Rise to Fame
A friend dared her to write something funny in 2012. She came back with a sardonic one-woman show about grief and black comedy, took it to Edinburgh Fringe the next year, and a BBC editor reportedly happened to be in the audience. The TV adaptation hit in 2016. By 2019 Fleabag had swept the Emmys, the first British show to win Best Comedy Series, and she walked away with three personal awards covering acting, writing, and the series itself. She was already running Killing Eve and co-writing Bond at the same time.
In the Spotlight
Six years after Fleabag ended, she's running one of the more quietly powerful production operations in British-American television. The Tomb Raider series she's writing for Amazon is her first franchise from scratch. Her deal with Amazon shifted from exclusive to first-look in 2025, which sounds like a demotion but actually signals she has enough on her plate. She also narrated and produced an octopus documentary the same year, which tells you something about range. The industry treats her as a writer first, an actress second, and she seems to prefer it that way.
Side Notes
Her maternal grandfather is the 12th Baronet, a Buckinghamshire title, which sits oddly alongside the fourth-wall-breaking protagonist she built her career on. Her paternal grandfather was an actor and BBC announcer described by contemporaries as 'a Wodehousian character,' which means she's basically a third-generation media figure. Her sister Isobel composed the Fleabag score. She auditioned for Downton Abbey; producers found her too funny. She avoids social media entirely, which for a writer of her output is either discipline or survival.