Interview with Susan Wokoma for Chewing Gum

14 December 2016

You play Cynthia in E4’s comedy smash Chewing Gum – explain a bit about her.

She is Tracey’s younger sister. She’s very, very religious. She’s sort of the extreme version of Tracey. She believes that God, her mum, and Tracey are all that she’ll ever need in life. The moment in series one where Tracey decides to go and explore different things, you see Cynthia have a kind of breakdown, where she’s losing her best friend in her head, and she panics, and the lid comes off all her own personal desires and wants. They’re very human wants, but they’re very scary to her, and you see her trying to balance her extreme religious views and wanting to have sex.

 

She seems very conflicted – at the same time very traditional and religious, but also a prodigious swearer and someone desperate to explore her sexuality. Is it fun, exploring those contradictions in a character?

Yeah. It’s the absolute extremes. She’s completely at war with herself. You can explore each extreme – the prudishness and the absolute filth. I love playing her. She’s a nutter.

 

Do you get self-conscious filming some of Cynthia’s scenes? Are you worried about family members seeing it?

I feel like you can’t allow yourself to get self-conscious, you have to throw that to the wind. So I try not to, I try and psych myself up for it on set. But with filming, you do a scene again, and again, and again. And again. And after a little while, you start to think “Oh God, is it funny? Is it silly? Is it working?” But I try and plough through that. As for my family… it doesn’t get bigger than watching me watch porn – after that, my family were like “Right, okay, that’s the kind of show we’re watching. We’re in!” They absolutely love it. But I was really worried about what my mum would think. As soon as that scene had broadcast on TV, I looked at my phone, and my mum was ringing me. I think in the end there were about seven missed calls, because I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. And when I finally picked up, she was in tears… In tears laughing.

 

Had you played it differently in other takes?

Actually, that scene we shot on the first day of filming for the first series. We did a lot of filming of Tracey and Cynthia together in their bedroom. And that scene was actually meant to be on the second day, but Tom, our director, was like “Well, let’s do some laptop scenes.” And then we got to near the end of the day and Tom said to me “How do you feel about delving into this scene?” And I thought “Well, we’re here now, we might as well do it.” And I remember finishing the scene, and looking over into the corner, and the poor sound guy was just dying in the corner, because I’d been very loud and high-pitched.

 

Cynthia didn’t have the best of endings to series one. Is her life set to improve at all?

It depends what you consider an improvement. She discovers a lot about herself, and religion, and her very natural desires to be with another human being. She learns a lot more about herself, but she still ends up getting it completely wrong. And that’s all I can say!

 

The show is so absurd at times – is corpsing a problem?

Yeah. Any scenes that I have with Michaela are almost unbearable. She watches me play Cynthia, and she looks like she can’t quite believe that she’s written this, and can’t quite believe that I’m doing it. You can just see it in her eyes, she’s thinking “That’s so bizarre.” And obviously it must be weird, hearing your words come out of somebody else’s mouth. And particularly with Cynthia, she’s very extreme, there’s lots of funny things that I’ll do on a whim that she’s not ready for. So there’s a lot of corpsing, particularly when I do stuff with Michaela.

 

Who’s worse out of the two of you?

I think Michaela is! But she’s like that with everyone. I think it’s because these are words she’s been working on for months, and then we come along and do something completely out of the blue with it, and that really tickles her. I think it’s really cool that she’s still excited about what us actors bring to it. But she’s definitely worse.

 

His year’s been something of a breakout one for you, with both Chewing Gum and Crazyhead doing so well. Have you noticed a change in your day to day life?

No, not really. I’m busier work-wise, which is great, at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing. It was an ongoing joke. Last year for New Year – my birthday’s on New Year’s Eve – me and Michaela went off to Italy. She got stopped all the time – it was a real moment, when I thought “My God Michaela’s life has changed!” We were in Italy, and people were recognising her, and fans were really fanatical about the show. And she’d call me over and say “This is Susan, she plays Cynthia!” And nobody would believe her. It ended up with the weird situation of me trying to convince people that I was in the show, and I was like “I didn’t even want to be involved in this conversation in the first place!” So as regards my life, day-to-day, the results are completely underwhelming. But as long as I’m able to be part of both of those brilliant shows, then I’m happy.

 

It’s probably a complement that people don’t look at you and immediately think of Cynthia from Chewing Gum!

I was doing a play at the beginning of the year, and this actor was talking about Chewing Gum for ages, and I looked at him and was like “Dude, you do know that I’m in it?” It’s great, though, I love being able to transform myself for the job. It’s brilliant!

 

What’s it like working with Michaela? How does she handle the responsibility she has?

I’ve worked with her before – we did a play together, that’s how we met, back in 2013. I played her little sister in that, as well. So I knew how she worked. But seeing her running set is pretty incredible. Before series one, she’d barely been on set, so to see her go from us rehearsing a play in a tiny little room in Manchester to being on a set, effectively running things – and more so with series two – is incredible. The thing that you do when you see someone with all that responsibility is you go “Okay, the one thing that I’ll make sure that she doesn’t have to worry about is my performance.” I feel like all of us performers really bring it out of the bag because she’s got a million and one things, including her own performance, to worry about.

 

You’re a writer as well as an actor. What sort of stuff do you write?

I write comedy. I love writing comedy, I’m a big comedy fan. The stuff I tend to do is tragi-comedy. The stuff I write is very dark, it sits very close to tragedy, because some of the funniest things come from really, really bad experiences.

 

Do you think that gives you an insight into the scale of Michaela’s achievement in writing and starring in the series?

Yeah! It takes so much to write something and create something. And to do that and star in it and to help run the set is pretty unbelievable. And knowing just how much hard work goes in to getting the final version of a script, once you get it, you’re much more respectful of it. That’s what I really respect about what she’s done, just how bloody hard it is.