In Lady” a weird, poignant new film, “Sian Clifford is a scene-stealer. In real life, she is anything but. “I’m very introverted,” she told me when she came to Manhattan to promote the film, “so I find fame very difficult.”
Clifford is perhaps best known to American audiences for her award-winning portrayal of Claire, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s uptight older sister in “Fleabag.” Now, a decade after the British comedy series first aired on Amazon Prime, she steps into the role of Lady Isabella of Ravenhyde, who describes herself as “the aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians” and has decided to become a social media personality.
“I came across an old friend — bed-wetter into her teens. Apparently, she’s calling herself an influencer,” Clifford’s Lady Isabella tells the crew she has hired to document her life at Ravenhyde Hall, a stately pile in Norfolk, England. “Chucking out the content, mostly table-scaping. And I thought, ‘Well, I can do that.’”
Lady Isabella is hoping that a struggling director named Sam (played by Laurie Kynaston) will make her internet famous with his footage of the low-stakes regional talent contest she is hosting at the hall. Duped into accepting the gig by his agent, Sam is just about to quit — provoking rage in Lady Isabella, who roars “Never stop filming me!” — when things start to get interesting.
“Lady,” which was directed by Samuel Abrahams and co-written with his partner in life and work, Miranda Campbell Bowling, was released to select theaters Oct. 2. It’s a mockumentary with an absurdist streak that offers a timely, affecting meditation on the need to be seen. Abrahams, Clifford explained, was inspired to make the film after coming across a YouTuber compulsively capturing her life on video for an audience of virtually no one.
“He was fascinated by that need to put something out into the world,” Clifford said. “It’s almost vampiric in our culture right now.”
While she herself launched a Substack in 2024 called Still Space, in which she extols the virtues of slow living, Clifford, not surprisingly, eschews most social media. “You can get so caught up, in this industry especially,” she said. “It’s a cacophony. You can’t hear yourself think.”
The Upside of Attention
The success of “Fleabag” still stuns Clifford. At the 2019 Emmys, when “Fleabag” edged out “Veep” to win Outstanding Comedy Series, she fainted backstage.
“It was so unexpected,” she said. “You can’t really wrap your head around the scale of it, or the impact it’s going to have on your life. People approach you in a way that they would never approach a stranger — they’ll cross boundaries.”
The upside was that her performance got the attention of filmmakers like Abrahams. “Claire is such an iconic role; it means something to people,” he said. “You recognize the faults in her, because they’re deeply human.”
Though Lady Isabella is a departure from Claire, Abrahams believed she was right for the part. “I knew that Sian had that innate quality, to be able to deliver something that could be unlikable, yet we would still fall in love with her,” he said.
Clifford was not put off by the sometimes monstrous character. “I loved Lady Isabella immediately,” Clifford said. “I could see where that desperation came from, her loneliness.” Even so, stepping up to play the main part in “Lady” was, at times, an uncomfortable stretch. “I almost pulled out,” she said, “because I was scared.”
Her path into acting has been defined by a fierce internal battle: performance anxiety versus a powerful urge to act. Growing up in Ealing, a neighborhood in West London, a 6-year-old Clifford followed her older sister into local youth theater. When she was 15, she summoned her courage to audition for a school production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
“It was such a terrifying moment,” she recalled. “I shook so much I nearly dropped the script.” Clifford landed the part. “That changed things for me,” she said. “It changed my status at school. It made me think, ‘Maybe I should do this.’”
Even so, a guidance counselor said she would never get into London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, or RADA. But on her third try, Clifford was accepted.
At RADA’s orientation week, Clifford met Waller-Bridge, and discovered that she was also from Ealing — though Clifford joked, “I was from the wrong side of the tracks, as far as she was concerned.”
“We were leaving on the last day of orientation, and we ran into each other on the Central Line platform,” she recalled. “You know when you’re getting on a train with someone and you’re like, ‘Oh God, I’m going to be on this journey for, like, 45 minutes’?” But by the end of the train ride, the two had become inseparable.
Waller-Bridge wrote the part of Claire in “Fleabag” for Clifford, but had to fight for her friend to be offered an audition because Clifford, then a theater actress, had never done TV work. The two women auditioned for two hours in front of a single-camera operator.
“I left that room so dejected,” Clifford said. “I just didn’t think I got it.” The camera operator, however, was the producer of “Fleabag,” Lydia Hamson. “She got to see me and Phoebe interacting, and that was when she was like, ‘It has to be Sian.’”
Waller-Bridge, who is now working on a TV adaptation of “Tomb Raider” for Amazon Prime, still shares an almost sisterly bond with Clifford. “Sian is able to play a well of buried pain while executing a pitch-perfect comedy performance,” Waller-Bridge said. “We hardly had to talk about who Claire was. She just understood instinctively.”
Making ‘Lady’
“Lady” was made on a shoestring, with a crew of 10 on a 15-day shoot at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk. Clifford’s costumes were vintage, and almost entirely borrowed. They ranged from twin sets and pearls to Princess Diana-inspired, ’90s-style athleisure; from Marks & Spencer to Vivienne Westwood.
Those looks turned out to be key to Lady Isabella’s character. “I was struggling to get a purchase on certain aspects of her,” Clifford said. “But as soon as we found the first outfit — a tweed suit with a Hermès scarf and oval sunglasses — we were like, ‘This is her.’”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Clifford said she finds it uncomfortable watching herself act. “I’m very self-critical,” she said. “There are always things that could be made better.” With Lady Isabella, though, she’s happier than she is with most of her roles. “Whereas with ‘Fleabag’ I’d probably change 80 percent of my performance, with ‘Lady’ I’d change maybe 40 percent.”
“I’m not filled with self-loathing,” she added, with a smile. “At the moment.”
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