Ashley Jensen interview

Rather than a swanky hotel restaurant, my interview with Ashley Jensen takes places in the fetid, cramped basement office of a rehearsal studio on the edge of a south-London council estate. A trapped fly throws itself repeatedly against a locked window while Jensen gamely tries to shovel a Marks & Spencer salad into her mouth while trying to answer my questions. It is the kind of location that you would expect to find Maggie Jacob languishing in, Jensen’s character in Ricky Gervais’s brutal comedy Extras, as she tried to scrape by a career in bit parts, but hardly the kind of place you expect to find the Scottish-born actress who was whisked off to Hollywood to star in prime-time comedy Ugly Betty.

Yet the 43-year-old seems delighted to be back in London in rehearsals for a Trevor Nunn-directed revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Eighties comedy A Chorus of Disapproval. “My husband and I always thought we would know when the time was right to come back and it felt right. I served six years in LA.”

Eleven years after she last appeared on stage, Jensen is returning to her roots. “My career started off in the theatre so I am coming back to do something quintessentially English. I’ve never worked in the West End before or worked with Trevor Nunn or done something so British.”

I tell Jensen that I thought that we had seen the last of her and that she had done a Tracey Ullman when she upped sticks to Hollywood in the wake of her Extras success, and she snorts into her couscous in that familiar, Maggie-like way. Up until now that seemed to be the narrative of any British actor, where making it in America was a kind of mythical holy grail of financial reward and sunshine-dappled, white-toothed living. But for Jensen, who left Ugly Betty when she had her first son Frankie three years ago, money and sunshine was not completely fulfilling.

“This is so different from the world of American comedy and television. The first day of rehearsals when Trevor was talking about London in the 18th century and Tyburn and Newgate prison and about John Gay who wrote the Beggar’s Opera. I thought, gosh, I couldn’t remember having these kinds of conversations on the set of Ugly Betty. It felt like coming back to the place where I had left off.”

You can see that the role of the repressed housewife Hannah, married to Rob Brydon’s Dafydd in Ayckbourn’s play about a play, isn’t a million miles away from Jensen’s speciality in thwarted female characters, spending their lives making other people shine.

“She is a bit downtrodden. Even when she has an affair with Guy, he is having an affair with two women and Hannah is the motherly one, the one he comes to for a cuddle. I am not the wild sex role. Maybe one day.” There’s that snort again but Jensen – effortlessly attractive in the flesh, a milky blonde Scottish beauty coolly dressed down in her converse trainers and plaid shirt – has an undeniable talent for subtle performance and an acute attentiveness to the people she is playing against. She talks slowly and carefully and listens to every single word you say. It has made her the perfect foil to more blunderbuss characters and lends her a somewhat serious, observant air that gives everything she says the suggestion of a deadpan joke.

But just as Jensen has become an accidental star so she is also an accidental comic. After university and a stint with the National Youth Theatre, her only ambition was to be able to earn a living as an actress. “I started at the bottom, the kind of work where you bundle in a little van and then go off to a tiny place with a village hall in the middle of nowhere. You put up the set, you take it down and then you go to Mrs McGinty’s guest house in the middle of nowhere with nylon sheets and a breakfast room that smells of beer. Then I started to get work in TV and then Extras happened.”

The success of Extras when Jensen was 36 came as a surprise. “When I got the role, somebody said 'This is going to change your life’, but I didn’t believe them because I was quite naïve.”

But after two series resulted in an avalanche of awards and nominations at the Baftas and Emmys, Jensen’s move to LA, when she was cast in Ugly Betty, did change everything. “I decided to totally embrace it. I had the publicist and the stylist – I did it all. When I was in it, it was like a big snowball. I’ve got Glenn Close winking at me at the Emmy awards and I’m having a sleep with Ted Danson in first class on the plane and he is recommending places for me to eat. It wasn’t until after I had my wee boy and I stopped working that I realised what had happened and how amazing it had been. Life can tumble by and you don’t get a chance to think about anything.”

Throughout the headlong rush of those six years, Jensen was applauded for being a great comic talent even though she considered herself a jobbing actress. “I never did stand up. I was just a grafter who got lucky.”

In Extras she says that Gervais and she both found their “comedy clowns”. “I think it is just a case of finding that wee bit of yourself and blowing it up and making it much bigger. People go through their whole careers and don’t find their clowns. They do workshops on trying to find them. I think that is what made it so honest because it was true to who we were.” Jensen seemed even more amazingly true to herself when she turned up in American sitcoms talking in her native Annan accent, a result of accident rather than intent. “I would go to these auditions and do my American accent and then they would say now do it in your own accent. Then they would say, 'Well, that is clearly much funnier.’ For the last few years, everything I have done I kind of looks and sounds like Ashley.”

Jensen says her return to London then will allow her to both spend more time with Frankie who she clearly adores, and stretch her acting wings again in film and the theatre. “In some ways, Hannah is probably the least funny role in this play, which is nice. You can get pigeonholed in America. Where as here you have this whole world of theatre. I love the buzz that comes from being on stage and how you can constantly evolve.”

A Chorus of Disapproval previews at the Harold Pinter theatre on Sept 17, with booking until Jan 5.