Did you get to see pantomime as a child growing up in India and Hong Kong?
Absolutely not but pantomime was my first ever job in this country in Robin Hood at Theatre Royal Stratford East, 30 or so years ago.
What did you make of this peculiarly British form of theatre?
I had trained in classical theatre and thought pantomime was some form of mime. It was a shock being brand new out of drama school and all of a sudden going into an audition thinking mime was involved. They asked if I could sing and dance and I said ‘what kind of mime is that?’
What was the worst moment about that first pantomime?
Probably being told I’d been cast as Friar Tuck. The show was brilliant and the writer Patrick Prior was the real thing. Adult humour and kids humour done in such a brilliantly tasteful way.
Do you have fond memories of Theatre Royal Stratford East?
I was involved with that theatre during my first seven years of acting. It was very hard being an ethnic actor and if you think of pantomime I don’t think you’d go to a brown actor in those days. I loved that it was such an open theatre to look at actors regardless of their colour and think if you have potential they will help develop that. The only other place that happened for me was radio. I was in the radio drama company and played everything from white Australian to black South African. On radio you can be anything – it’s all down to your voice and your craft.
You play Fairy Sugarsnap in Jack and the Beanstalk – what’s your costume like?
I was expecting a silly costume. I described it to my husband and said they’ve dressed me as an aubergine pretending to be an artichoke.
This year the Asian comedy series Goodness Gracious Me celebrates its 25th birthday – did you realise how ground-breaking the show would be?
Not at all. I’ve said this many times but I just thought if we can make other brown people laugh at our jokes we’ll have done well. The truth is it took off in such a spectacular way that I was in a state of shock at how huge it was. It took my career in a completely different direction. I thought I was going to be a theatre girl for the rest of my life. I had a career in radio (where Goodness Gracious Me began before moving to BBC2) and hadn’t done television before. It was an entirely different media, one of those live Friday night shows with multi cameras. I didn’t know how to work with one camera, let alone five. The thing is to just sit with the sound man or cameraman and learn. What you see on screen is me learning to act on screen.
You were a hit as Zainab Masood in BBC1’s EastEnders and collected several soap awards but have said it was difficult getting work immediately after you left the series.
I left EastEnders because I was missing creating. For me, half the fun of being an actor is creating different people and I felt I needed to do that rather than play just one character. I don’t regret doing EastEnders, never in a million years, because it raised my profile with a different demographic and brought me a lot of very different roles as well. So I can’t complain about it.
What current projects are you working on?
I’m doing motion capture filming for a new video game and voicing the animation Tweedy and Fluff for Channel 5’s Milkshake. I also return for a new series of Netflix’s The Sandman.
You’ve won various Asian and British ating awards, and were awarded an OBE for your charity work. What do they mean to you?
In terms of accolades there’s a story I always tell that after every award I’m brought back down to earth – an hour and a half after one ceremony I was to be found in my dress scrubbing my baby’s vomit off the kitchen floor. No matter how good it gets something brings you back to life.
How did your charity work for a number of charities come about?
I’m a Parsi Zoroastrian – Freddie Mercury is the only other famous one I know of – whose ethos is about being a good human being. My parents told me the importance of being kind and giving. My charity work has always been focussed around things that have affected our family and hopefully make change for other people so they don’t hurt as much.
Interview by Steve Pratt
Jack and the Beanstalk, York Theatre Royal | 08 Dec 2023 – 07 Jan 2024
