Some kids aspire to be doctors, astronauts, teachers or firefighters. Growing up in Bolton, a former mill town in the north of England, Diane Morgan was interested in one thing: comedy. She watched a lot of it, mostly British. Peter Sellers, “Fawlty Towers,” Monty Python.
When she landed in drama school, she told the head of the program, “‘Look, I’m not here for the Shakespeare’ — so they gave me Lady Macbeth, all the big roles,” she recalled in a video chat from her London home. “All these lovely, beautiful girls who wanted to play the ingenues — they hated me because they were like, ‘Why is she getting these parts? She wants to be the stupid maid.’”
Several decades later, Morgan’s commitment to playing the fool has paid off. Since 2013, she has starred as Philomena Cunk, a know-nothing TV pundit, in a series of mockumentaries about history, philosophy, art and science (including “Cunk on Earth”). As she strides through picturesque locations, dressed in tweed, and sits down with distinguished experts from the world of academia, she looks every bit the part of a BBC presenter. Then she does things like ask an Oxford professor, “What was more culturally significant, Beyoncé’s hit ‘Single Ladies’ or the Renaissance period?” and the illusion of gravitas is (hilariously) ruptured.
The latest volume in the “Cunk” canon, “Cunk on Life,” premieres Thursday on Netflix. Cunk remains as deadpan and ill-informed as ever, asking great philosophers and physicists “some of the most significant questions you can ask with a mouth.” In one particularly absurd scene, she tells a renowned British surgeon that only 40% of people have skeletons. Everyone else, she says, is “solid meat.”
Morgan has a remarkable ability to maintain a straight face throughout these interviews. It’s all about the pressure, she says. “I know that as soon as I laugh, it’s not funny.” She admits she does “corpse” — or crack up — on occasion, particularly with certain experts, like Douglas Hedley, a professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University who has become a recurring talking head in the “Cunk” universe. “He talks very slowly, but he’s brilliant. I think the straighter and more serious they are, the more it tickles me,” she says.
The academics who appear in “Cunk” may be aware that Morgan is doing a bit for a comedy program, but they still react to her character’s idiotic questions with genuine shock and exasperation. In the early days, before Cunk became well-known, there was more confusion.
“We had some real eggheads, and famously, they don’t watch comedy. Then you trample all over their favorite topic” and things can get tense, she says. One expert grew so irritated they had to pause filming while he calmed down. “I said, ‘Don’t stop if that happens again.’ I was willing for him to punch me, because I thought it would make great TV. If he breaks my nose, it’ll heal.”
“I think they genuinely feel a bit defensive of their subject matter,” says “Cunk on Life” creator Charlie Brooker, who is also the force behind the techno-dystopian anthology series “Black Mirror.” He is usually not physically present when Morgan is filming the interviews because, he says, “I find it too cringe. I would die.”
Brooker says Morgan “doesn’t mind an awkward silence, which comes in really handy when she’s doing the interviews, because sometimes they will last an hour, 70% of which is awkward silence.”
The experts, some of whom have become recurring favorites, “seem to really enjoy the fact that they’re there,” Brooker says. “The sad thing is, experts don’t get interviewed on mainstream TV very often anymore.”
Over time, Cunk has grown more antagonistic toward the talking heads she interrogates, and more willing to counter their arguments with dubious anecdotal evidence. (“My mate Paul” is one of her most frequently cited sources.)
“That feels like a modern-day thing,” Brooker says. “People are less shy these days about saying to an expert, ‘Yeah, whatever, you may have studied this subject for 25 years, but I just watched a video on YouTube which tells me your life’s work is bulls—. I’ll tell you why we didn’t land on the moon, or vaccines don’t work. There’s an arrogant swagger to a lot of the alternative truth crowd.
“There’s something funny about watching her attack their professions, things they care passionately about, from her position of slightly bored detachment,” he adds.
Morgan’s Bolton accent somehow adds to the character’s dry comedic affect. When Morgan was studying at the East 15 Acting School, she was told the way she spoke would be an obstacle to getting work.
“It’s madness, because every part I’ve had since then, it’s the accent that’s got it,” she says. “In drama school, they always want to stamp out the interesting bits about you and build you back up into an actor that they think people want. But actually, people want weirdness. They want individuality, don’t they? They want humps and lumps and weird eyes.”
Morgan spent nearly 10 years performing stand-up in London, an experience that was at least as valuable as drama school. “You learn a lot very quickly about how not to bore people,” she says.
During those lean years, she made ends meet by working a string of miserable jobs. There was a stint as a telemarketer, cold-calling people to ask if they needed a new accountant, and a particularly grim gig packing worming tablets for dogs for 10 hours a day, with no talking or sitting allowed. “It was the worst experience, but it made me think, ‘I’ve really got to make this work. I’ve really got to pull my socks up and do something with my life, because I don’t want to end up here,’” Morgan says.
She had landed a few small parts in TV when she got the audition for Philomena Cunk, which originated as a character on the satirical news show “Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe.” Comedian Al Campbell played a dim-witted commentator with the ludicrous name Barry Shitpeas. The show was looking for his female counterpart, someone they originally envisioned as “a yummy mummy cupcake blogger who’s vacuous and drives a Range Rover,” Brooker says.
To complete the stereotype, the character was supposed to sound more posh. But Morgan insisted on asking for additional time in her audition to play Cunk in her own voice. “I’d never had the balls to do that,” she says. “It was just funnier, because my own accent is quite flat, and it lends a sort of misery to everything.”
Brooker was “absolutely floored” by the audition. Morgan brings “an odd comic unknowability” to Cunk, he says. “There’s something very curious about the character, where she is sort of alien and otherworldly but simultaneously vapid in a cosmic way,”
“Everyone was quite nervous about it — would this new character work or not?” Morgan recalls. “If it hadn’t, I’d have been axed immediately and taken off and shot around the corner. But it worked.”
Cunk became a breakout character, appearing in recurring segments and then anchoring standalone specials, including “Cunk on Britain” and — yes — “Cunk on Shakespeare.” (Standout quote: “School in Shakespeare’s day and age was vastly different to our own. In fact, it was far easier because he didn’t have to study Shakespeare.”)
Meanwhile, Morgan became a reliable scene stealer in acerbic British comedies, often playing bluntly profane characters with little regard for social niceties. In the Ricky Gervais vehicle “After Life,” she starred as a newspaper employee obsessed with Kevin Hart’s oeuvre. In “Motherland,” a sitcom co-created by Sharon Horgan, she played a foul-mouthed single mom who chafes at the bourgeois parenting standards of her middle-class social orbit. (She lets her son pee in the street and makes sandwiches by hacking cheese from a hunk in her freezer, severing a finger in the process.)
“It’s nice to have someone like that, who just doesn’t give a toss,” she says of her “Motherland” role. “I used to get moms running up to me in the street every day: ‘Thank God for this. I thought I was the only one.’”
She also wrote, directed and starred in the defiantly weird comedy “Mandy,” which follows an unemployable woman as she skips from one odd job to the next.
Morgan occasionally thinks it would be nice to do something a bit grittier and more dramatic. “But I’ve still got no interest in Shakespeare.”
