Aisling Bea: ‘In terms of comedy, I’m not Heston Blumenthal. I’m like ‘chips and a side’’

Aisling Bea is drinking a pint of beer outside a bar at the edge of Hollywood next door to an Upright Citizens Brigade venue and across the road from the towering Scientology Celebrity Centre. Welcome to LA. It's difficult to articulate what good company Bea is. She's hilarious, charming and whip-smart. She's self-deprecating and honest, and generous with her time and thoughts. She's frank and curious. She's equal parts self-conscious and comfortable with her brand of comedy that is both goofy and clever.

“When you go to a restaurant,” she says, towards the end of a conversation that turns into a few more drinks before she heads off to play mini-golf, “sometimes you want to go to Heston Blumenthal’s where you hear the sound of the sea while you’re eating one tiny thing for a hundred quid. And then sometimes you just want toast. You just. Want. To eat. Toast. Sometimes you have to be okay with the fact that in terms of comedy, I’m just like, maybe, ‘chips and a side’. And sometimes you might really fancy that, and maybe you’re not going to be listening to a cone while eating an oyster.”

In Los Angeles, where she spends up to a third of her year, Bea generally gigs every second night. In February or March, it's non-stop auditioning during pilot season. Then there's the standup writing, the panel shows (she was recently made a team captain on 8 Out Of 10 Cats), the gigs in the UK and Ireland, screenwriting, developing shows, acting (she stars in series three of the BBC drama The Fall), the comedy festivals, and Channel 4 has commissioned a show she wrote with Sharon Horgan.

If you think that’s a lot of work, then you’re right. She admits that last year she ran herself ragged, the curse of a freelancer saying yes to everything and surviving on too little sleep. It sounds like burnout. One month in Los Angeles, she did 14 gigs in a week including three in a row on a Saturday.

The Saturday gigs went increasingly poorly. “In a way dying on your arse is like being wrong. The brain reads being wrong or embarrassment or cringe-worthiness in the same place as being hit. So the reason you feel like that is because your body is going ‘ow, I’ve been hurt’. But your body looks around and there’s no pain.”

With that level of self-examination, and a desire to understand human behaviour, it’s not surprising that Bea is interested in psychology. Of criticism, she says “We are trained to remember the poison berry, not the berries that are nice, because that means you don’t go back to the poison berry. So that idea of finding the bad thing, or something that makes you feel bad, is how humans survived. So when you look at lots of people saying ‘you were great!’ and then someone says ‘you’re an unfunny f***.’ Oh my god! That’s where you think: ‘I’ll focus in on that, that’s the one that’ll make me never try again because it was too scary.’” She speaks with captivating perceptiveness about failure, tiredness, sleep-deprivation, and the dopamine hits delivered by to-do lists. I find myself mentally taking notes.

Acting profile

Bea, 32, is from Kildare and has been acting since she was 20. She has been doing standup for 5½ years. Being in The Fall has certainly upped her acting profile. "People go to me 'oh, you're doing acting now? And would you be interesting in keeping up the acting?' And I'm there with tears rolling down my face." She comes from a family of hard workers (her mother is a retired jockey who, when Bea introduced her to the head of Channel 4 comedy, confronted him about the state of the channel's horseracing coverage).

She was part of a sketch group for two years in college and thought "well, at least I gave comedy a go". Then in drama school in London she was convinced she'd come out with an agent, "not any agent, the big guys!" She thought she'd be doing theatre for the rest of her career. Instead, she came out of drama school with bleached blonde hair and no representation, and she started getting comedy roles in TV series including Come Fly With Me, Dead Boss.

Then she started writing comedy and thought “maybe I’ll do standup just once”. A year later she was a TV standup. “All of a sudden you’re being compared against people who have been doing it for 20 years. It can be a baptism of fire and make you better in some ways [but] the real person inside you wants to put up a little sign that says: ‘by the way I’m brand new!’”

When Sharon Horgan was working on the HBO series Divorce in New York, Bea would write with her. Horgan is one of the many people Bea praises throughout our conversation, "Sharon is the most unbelievably disciplined workhorse you've ever seen in your life. I work a lot, but Sharon has got such amazing discipline with her writing that I don't have. I work very hard, but it's maybe a scattier process. Unfortunately that is my process. I'd love to sit down and go," she mimes exaggerated typing, "Roald Dahl in the back of his shed: 'I have a coffee, I stop for lunch, and I always finish at 6pm'. Well, great to be you Roald!"

"Scatty" is Bea doing herself a disservice. You don't get to where she is without hard work and talent. She says she's been in too many failed pilots to count, "something like 10, 20 TV shows that never made it to air at all." Her TV roles go from Cliodhna in Fair City for RTÉ, to a woman with an exploding boob job in the BBC hospital drama Holby City. On the Jonathan Ross Show recently, promoting The Fall, Bea owned her segment like a boss. When Ross asked if she was single, she shot him down with brilliant put-on seriousness, pretending he was hitting on her, "I thought I was on this show by merit. That's not going to happen". Then, without missing a beat, turned to the other guest on the couch. "But I will go out with you, John Malkovich. "

Bea is full of recommendations; Sara Pascoe's Animal, Nish Kumar and Arianna Huffington's audio book on sleep ("It's not Faust, but it was very interesting"). She quotes Pulling, [Horgan's comedy series] does pitch-perfect impersonations of American standup gig hosts, hilariously dissects why the Bradley Cooper film Limitless appealed so much to freelancers and meditates on a feminist reinterpretation of Tinie Tempah's Pass Out. At one point she performs an improv scene when a young man who recognises her approaches: "sorry, are you Aisling Bea?" Bea, congratulating him for his timing in approaching her during an interview, details where he can pick up his "payment" later. "I think you're brilliant!" he says, half playing along. Bea responds, "you didn't mention how thin I'm looking, could you just go round the corner and come back and do that again please?"

In the past, Bea admits to buying into some “false prophets”, certain situations or people who didn’t make her feel great, people who grated down her confidence. “There was a stage in my career, especially with standup, where I felt because I didn’t know why I was doing well, that anyone who would tell me anything I was sort of like, ‘what did they say? Yeah, I’ll take that advice’. Now I’m a bit more careful who I choose to listen to.” As a result, she has naturally plotted her own course based on gut feeling.

Live at the Apollo

"Someone said to me 'oh, you're doing Live At The Apollo and you're not going on tour after?' And I said 'no, I don't have a show that I want to bring on tour', and they said, 'well, that's a bit of a waste of the Apollo'. And I didn't realise I had to follow the same path as everyone else."

There’s something noble about how she talks about the exchange between the position of the performer and the buy-in of the punter. In drama school, one thing that was drilled into her was that a reason for doing vocal exercises is so people in the back of the venue can hear you. “If you go around kind of half-arsed about it, why would you ask people to pay 20 quid to come and see you? If people don’t like it and you’ve given 100 per cent, at least you can die by your own sword. Put everything into it if you’re asking people to part with money for it. That’s the way I feel about it. Maybe a moral thing. But I like that idea. Don’t do something half-arsed if you’re asking them to pay for it.”

There is an urgency to Bea’s multifaceted work, the type of vibe you sense in someone whose work ethic is undoubtable but also happens to have the kind of irrepressible talent that spills over. The desire to plonk fingers in as many pies as possible has a better reception Stateside.

"In America they like to think 'do as many things as you can'. That's what I like about being here. 'You're a polymath! We call you multi-hyphenates!' I like the idea you're allowed work as much as you can. And in the UK they're like, 'So what are you going to end up doing then?'" She falls into an impersonation of no one in particular to emphasise the point, "Amy Poehler writing a book? Who does she think she is? Brendan Kennelly?"

Bea's brand of comedy has developed in sophistication over the years, but at times she sells herself short when pressed about her talent – toast versus Heston Blumenthal.

“It feels unnatural being a guilty Irish Catholic to get anything without the dirt of the long walk in the bare feet,” she says of success via graft. She tells a yarn about trying to write jokes with real political purpose.

“I go home and I’m like, you know what? Throw out all of my material, I’m gonna change things. People are gonna watch and be like ‘woah, never thought about it like that’. Then the thing I wrote was: ‘Do you ever put on shower caps in hotels and pretend you work in a factory?’ And that’s the only thing I wrote the whole day. It’s true.” I laugh, again. No, guffaw.