Lolly Adefope: 'Some people act as if it's their right to be overpaid and on TV'
Lolly Adefope isn’t really sold on paranormal activity. We are in her living room in south London, discussing the second series of the chaotic BBC comedy Ghosts, in which she plays endearingly naive (and extremely dead) Georgian noblewoman Kitty, one of a band of spirits terrorising a young couple who have unexpectedly inherited a country pile. But as for real spirits? “I’ve never seen one,” she says. “I’ve talked about this with the rest of the cast – I think if a really sceptical person saw something, I would believe them 100%. But I think programmes like Most Haunted are fake.” Even the sudden, spooky disappearance of a wheelie bin from outside Adefope’s window isn’t enough to sway her. “Maybe it was a neighbour?”
Masterminded by the team behind CBBC’s Horrible Histories, Ghosts is unlikely to convince you of the existence of the spirit realm either, but its cast of spectres – including florid Romantic poet Thomas and Julian, a disgraced Tory MP who perished with his trousers round his ankles – will at least make you chuckle. For all its silliness, the show has its challenges for Adefope, not least the “four or five layers” she has to wear on set. “There’s a lot of underskirts and petticoats and a corset, so I’m very weighed down,” she explains. “At least there’s heating now – they didn’t have any during the first series, so it did feel like being in a haunted house.”
Ghosts is not the only place you might have spotted the character actor and comic. She has packed more into five years on telly than many have in double that time. As well as Kitty, there was the perennially unimpressed reporter Ruth Duggan in This Time With Alan Partridge, as well as major parts in two US comedies, the Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi fantasy saga Miracle Workers and Shrill, a shrewd, body-positive series based on journalist Lindy West’s memoir. She has had supporting roles in the likes of Stath Lets Flats and Josh Widdecombe’s comedy Josh, and turned up on Taskmaster and QI. She has written and starred in her own short film, Sorry, for the BBC, and even landed a small role in Mission Impossible: Fallout, spending one day on set with Tom Cruise. (“The hairdresser looked at me and said: ‘Doesn’t she look great,’ and Tom said: ‘Yeah, she looks amazing’ – I will always be grateful to her.”)
Although Adefope’s rise seems rapid, she’s been working on it for a while. Born Ololade Adefope in south-east London, she was a keen performer from a young age, though wasn’t sure how it would translate into a career. “I wanted to do comedy, but I didn’t grow up wanting to be a standup,” she says. “Maybe because standup looked like a thing that white men did. The thing that attracted me the most was comedy acting and people like Catherine Tate and Olivia Colman; people doing funny voices and accents.” Studying drama at university seemed a step in the right direction, but her parents weren’t sold (“They’re Nigerian,” she laughs), so she opted for English instead.
After graduating, she was rejected by a drama school and worked an office job she has described as “excruciating”. Things changed dramatically when she started going to the Edinburgh fringe. Her eyes light up as she describes the place, a “summer camp” where comics from around the world congregate. She ditched the job and embarked on a sink-or-swim trip to the festival. The comic creation that marked out Adefope as one to watch circa 2015 was Gemma, a terrifyingly deluded young comic with a broad northern accent (“I’m mad, me”). “I thought I would be too vulnerable on stage doing standup,” she explains. “I didn’t want to get up there and say: ‘This is who I am. I want you to like me.’ So I was like, I’ll do a character, so we’re on the same team.”
Gemma led to her debut standup show Lolly, a mock talent contest billed as a chance for Adefope to “[masquerade her] deep-rooted insecurities as character comedy”. Despite largely positive reviews, however, something was troubling Adefope. Some critics thought she had spoken about race too much, others not enough. Her second show, Lolly 2, was a response to both criticisms. Characters included “Black Hermione”, a tongue-in-cheek imagining of Adefope auditioning to play the Harry Potter character, based on her own nightmare casting experience.
“I’d had an audition for a very big BBC show,” she explains. “I did it, and then they came out and gave me a new bit of script and said: ‘We’d like you to do this in an “African” accent.’ I wasn’t as confident as I am now to say: I’m not gonna do that; I’d only just started acting.”
As and when, she gently uses comedy online to point out the absurdity of race in the UK. I ask her about the time she tweeted: “Someone’s dreaming of a white Christmas” in response to a 2018 charity gig lineup that featured zero comics of colour. While she says she regrets getting into Twitter debates about it, which were inevitably fashioned by the Daily Mail into a “race row”, she would make the joke again. “If any white comedian said that, it wouldn’t have been anything, it wouldn’t have been a story,” she says. Besides, she adds, “I wasn’t really commenting on that gig, because obviously if that had [been] 12 black people on the lineup it wouldn’t mean that comedy is fixed. It’s so much bigger than an individual.”
Just as Adefope was finding her feet in British comedy, America came calling. In a suitably spooky set of circumstances, the day after she had been told that there was a problem with her flight home from New York and that she would have to extend her trip, she was asked to fill-in for a read-through of Miracle Workers. Two days later, she had been cast in the show as “eyerolly” Rosie, personal assistant to Buscemi’s deeply unbothered God, and was preparing to move to Atlanta. On set, she bonded with fellow Londoner Radcliffe. “He’s quite famously known to be an angel,” she says of her colleague, whom she introduced to the work of Cardi B and who, in turn, bought the cast caps emblazoned with the rapper’s Bodak Yellow lyric “I make money moves”.
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Shrill soon followed, with Adefope putting plans for Lolly 3 on hold to play Fran, queer best friend of lead character Annie (Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant) and bearer of the best lines in the show (“I’m masturbating tastefully and sparingly”). She says Fran is “more confident” than her. “She just knows that everyone loves her. She’s a very, very empowering character to play. It’s not that extreme to believe in yourself and think that you’re great. It seems like a radical idea, but she’s just doing what we should all be doing.”
While she has enjoyed the downtime lockdown has offered, Adefope is keen to get back to work, and is hoping to carve out some time to create more of her own. “A lot of people just kind of act as if it’s their God-given right to be overpaid and on TV, but it just feels like there has to be a level of like: ‘This is an exciting thing to be doing.’ It’s not just something that we’re owed.”
May the universe continue to shine on her – and maybe bring her bin back some time.
Series two of Ghosts starts tonight, 8.30pm, BBC One
