Some children aspire to become doctors, astronauts, teachers or firefighters. Growing up in Bolton, a former factory town in northern England, Diane Morgan was interested in one thing: comedy. She watched a lot of it, mostly British movies. Peter Sellers, “Fawlty Towers,” Monty Python.
When she got into drama school, she told the program director, “‘Look, I’m not here to see Shakespeare,’ so they gave me all the major roles like Lady Macbeth,” she said in a video chat. I recalled. London house. “All the lovely, beautiful girls who wanted to play geniuses hated me, saying, ‘Why is he playing this role?’ He wants to be a stupid maid.’”
Decades later, Morgan’s efforts to play the fool paid off. Since 2013, she has appeared as clueless TV expert Philomena Cunk in a series of mockumentaries about history, philosophy, art and science (including “Cunk on Earth”). Dressed in tweed, strolling through picturesque locations and sitting with leading academics, she looks like a BBC presenter. She then asks an Oxford professor, “What was more culturally significant, Beyoncé’s hit song ‘Single Ladies’ or the Renaissance?” And the illusion of gravity was (hilariously) shattered.
‘Cunk on Life,’ the latest installment in the ‘Cunk’ canon, premieres on Netflix on Thursday. Cunk remains deadpan and ill-informed, asking great philosophers and physicists “some of the most important questions you can ever ask.” In one particularly outrageous scene, she tells a famous British surgeon that only 40% of people have skeletons. Everyone else is “solid meat,” she says.
Morgan has an incredible ability to maintain a cool expression throughout an interview. It’s all about pressure, she says. “I know it’s not funny to just laugh.” She admits that sometimes she breaks or destroys “corpses.” This is especially true with certain experts, such as Douglas Hedley, professor of religious philosophy at the University of Cambridge, who continues to be a hot topic in the “dunk” world. “He speaks very slowly, but he is really smart. “I think the more honest and serious it is, the more it tickles me,” she says.
Ricky Gervais and Diane Morgan in ‘After Life’.
(Natalie Seri)
Scholars who appear on “Cunk” may know that Morgan is trying a little harder on a comedy show, but they still react to her character’s dumb questions with genuine shock and anger. There was more confusion in the beginning because it was before Cunk became famous.
“We had real intellectuals, and famously they don’t watch comedy. Then, if you trample on their favorite topic, things can get tense, she says. One expert was so irritated that he had to stop filming while he calmed down. “I said, ‘If it happens again, don’t stop.’ I wanted him to punch me. Because I thought it would make great TV. If he breaks my nose, it will heal.”
“I think they’re really feeling a little defensive about their subject,” says “Cunk on Life” creator Charlie Brooker, who is also behind the techno-dystopian anthology series “Black Mirror.” When Morgan films interviews, he is usually not physically present. Because he said, “I feel too withdrawn. “I will die.”
Brooker says Morgan “doesn’t mind awkward silences, which is really useful when I’m doing interviews. Sometimes they last for an hour, and 70 percent of them are awkward silences.”
Some of the experts continue to gain popularity and “seem to really enjoy the fact that they are there,” Brooker says. “The sad thing is that experts aren’t often interviewed on mainstream TV anymore.”
Over time, Cunk became more hostile toward the talking heads he interrogated and more willing to counter their claims with vague anecdotal evidence. (“My Friend Paul” is one of her most frequently cited sources.)
“It feels like a modern day thing,” Brooker says. “People these days are less shy about saying to an expert, ‘Okay, anyway, you may have been studying this topic for 25 years, but I just saw a video on YouTube that tells you your life is bullshit.’ Let me tell you why we didn’t land on the moon and why vaccines don’t work. There is a condescending attitude among many of the alternative truth crowd.
“There’s something fun about watching her attack their jobs, the things they care passionately about, from a slightly bored standpoint,” he added.
Diane Morgan in the Max comedy ‘Frayed’.
(Lisa Tomasetti / HBO Max)
Morgan’s Bolton accent somehow adds to the dry, comedic feel of the character. When Morgan studied at East 15 Acting School, she was told that the way she spoke would be a barrier to getting a job.
“It was really crazy because every part I’ve had since then has been an accent,” she says. “Drama schools always want to take away the interesting parts of you and make you back into the actor they think people want to be. But in reality, people want weird things. They want individuality, right? They want bumps and lumps and strange eyes.”
Morgan performed stand-up in London for almost a decade, an experience at least as valuable as drama school. “You can learn a lot very quickly about how not to bore people,” she says.
During those difficult years, she earned her living by working a series of miserable jobs. There was a particularly grim gig as a telemarketer, calling people to ask if they needed a new accountant, and packing deworming medication for dogs for 10 hours a day without allowing them to talk or sit. “It was the worst experience, but I thought, ‘I have to make this a success.’ I really need to pull my socks off and do something with my life because I don’t want to end up here,’ says Morgan.
She landed a few small roles on TV when she auditioned for Philomena Cunk, which started as a character on the satirical news show “Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe.” Comedian Al Campbell played the goofy commentator with the comically named Barry Shitpeas. The show was originally looking for a female counterpart, whom it envisioned as “a vacuous, Range Rover-driving, delicious mummy cupcake blogger,” Brooker says.
To complete the stereotype, the character had to sound a little fancier. However, Morgan claimed that he asked for extra time during his audition to voice Cunk. “I never had the courage to do that,” she says. “It just makes it funnier, because my accent is pretty flat and gives the whole thing a kind of misery.”
Brooker was “absolutely floored” at the audition. Morgan says he brings a “weird, comical inscrutability” to Cunk. “There’s something very interesting about the character: she’s kind of alien and supernatural, but at the same time dumb in a cosmic way.”
“Everyone was very nervous about it. Would this new character work or not?” Morgan recalls. “Otherwise I would have been immediately axed and shot around the corner. But it worked.”
Morgan (right), <모더랜드>with Paul Reddy.
(Sundance Now / BBC Pictures)
Cunk became a breakout character, appearing in recurring parts and then anchoring standalone specials, including “Cunk on Britain” and — yes — “Cunk on Shakespeare.” (Standout quote: “Schools in Shakespeare’s time were very different from ours. In fact, it was much easier because you didn’t have to study Shakespeare.”)
Meanwhile, Morgan became a dependable scene-stealer in biting British comedies, often playing overtly profane characters with little regard for social subtleties. In the Ricky Gervais vehicle “After Life,” she starred as a newspaper employee obsessed with Kevin Hart’s work. In “Motherland,” a sitcom co-created by Sharon Horgan, she plays a foul-mouthed single mother who dislikes the bourgeois parenting standards of her middle-class social orbit. (She lets her son urinate in the street, amputating one of his fingers in the process, and makes himself a sandwich by splitting cheese from a chunk in the freezer.)
She says of her ‘home country’ role: “It’s good to have someone like that who doesn’t do anything.” “Every day, mothers would run to me on the street. ‘Thank God. I thought it was just me.’”
She also wrote, directed and starred in “Mandy,” a bizarre comedy about an unemployed woman jumping from one odd job to the next.
Morgan thinks it might be nice to do something a little wilder and more dramatic sometimes. ““But I’m not interested in Shakespeare yet.”
