Interview with Rose Reynolds for Wasted

5 July 2016

You star in E4’s new comedy, Wasted. Explain a bit about the show.

Yes so Wasted is about 4 friends, who run a shop in the West Country.

It’s about four friends, a brother and a sister and then their mates Kent and Alison, in their mid-twenties who are wasters essentially, so they’re getting drunk quite a lot of the time. It’s about how they fill their days with chaos - that’s Wasted in a nutshell really.

Who do you play?

I play Sarah who is Morpheus’ sister and I think of the four she seems to be the one that is most likely to leave her hometown. At the beginning we find her planning to go away to India and then Kent arrives back from uni and that puts a a spanner in the works as they have a bit of a past. I think Morpheus is very happy to keep things as they are so Sarah is kind of locked in, she’s loyal to her brother so she’s stuck.

How much of you is there in Sarah? Can you relate to her?

Well I grew up in a little town in Devon so I can relate to that feeling of boredom and spending your day getting drunk on a cathedral green aged 16 and finding things to do with your friends when there isn’t much to do. But the difference between us is that I’ve felt like I can leave, whereas Sarah for some reason doesn’t. However I can also relate to her loyalty, her joy of life and her bravery.

What attracted you to the role?

I watched Chewing Gum so I was a fan of the directors (Tom Marshall) work and I liked the style of that. When it was pitched it was described to be a bit like Spaced and I’m a big fan of Spaced and then Sean Bean came into the mix and I thought “wow! This is mad!”

I’ve also known Danny for 10 years and Gwyneth for four so to think that she’d be playing my best friend was great. Dylan came onto the show with me at the end and it turns out he's from near me in Devon. My dad taught him at school, so we've got all these connections which drew me to the project as well.

Was the show as much fun to film as it looks?

Yes it was, definitely, because of the rapport we already had and a few weeks of rehearsals before we started too. We were able to try stuff out and figure it out in rehearsals and then pick up where we left off straight away in filming so it was so much fun.

Is there much room for improvisation?

Definitely! There would be re-writes a couple of minutes before a take sometimes and Jon and James were so great. It was really useful because they'd say try this or that and they were open to us throwing stuff in too. Dylan is really good at improvisation and then we started a kind of tennis match of banter between us all.

Some of the stuff you get up to is quite ridiculous – did you find corpsing a problem?

Oh my god I am the worst corpser in the world! I think the guys knew that I was a target for that and so they would play on that a little bit, but in a lovely way. It was hard to keep a straight face, especially with the element of improvisation. You can prepare yourself with the lines and you know what they're going to say and then they'd throw something in at the end or a look and you think 'you bugger' cause you kept it together for so long and then you'd lose it at the end! 

You’ve done some theatre as well as TV and film – do you have a favourite at all?

I'm trying to gain as much experience as I can. I'm a classically trained actor so Shakespeare and the Greeks and all of that stuff is where my roots are, so to do something like Wasted which is completely different was really exciting.

Anything else exciting coming up for you?

I'm in the new series of Poldark which is coming up later in the year and apart from that I'm spending a lot of time with my family down in Devon - so I can re-visit my roots!