Anna Sewell’s 1877 classic Black Beauty. Inevitably, the book chat is couched in unbeatable banter – something Cooper can apparently foster with anyone. A gregarious collaborator, she has found joy and success in partnerships. This Country was just the first; last year’s comedy-thriller Am I Being Unreasonable? was a joint effort between herself and her former drama-school enemy, now best pal, Selin Hizli (they went to Rada together). Now, Cooper is ready to go it alone with a comedy-drama-horror-romance.

“And I’ll tell you why! Because if you write something with someone else, you’ve got to split the money with them,” Cooper yells out theatrically. “Isn’t that right, Selin?” Hizli is off screen somewhere in the London apartment to which the two have decamped to work on the second series of Am I…?. It’s not going well. “All we’ve done is watch Jonathan Creek episodes.” On a more serious note, Cooper says, “I want complete control over something and I want to see if I can do it on my own.” Her solemnity, however, is short-lived. “Obviously I f***ing can’t, can I?” She roars to life again. “I’ve written 10 pages in six months... I need a partner because somebody’s got to kick me up the arse so I can actually get paid.”

Daisy May Cooper in the BBC series ‘Am I Being Unreasonable?’ (Boffola Pictures/Simon Ridgway)

Cooper has ADHD. She had always suspected it, but only recently did a psychiatrist confirm the diagnosis. “It’s nice knowing, because now I can blame all my bad behaviour on it. Don’t want to call someone back? ‘Sorry, I’m not ghosting you. I have ADHD!’” It’s not only this that’s hampering her efficiency, though. For a long time, Cooper’s casual demeanour belied an intense productivity. Now, newly flush with TV money and opportunities, she has taken her foot off the pedal, she claims.

“There isn’t that fight any more,” she says. “You don’t have the urgency. You become f***ing complacent because you have the luxury of being able to do that. It used to be about survival to be successful, to prove that everything I was going through wasn’t going to be my life for ever, and all that s*** stuff was worth it for some unknown reason – because otherwise it’s f***ing bleak, and cruel, and why would anyone go through it?”

We’ve come a long f***ing way. And God, it was bad. It was so dark, it was f***ing black. Just this feeling of complete and utter hopelessness and worthlessness

Daisy May Cooper

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Cooper is explaining how quickly she has forgotten parts of her past. Until she was 30, her family lived in poverty. She and her brother shared a mattress at home in Cirencester. “Really traumatic, horrible things happened and so you block it out,” she says. “It’s a defence mechanism, right?” Sometimes, though, she can’t help but remember. It was hard not to when filming Rain Dogs, the 2023 HBO series created by Skint Estate writer Cash Carraway. Cooper played Costello Jones, a single mother recently evicted from her council flat. The role called for Cooper to perform in a number of painful scenarios she had regularly encountered in her real life.

“Cash wrote it brilliantly, so brilliantly that it was unbelievably triggering.” Cooper singles out one scene in the first episode that really rattled her. “I remember doing exactly that: trying to buy a 2p sweet with my credit card just so that I could get cashback, hoping that the bank might forget that I’m in overdraft.” More memories were dredged up by an old diary her mum recently found. Inside it were notes like “Wednesday: can’t afford food.” “We’ve come a long f***ing way. And God, it was bad. It was so dark, it was f***ing black. Just this feeling of complete and utter hopelessness and worthlessness.” Later, Cooper shakes her head: “I need to f***ing pull my finger out my arse and do more [to help others].”

Adrian Edmondson, Daisy May Cooper and Fleur Tashjian in ‘Rain Dogs’ (BBC/Sid Gentle Films/HBO/Simon Ridgway)

Success arrived quickly after This Country, but with it came another set of problems. “You know, when one part of your life is going well, it shines a spotlight on another part of your life that’s completely f***ing dysfunctional and falling apart? That’s what it did for me,” says Cooper. “Obviously with my relationship [she divorced from her husband Will Weston in 2021] but also in how I felt about myself.” These are concerns reserved for the privileged, is her point. When you’re poor, she explains, “you don’t have time to delve into depression or how you feel about yourself, because you’re literally just trying to get to the end of the day.”

Her relationship with Charlie suffered, too. The siblings aren’t as close as they used to be, a parting of ways Cooper credits not only to success but also to your average, garden-variety growing up. She has two children, and Charlie has just recently become a dad. “To go from being so close, these vagabonds who were in it together through thick and thin, to suddenly not speaking for long periods of time because one of us is filming or the other has got a baby... I’m finding that really f***ing hard, and it’s actually making me question a lot of things about who I am and what I want.”

“Do I want all of this, and is it actually making me happy?” she asks. “Because at the minute, it doesn’t feel worth it to sacrifice my relationship with my brother – which was what all this was about in the first place, and you lose sight of that. People come along who want to make you into something, and they’ve got their own agenda, and that f***ing separates you. And it’s f***ing horrible.” Cooper exhales a puff of air, raising her eyebrows in bewilderment. “I don’t know. Life’s just f***ing hard. Whatever you do, there’s something that needs attention. I get these brief spurts of happiness, where I’ll be on a walk and I’ll forget that I’ve got to pay my tax, or that I’ve got to sort my relationship out with my brother,” she laughs. “It’s ongoing. We’re human, and I suppose that’s why I have to write about it. It’s a form of therapy.”

Sibling troubles, divorce, body image, being ghosted by an ex on Facebook, impulsively splurging on a three-storey rabbit hutch: Cooper airs it all without qualm. “I have verbal diarrhoea,” she explains, advising me never, ever to tell her a secret. She proclaims, however, to be a “private person”. It turns out her frankness is, in fact, born out of fear for her privacy. “I’d rather be candid about these things, so at least I have ownership of what the narrative is, rather than somebody else going, ‘Oh, we found out you auditioned to be a stripper!’ I’d rather own up to it, because really, I’m terrified of everybody finding out about my sordid past.” She did, in fact, audition to be a stripper, in a desperate attempt to scrounge together rent money for the Shepherd’s Bush roomshare she was then living in.

‘This Country’ saw Charlie and Daisy May Cooper play Kurtan and Kerry Mucklowe (BBC)

Back to the rabbit hutch. “It’s my latest ridiculous purchase.” She hangs her head in mock shame. “It’s this palace, but the rabbits hate it, so it’s just sitting out in the garden rotting.” Cooper is the first to admit she is no good with money. “I literally live hand to mouth. I don’t think I can really afford the lifestyle I’m living at the moment, but if it’s in my bank account, I will spend it.” She asks that her agents take the tax off her pay cheques before handing them over. “Otherwise, I’ll spunk it.” She considers this for a moment. “Maybe it’s the ADHD thing.” There’s that coy smirk. “Would that hold up in court?”

Cooper is not your average celebrity, for many reasons. For one, she hates fancy industry parties (“People will be talking to you and then their eyes start going above your head to see who’s more important in the room,” she huffs. “F*** off, I could be at a Wetherspoon’s right now”). Secondly, she still checks her DMs on Instagram (“I like to see if anybody is offering me any free stuff – or if any exes are trying to get back in touch”). Chief among those reasons, though, is the fact that she remains so incredibly outspoken.

At the start of her career, Cooper was scathing about her time at the prestigious London drama school Rada, where she claims students were berated by teachers and encouraged to share their deepest traumas. “I have never, ever once been put in as dangerous a position as that in the professional industry,” she says. “It did a hell of a lot of damage to me, and a lot of damage to other people. Now, working in this industry and seeing quite how lovely and professional and safe it is, it makes me furious as to why we were ever taught that it would be anything other than that. It’s just so strange to teach based on making people frightened.”

It’s been over two years since she first spoke out about her experience at the school, and she says it’s only now that Rada has been in touch to organise a meeting – though the school issued an apology at the time, saying it “would not tolerate the practices she describes in our present teaching environment”.

Before our time is up, I want to ask about Welcome to the Flatch – the much-derided US reboot of This Country on which Cooper and Charlie were executive producers. For her part, she has nothing but nice things to say about the series, and the actor (Chelsea Holmes) who recreates her character so closely. “Was she cloned in a laboratory?” Not that she or Charlie had anything to do with it. “We just said, ‘Where’s our f***ing cheque?’” she laughs. “I want to buy more rabbit hutches!”

‘Educating Daisy with Daisy May Cooper’ is out now on Audible