In March, Daisy Haggard wrapped filming on the third season of Breeders, the uncomfortably honest parenting comedy in which she stars alongside Martin Freeman. The plan was to spend the next few months working on his own scripts. Haggard is now a popular writer after two series of the excellent BBC sad comedy Back to Life, the story of a woman who returns to her small town after a long stint in prison, which she created, co-wrote with Laura Solon and starred in him. Now was the time to think: She had a few ideas for feature films she wanted to pursue and another TV show, and while she didn’t think she’d be doing any more Back to Life — certainly not by a long shot — there was buzz. to reconsider this.
April, Haggard admits, was a near-crash. There was Easter, the school holidays and she had other extremely important things on her mind, such as finding out when the reality TV show Love Is Blind was coming back. But the “peak postponement” occurred in early May. After several weeks of intensive research, she adopted a rescue puppy: Betty, a scrawny, five-month-old dachshund-poodle-seguggio-italiano-yorkie-bichon frise-cocker mix with a broken elbow. Betty ended up in a loving, crowded home in the south London suburbs, which Haggard shares with her partner Joe, their two daughters, aged seven and four, and two previous rescue dogs.
“So I’m sitting on a bed with a laptop and three dogs, holding rawhide bones, and then writing with my other hand,” Haggard says. “My friends were like, ‘Well, you’re just doing Daisy…'” She acts horrified: “I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ And they’re like, ‘You’re creating a bit of chaos and then all of a sudden you’re writing.’ Because I wrote ‘Comeback to life’ when I had just given birth to my second child: she was one month old. And I wrote the second season indoors with both kids, no childcare and a puppy. But then I spent 20 years in a flat in Brixton in my trousers doing nothing. So maybe there is something going on there. Send him to a therapist.
With Martin Freeman in Breeders. Photo: Mark Johnson/Sky/Avalon
We meet in mid-June at a photography studio near Brixton – is Haggard progressing better with his writing? “Whatever it is, it’s still not working,” she sighs before determination washes over her. “But it will.”
Haggard is 44 and describes his career until recent years as “a lot of little moments with things… a little bit, yeah.” She’s modest: she’s reliably appeared in many of the best British comedies of the past two decades, including Man Stroke Woman, Psychoville and Episodes. (Sometimes people would come up to her and say they thought she was brilliant on Smack the Pony, which, to be clear, she wasn’t in.) But Haggard is right that with Breeders and Back to Life she has discovered two shows, which allow her to fully demonstrate what a deft comic performer she is.
She has a natural intelligence which means she just gets what is required with very little explanation, always Martin Freeman
“Daisy is a superbly nuanced dramatic actor who also has a keen sense of, well, mischief,” says Chris Addison, who co-created Breeders with Martin Freeman and Simon Blackwell. “She’s got funny bones, Haggard; things you can’t acquire – you either have them or you don’t. You could try to dissect it and figure out what makes her such a good comedic actress, but at the end of the day it’s just because she’s… Daisy.” Blackwell, who wrote Breeders and previously worked on The Thick of It and Veep, agrees. “She’s a great dramatic actor and a natural comedian,” he says. “It’s such a rare skill to be emotionally real while nailing the comedy. It’s an instinctive thing, and it makes her an absolute pleasure to write about.”
At the heart of Breeders is Haggard’s easy chemistry with Freeman as the stretched-out, sometimes beleaguered, often distraught parents of two children. The two have known each other for years – Haggard is godmother to one of Freeman’s children – but they’ve never worked together before. “She’s one of those people who has a natural intelligence, which means she just gets what’s required with very little explanation ever needed,” says Freeman. “Also, she makes light work. There is no overthinking. Sometimes without thinking period.’
Photo: Alex Lake/The Observer
How is she as a godfather? “She’s crazy about the kids or mine, either way,” Freeman replies. “She is this bundle of enthusiasm and fun. Daisy is the original Mother Earth. And also very stupid. To the Olympic level. I make her very angry. But she often gets ahead of me.”
It’s ridiculously easy to find people to say good things about Haggard, and when you meet her, it’s not hard to see why. She has warmth, self-deprecation and silliness. We spend the first 10 minutes of the interview talking about chips: for Christmas a few years ago, her husband ordered a Frazzle, Walkers Square and Monster Munch necklace, which obviously delighted her. When we finally move on to other subjects, she looks disappointed. “Let’s just talk about Wotsits,” she says, “Can we not talk about work?”
For those of us who know Haggard personally and professionally, we seem genuinely glad that the rest of us are finally realizing just how great she is.
“No, things are going very well,” says Haggard. “But it’s also really nice when things are going well when you’re in your late 30s, early 40s. My plan was that the day I left theater school, the phone would ring and I would become a movie star. Then I worked for 10 years in a gym. So many times I’ve left so much work and then had to come back to them and say, “Yeeee! Um, this whole thing with me leaving…
“So it’s nice to have that now because your feet are on the ground, my priorities feel very defined and sorted,” she continues. “I feel like, ‘Just take the moment, enjoy it, because tomorrow could be really different.’ Don’t expect everything to last forever.”
Haggard’s father is Piers Haggard, the Bafta award-winning director of Dennis Potter’s Pennywise, as well as cult horror films Blood on Satan’s Claw and 1981’s Venom, starring Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski, as a black mamba who picks off the characters one by one. But she disputes the idea that she was born into acting. Haggard performed in school plays but was never cast. Eventually, in the last production before she left, she was cast as Miss Hannigan, the main antagonist in the musical Annie.
School, in general, was a struggle. “Yeah, I was pretty bad at everything,” Haggard says. “I had a very short skirt though. I was really good at it!” She laughs. “No, I just didn’t like school. I don’t think school is for everyone. Right? I mean, of course it’s for everyone. And I’m happy with the way it went. If I really like something, I can devote everything to it, I work all night. But if I don’t, I just can’t concentrate.
Haggard was the youngest of his father’s six children, two of whom he had with her mother, Anna Sklovsky, a stained glass artist. “My parents were weirdly puritanical about television, but I watched some very extreme horror movies quite young,” she recalls. “I watched Venom, probably too young. We had the mock black mamba in the dressing box along with Satan’s Claw from Blood on Satan’s Claw. So we had a very good prop for our dressing.’
There was a lot of crafting and making in the Haggard household: “It was always like, ‘What can you do with a margarine container?’ I’ll see you in two hours.” And at the age of 11, Haggard began work on his first screenplay. Everything was going pretty well until she hit puberty and her writing took a bit of a gratuitous turn when a set designer appeared in a scene and took off his shirt, Diet Coke ad style.
After drama school, Haggard wrote in fits and starts. She thought there might be a comedy based on the gym she worked at – “At the front desk, I hasten to add. I’ve never set foot in a gym” – but it didn’t quite work out. Another idea had interest from Channel 4, but nothing came of it. “I always wanted to be a writer, but I had almost given up,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, well, that’s it.’
The idea that stuck came from Haggard, who noticed that women who had committed serious crimes often faced more complicated rehabilitation when they got out of prison than men. Back to Life is certainly not an obvious comedy conceit: it follows Miri Matheson (Haggard) as she tries to re-enter society after a life sentence for murdering her best friend Lara as a teenager. At home in Kent, living with her parents, Miri is excluded, attacked and betrayed by almost everyone close to her. Somehow, though, Haggard and Solon create pathos and humor out of these bleak scenarios. “Back to Life’s ability to move you from tears to laughter within a line, let alone a scene, remains undiminished,” wrote Lucy Mangan in her review for the Guardian.
Along with Adeel Akhtar in Back to Life. Photo: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
“I’m obsessed with the underdog,” says Haggard, speaking now of Miri. “And I think people relate to her optimism and her determination. We really put Miri through a lot. I guess it’s its own beast then, right? It’s a bit spooky. Kind of funny. A little…? I’ll never write something that’s just one thing, but it always has to be stupid because I think everything is a little bit stupid.
Many details from Haggard’s own life found their way into Back to Life. When her father lectures Miri about how to pack the dishwasher, it’s pure Pierce Haggard. However, Haggard’s mother is keen to point out that there is also a lot of fiction in the images. “My mother is never…
Add Comment