Before she’s even sat down, Ruth Jones wishes to make things very clear. ‘I’m not going to talk about the Gavin & Stacey story that was in the press recently,’ she says. Everyone else is though, so what’s occurring?
‘I’m gobsmacked. Why do these rumours keep circulating? There’s been this whole thing about an apparent bidding war between Netflix and the BBC.
‘In which case, why is no one from Netflix talking to me? Are they planning to do it without me writing it, without me playing Nessa? I just don’t understand. It’s all nonsense.’
Fair enough, but given the perpetual clamour for more episodes of the hit comedy, or at the very least another Christmas special after the huge success of the last one in 2019, why don’t she and co-writer James Corden just sit down and give the public what they want?
‘I know, and it’s lovely. It’s very flattering. The only thing I’ll say is, if there was anything to announce about Gavin & Stacey, you can guarantee James and I would happily announce it.’
Welsh actress Ruth Jones said it’s ‘flattering’ that so many people want more Gavin & Stacey episodes
Ruth Jones said that she heard Netflix and the BBC were bidding for Gavin & Stacey
Which suggests nothing is underway at the moment. What is underway is her starring role as Mother Superior in the hit musical Sister Act at London’s Dominion Theatre, where she’s treading the boards alongside Beverley Knight, Lesley Joseph and Lemar until June.
Before the London run began, she did two weeks in Dublin, and although she’s a seasoned trouper she’d never appeared in a professional stage musical before. Was her heart hammering in her chest?
‘Are you kidding? Hammering doesn’t even come close. I forgot the words to a song one night in Dublin but I kept up with the tune and just made some words up. In a funny way, having survived that, I overcame my fear.’
As a teenager in her hometown of Porthcawl she was a stalwart of amateur school productions alongside a certain Rob Brydon, who was at the same school.
‘We did Carousel, Guys & Dolls, West Side Story… in fact, that’s my first memory of Rob. He played one of the Jets in West Side Story, and I was a Puerto Rican called Rosalia. We were friends from that day onwards.’
She can hold a tune, she says, although she’s not really a singer or a dancer, two of the three key showbiz disciplines.
‘But I can act. They say you should be what’s known as a triple threat. Well, I’m a single threat.’
That said, she did have a Number One hit with the same Rob Brydon on Islands In The Stream for Comic Relief. ‘Actually, strictly speaking, it was Nessa and Bryn, with Tom Jones making a guest appearance.’
So what attracted her to Sister Act? ‘Well, I’m 57 and I thought I probably wouldn’t have this opportunity again. I’ve got less time ahead of me than behind me. And Jennifer Saunders has played Mother Superior, so why not?’
Unlike the Americans, we tend to pigeonhole performers. Yet if you take a glance at Ruth’s CV she’s not only a comic actress, she dreams up hit sitcoms and writes best-selling novels too. Is this swapping of roles a deliberate policy?
‘No, not really,’ she says. ‘With me, things seem to happen accidentally. I don’t plan anything. I’m not particularly ambitious. A question I dread is when people ask where I see myself in five years’ time. And the answer is: alive, I hope.’
Ruth is starring as Mother Superior in the hit musical Sister Act at London’s Dominion Theatre
She certainly hadn’t planned to be a novelist. Between the first two series of Fat Friends (the ITV drama on which she met James Corden more than 20 years ago), she wanted ‘an outlet for creativity’.
So she wrote a screenplay. ‘I sent it to a few people but nothing came of it.’ Then, years later, in 2015, she was going through her laptop and came across it again. ‘By then I’d written a lot of episodes of Stella [the Sky comedy-drama], and Gavin & Stacey obviously. It didn’t work as a screenplay but I liked the story so I thought I’d try reworking it as a novel.’
Thus the number one bestseller Never Greener was born, and now she’s on to her fourth. ‘It’s in my bag right now. I’ve done the first draft and I’m polishing it in my lunch hour.’
She still slightly marvels at the way her career has gone. Her father, Richard, was a legal executive and her mother, Hannah, a GP. She has two older brothers and a younger sister.
‘There was no tradition of theatrics in the family, but looking back I realise I was a bit of a show-off.
‘I remember my dad buying a Philips tape recorder with a little microphone. He encouraged us to sing songs or tell jokes.
‘My brothers were a bit shy, but not me. I couldn’t get enough of that microphone. ‘Why do cows wear bells, everybody? Because their horns don’t work. Ha, ha, ha!’ Precocious!’
She’s reluctant to talk about her husband, TV and radio producer David Peet, with whom she has three adult stepchildren, but she’s more relaxed about her own siblings and parents.
Her fame, she says, doesn’t affect them at all. ‘I’m just Ruth to them, quite as it should be.’ Her dad died in 2017 but he was immensely proud of her success. ‘He’d be on holiday, strike up a conversation with someone on the same table, and his second sentence would be, ‘Have you seen Gavin & Stacey?’
After a degree in theatre studies and dramatic arts at Warwick University she attended the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. But her career had a strange start.
‘I was at university with someone who set up a theatre company called Pan Optic. He put together a production of The Marriage Of Figaro, not the opera but the comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, and cast me as the Countess on a six-month tour. The Guardian called me ‘titillating’.’
She thought she had it made, but in those days you needed an Equity card if you were to get professional work.
She finally got one working with a panto producer in Wales, and after a few bits and pieces came Fat Friends, while she also landed the role of Myfanwy the barmaid in Little Britain.
She won acclaim as Hattie Jacques in BBC4 drama Hattie, and wrote and starred in Stella – and then of course there was Gavin & Stacey.
Did she and James know they’d written something that was going to be a hit? ‘How could we possibly? But that said, when we read it back to each other it did make us laugh.’
On its first outing, on BBC3, it got viewing figures of just over half a million, but after a move to BBC1 it was pulling in 10 million by the end of the third and final series. ‘Now people who weren’t even born when it was first broadcast tell me they watch the repeats,’ she says.
So what’s it like working with James? ‘Always a joy. We started to write it on Fat Friends but it wasn’t Gavin & Stacey then. It was going to be a one-off about the wedding day of a Welsh girl and an English boy. Its working title was It’s My Day.
‘We showed it to Stuart Murphy who was head of BBC3, but he said they didn’t have a slot for a one-hour comedy drama: why not expand it into a series? So we did and he sent us an email when he’d read it: ‘I think this could be one of the best things the BBC has ever made.’ I’ve kept that email to this day.’
Does she see much of James now he’s moved back to this country from America? ‘Of course, he’s a mate.’ Do the two couples go out together then? ‘Well, I don’t go out. I hate going out. Anyway, I’ve got a book to finish.’
And the next instalment of Gavin & Stacey to write…
- For tickets and performance times, visit sisteractthemusical. co.uk/london
