Tanya Moodie: I'm nothing like my Motherland character

As the raucous, rule-breaking alpha mum Meg, Tanya Moodie is the star of this season of Motherland. She talks to Katie Strick about tequila, parenting and why the series is radical
Daniel Hambury
The Weekender

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Tanya Moodie insists she’s nothing like her character, alpha-mum-of-five Meg in the latest series of BBC Two comedy Motherland, but our first encounter — greeting me with a giant bear hug and an enthusiastic clap on the back, before running, childlike, around our room at The AllBright Club — feels like an almost identical remake of the nightclub scene in episode one.

Admittedly, minus the tequila. “I feel bad because there have been lots of lovely people on Twitter saying, ‘I really want to hang out with Tanya Moodie because I bet she’s fun’, but I’m really not,” the Toronto-born actress laughs, when asked how she compares to her wild on-screen persona. “I get tired really early, I’m a cheap date — I can have maybe two glasses of wine, maximum — and we tend to have dinner parties around our place. We don’t go out clubbing.”

Maybe not, but in the show, the stylish, zero-f***s-given Meg is the envy of the school gates, and it’s made her the standout star of this season, which finishes on Monday. There is hushed awe when she arrives for a 3pm pick-up on the first day of term. “She’s a real high-flier,” Lucy Punch’s character, “mumpreneur” Amanda, tells the other parents. “I believe she gave a talk at Davos last year.”

Frazzled protagonist Julia, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, begs Meg to reveal her secret, and Meg insists on taking Julia and her fellow outcasts under her wing. By the end of episode one, she’s taken them out for champagne to toast Julia’s promotion, kissed married dad Kevin (Paul Ready) in a club, taken a business call from Mexico mid-vomit and been held up by police for urinating in the street. It’s quite an entrance. The next day she pops up laughing and hangover-free at the school gates. “It’s how I let off steam,” she smiles, nonchalantly. “I love my kids, I love my job, I love my life, but in order to survive I’ve got to blow it up every now and again.”

BBC/Merman/Colin Hutton

Off-screen, Rada-educated Moodie, 47, says she rarely remembers to toast her own “champagne moments”. When she found out she’d got the part in Motherland, her partner, Andy, a business executive at Visa, had to remind her to pop a bottle of fizz. “He’s good at that,” she laughs, recalling how her initial reaction was — ironically — to sort out childcare for her 12-year-old daughter Willow. “That was my first thought. I’m always just like ‘calendar, calendar, calendar. What happens here? Who’s taking her here?’ That’s why he [Andy] has to be the one to tell me we need champagne now.”

The couple live in south London with Willow and their miniature bull terrier Bella (@bellaminibully, who has about 400 followers on Instagram) and Moodie likens many aspects of the relationship to her on-screen marriage with Meg’s “silver fox” husband: “He’s laid-back and lets me get on with my kind of madness: he throws in a few provocations, then stands back and has a laugh”.

Do the couple watch Motherland together? Moodie says she never watches herself. “I know my acting teacher, if she was still alive, would probably be very angry with me, and I really should. But when it came on that night, my partner was like, ‘I’d like to watch’ and I said ‘OK, I’ll go to bed’.” Willow, meanwhile, has a “healthy disinterest” in her mother’s work but started watching Motherland recently after people told her she should. “She was actually really irritating when she was watching because she’d be in the other room, then she’d pause it, come in, quote a line of mine back at me, then go back in and watch some more.”

BBC/Merman/Colin Hutton

When it comes to armchair critics, Moodie is careful not to read what people say about her on Twitter but does skim through her notifications “gingerly” if they come up. “On the first day [Motherland was aired] I was tagged by someone who was like, ‘I thought she was terrible,’” she laughs, but overall she’s found the reaction from viewers to be “joy … and at a time where there’s a great deficit of joy across the world”.

It’s not just mothers who like the show. “I have many friends who don’t have kids, whether that’s by choice or not, and I would absolutely say that there is still joy in there for them.” Plus, men like it too, Moodie points out, describing a recent encounter with a male staff member in her local pet shop. “He’s like ‘Can I help you?’ I said ‘Yeah, I’m just looking at the chunky chicken chunks…’” she says, pausing to put on a strong Cockney accent. “He was like ‘You’re that bird! On that show...’ Oh, we laughed.”

(NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images)
NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images

Moodie credits writers Sharon Horgan, Helen Linehan and Holly Walsh for getting Motherland’s humour so spot-on. “The victory of the show is the writing. I’m being kind of facetious with the comparison but as you would perform Shakespeare, you don’t change the rhythm of the pentameter, you don’t change the punctuation that’s been inserted… you need that, that’s the scaffolding.”

She watched the first series (once she was called for an audition, she admits, “because I miss a lot of stuff when it’s on”) assuming the lines flowed naturally, “then you look at the script and you realise it’s all exact. All the little pauses and nuances and everything — there’s zero room for improvisation.” Is it a radical show? “I think British writers are on the vanguard of radical humour — they’ve always been,” says Moodie.

Listening to actresses Julia Davis and Vicki Pepperdine on the Dear Joan and Jericha podcast has her “snorting” in the gym and she is thrilled to see a growing wave of British female writers such as Horgan “throwing down the gauntlet and saying ‘this is life, laugh at it or cry — you choose’”.

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Moodie admits she’s spent “many days under the duvet crying” , but credits her faith for helping her through a career that’s full of rejection. As a child, she attended a Roman Catholic convent school in Canada but later in her career she was introduced to Buddhism through a fellow actor.

Today, she practices chanting morning and night, “like cleaning my teeth”. She is currently filming season three of Sky thriller Tin Star in Liverpool and is excited for a third series of Motherland (“I hope they do really, really ridiculous things with Meg”). She’s an active member of the Women’s Equality Party (she considered standing as a candidate “for five seconds”), runs a production company with “work wife” Sarah Rutherford, and is currently a council member and associate teacher at Rada.

Moodie notes that she is pleased to see many of her students — and young people in general — being more “forthcoming” about their mental health and “self-medicating” in ways other than drinking. “When I was at drama college you’d go down to the pub, get wasted, smoke a lot, kiss someone you shouldn’t,” laughs Moodie. “Then you’d wake up in someone else’s bed and go back to college.” Or the school gates.

​Motherland is streaming on iPlayer now.

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