Outnumbered star Ramona Marquez: ‘I grew up on TV. I never knew anything different’

Marquez was just five years old when the groundbreaking improvised sitcom ‘Outnumbered’ made her a star. As the show returns to our screens for a one-off Christmas special, she talks to Ellie Harrison about the pitfalls of fame, from eager fans at Reading to intrusive tabloid headlines, and what we can expect from the Brockman siblings now they are all grown up

Daddy, what’s a twat?” Ramona Marquez was just five years old when she uttered this line – surely the stuff of every parent’s nightmares – in the 2007 pilot of Outnumbered on BBC One. It was one of her very first pieces of dialogue as Karen, a sweet-faced mess of blonde curls with a knack for difficult questions. The encounter, which took place with her frazzled father one morning before school, set the tone for the frenzied family sitcom which, for seven years, followed the Brockmans as they grappled with the unhinged reality of controlling three wayward children.

The show returned for a Christmas special in 2016 (in which Karen was a teenager glued to her glittery iPhone), and it’s back again this year for another one-off festive episode. Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner are reprising their roles as parents Pete and Sue, with Daniel Roche and Tyger Drew-Honey back as Karen’s older brothers Ben and Jake. “It’s classic Outnumbered chaos,” Marquez, now 23, tells me from a shed in the garden of the home she shares with her girlfriend in southeast London. Details on the episode are a closely guarded secret, and Marquez is only really able to tell me about one plotline. “We’re joined by a grandchild [Jake has had a daughter] – so Karen’s an auntie!”

Outnumbered was groundbreaking when it arrived in the Noughties: a show that appealed to everyone from the age of six to 96, and with the children’s dialogue almost entirely improvised. Marquez, Roche and Drew-Honey would be asked by creators Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin to come up with funny things to say in each scene, meaning that, as actors, Dennis and Skinner were continually at the mercy of whatever the children said. Surely no adult could have dreamt up this line of Karen’s, when she earnestly explains that fairies can be lethal: “They fly down your throat and turn your heart into a pumpkin then your blood stops running and then you die.” The show’s genius lay in its glorious, at times almost surreal unpredictability.

Marquez was five when Outnumbered began and 13 when it ended. During that time, we watched her grow from a scrappy but angelic kid into a brunette teen on the brink of adolescence. She practically grew up in public, although for her of course, it simply felt normal. “I’ve never known any different,” says Marquez. “I was so young. I do have some memories from before I was five, but not many. I hear about other instances in TV where young kids were exploited, and I feel lucky that we were always respected.” That didn’t mean it’s always been straightforward. While the day-to-day experience of filming holds “the best memories” for Marquez, it was what happened off-set that could be tricky. The tabloid interest could be intense. Over the years, there were countless sensationalised stories about the Outnumbered cast appearing in the press. “Ramona Marquez looks worlds away from Karen Brockman and shows off HUGE tattoos” was one typical headline earlier this year. Another, published by The Sun in 2021 while Marquez was studying Spanish and Mandarin in Manchester, screamed: “Ramona Marquez selling off her old BRAS for £4 after quitting acting for uni.”

Reunited: the Brockman family in 2024 (BBC/Hat Trick Productions/Adam Lawrence)

Marquez remembers the bra headline well. “I sold a sports bra. It wasn’t even mine. I’d never even seen it before. It just must have been my sister’s or something, who knows, and then it was in the news. And it was such a misrepresentation. It was just a crazy, crazy thing to write.” She laughs. “It was so out there that even the readers were commenting, saying, ‘I read the story and she’s sold like 500 things on Depop. You’re portraying that to be something quite sinister.’ You sometimes think, well, you know, I could be doing that. There’d be nothing wrong with that if I wanted to, but I’m actually not, so let’s just keep the facts straight.”

She was also recognised a fair amount in public. Six million people watched Outnumbered in its prime. And being a teenager is hard enough as it is, without so many people knowing who you are. In 2016, after attending Reading Festival, she was forced to shut down rumours she had taken drugs. “I really enjoyed Reading and meeting lots of fans and cool people it was so lit,” she wrote on social media at the time. “It is pretty upsetting though now seeing people posting about me and saying that Im doing drugs and really horrible things like that,” she added. “I just don’t understand why people feel the need to being assholes, it’s such a piss-take.”

“That one year at Reading Festival, that was probably the only time it’s ever been super funny or crazy,” she tells me now. “Luckily I was with a big group of friends and we just made a joke out of it. Every time someone asked for a photo, all my friends would get in, it’d be like a massive group photo. It was quite funny. But without those people around me, I wouldn’t be so comfortable going somewhere like that alone. Because you do feel vulnerable in a way.”

All grown up: Ramona Marquez, then and now (BBC, Getty)

Today Marquez is no longer recognisable as that curly-haired master interrogator. When we meet over Zoom, she’s dressed all in black, her hair dyed dark, with winged eyeliner and a crucifix necklace. But she still has that same husky voice, and she is also now a vegan, which may or may not have been a consequence of the Outnumbered scene in which Karen draws felt-tip pictures of cows killing people because they don’t want to be made into hamburgers. She hasn’t been on screen since the 2016 Christmas special, apart from a brief Outnumbered Children in Need skit last month. But she is very active on social media, and her role as Karen has nabbed her a not-insignificant fanbase – she has 129,000 followers on Instagram.

She is very level-headed about the attention, good and bad. “I usually find it pretty funny,” she says. “Maybe I’m just desensitised to it. I know the people who like me and there will always be people who don’t like you, aren’t there? Especially if you’re maybe a bit out there or a little bit alternative or posting about having hairy legs.” When she did exactly this in 2022, it sparked online debate. “I just think, well, you wouldn’t want to appeal to those kind of people anyway.”

During the filming of Outnumbered, Marquez notched up a handful of other childhood screen credits; she appeared in the 2009 TV movie Enid about the life of Enid Blyton, and in the 2010 Colin Firth film The King’s Speech as a young Princess Margaret. Now that she’s finished uni, she’s hoping to get back into acting. “I love that world,” she says. “It is my complete passion and ambition. But I’ve been doing other stuff on the side, such as learning to tattoo, because obviously for an actor, there can be big periods between jobs.” She also values the following that Outnumbered has given her on socials, where she can post about causes she cares about, such as veganism. “Lesbian, vegan and a sober girly,” reads her Instagram bio. Marquez is certainly not an impish five-year-old worrying about deadly fairies anymore.

The ‘Outnumbered’ Christmas special airs at 9.40pm on Boxing Day on BBC One