Phoebe Waller-Bridge says she regrets not protecting her family from Fleabag’s success

‘I’d underestimated, as we all had, what impact it was going to have and that people were going to want to talk about it so much and like it so much’

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has said that she regrets not protecting her family better from the effects of Fleabag‘s success, particularly the assumptions people made that she’d drawn from real life in writing the show.

The writer-performer makes an appearance on an upcoming episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, where guests are asked to discuss their personal mistakes, even at the height of their success.

​”I’d underestimated, as we all had, what impact it was going to have and that people were going to want to talk about it so much and like it so much,” she said in the interview (via The Guardian). “And I was essentially just so far away from everybody and in a different timezone doing the play.”

In the show, her character has a troubled relationship both with her sister Claire (Sian Clifford) and her godmother (Olivia Colman), while both her mother and a close friend have died.

“Because it’s about family and everything, my family suddenly experienced this really intense focus from people in their lives, and people asking about the show and asking about me, and one of my regrets is I wish I’d seen that coming,” Waller-Bridge said.

“They were actually taking the brunt of the profile of the show getting bigger,” she continued. “They were being asked all the questions about the show... basically, there was just a communication breakdown with my family.”

In reality, Waller-Bridge has an excellent relationship with her elder sister, Isobel, while her mother Theresa is still alive. Her parents are divorced, with her father, Michael, now married to artist Rosemary Goodenough. Most of Fleabag‘s material draws, instead, from Waller-Bridge’s “biggest fears”.

She also questioned whether male screenwriters have their personal life scrutinised in the same way, adding: “That autobiographical assumption is something I’m asked about a lot. It is either because the show feels so raw and real that people think it’s real, or it’s because people assume there’s a limit to a woman’s imagination. I’d always rather believe the former.”