‘See that Ashley Jensen . . . she’d be nothing without her hair.” I like the way the woman sitting opposite me in a west London pub can laugh about a barb directed at her by a fellow student in Annan, Dumfriesshire, many years ago.
It upset the young Jensen a bit at the time, but she certainly proved that person wrong, deploying all her passion, talent and toughness to land an array of successful roles. These have included the kindly seamstress Christina in the hit American comedy Ugly Betty and Ricky Gervais’s dippy friend Maggie in his actor sitcom Extras. Jensen also beautifully humanised the self-centred Fran, best friend to Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s central couple in the Channel 4 relationship comedy Catastrophe.
The roaring tiger logo on Jensen’s shiny black jacket, over which hangs a gold necklace with “love” written in large letters, also seems characteristic. She’s warm and engaging company, but she is no pushover, either. Another revealing detail is her verdict that one of her favourite TV shows, Celebrity SAS, has got “too soft” on this year’s batch of participants. And if she had been on the show and discovered that Matt Hancock had been a contestant, she would have walked off. She is still cross about the handling of the Covid crisis.
Jensen, 54, is returning to her native country as the new co-lead in the long-running BBC crime drama Shetland, taking over a position vacated by Douglas Henshall, whose DI Jimmy Perez has seemingly flashed his dreamy eyes for the last time. Jensen’s Ruth Calder fits into the increasingly hard-hitting storylines that have come to this quiet part of the world: she is a no-nonsense Metropolitan Police detective inspector who is sent to Shetland to find a woman being pursued by London hitmen. Calder isn’t keen on the secondment — she was born on the island and has a lot of baggage there, romantic and familial. Not for Calder those gorgeous seascapes and rolling empty hills, though one suspects she will warm to them.
The actress enjoyed the challenge of playing someone who enters a familiar show with familiar characters and alters how those characters behave. She treated the job as a self-contained six-part series and is tight-lipped about whether her character will stay for another run. However, Jensen can confirm that Calder doesn’t bump into Perez on the island. “Maybe he’s in his wee fisherman’s house doing a PhD or something,” she says.
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Jensen talks warmly of Scotland’s food, music, poetry and landscape. Her memories of a childhood in which she was looked after by her teaching assistant mum are positive too. She stood out at school, and not just for her hair. Her fashion tastes were for men’s suits and big shoes. Jensen also wanted to be a nun, not because of any nascent religious faith but because she thought the costumes were suitably “dramatic”. She defied a lack of acting opportunities at school, travelling to do am-dram in a nearby village “with middle-aged men and women and me”.
• Ashley Jensen on the case in eighth series of BBC’s Shetland
She has always enjoyed the “intoxicating, addictive” feeling of making people laugh. “I wasn’t like the prankster at school or anything, but I did my little thing,” she says. “I’ve always been quite a happy wee person.”
She won a place studying drama at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, often dubbed “the other place” when compared to Glasgow’s supposedly more prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Jensen does a very good impression of a posh English actress who once told her: “Gosh, you’re quite good considering you went there.” She hasn’t really been out of work, starting with small theatre jobs and getting by on second-hand clothes and bulk buys of 5p cans of beans from Kwik Save.
“I felt like I was a success when I was able to support myself and do what I set out to do,” she says. “And I kind of always thought anything else is a bonus. So I feel as if I’ve served an apprenticeship as an actor.” That is one way of describing someone who worked for 16 years before Extras came along in 2005. This was followed by Ugly Betty, which aired between 2006 and 2010, and a swish life in Los Angeles where Jensen had a stylist and a publicist and a man called Ramiro who “cleaned the pool and blew my leaves and things”. She enjoyed the experience (and she is good at impersonating Hollywood phoniness), but she clearly craved normality so came back to the UK.
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“I’ve loved going back . . . Scottish people have a wee understanding with each other that I think [I appreciate] after living in America, where they just don’t get self-deprecation.”
She’s fun company, but with Jensen there is an elephant in the room, a subject that would have required unimaginable strength and stoicism to deal with. I have been told that she will not discuss the suicide in November 2017 of her husband, the actor Terence Beesley, aged 60. Jensen, as the inquest reported, discovered him at their home in a village near Bath.
She still lives in Somerset with her son, who is “nearly 14”. Childcare remains “a juggle” but she enjoys the support of friends and family. She has familiar worries: the effects of Covid on the schooling of young people, knife crime, which is an issue even in her part of the world. At one point she says she believes “the country’s falling apart”. However, a particular bugbear for her is social media, which she doesn’t engage in and neither does her son.
“He’s got a brain in his head,” she says. She notes that he recently watched Extras, which ran for two series from 2005, and was quite surprised at some of the content. One scene involved her trying to persuade the actor Samuel L Jackson that he was brilliant in The Matrix (its star was not Jackson, of course, but Laurence Fishburne). Another episode found Kate Winslet observing the actress Francesca Martinez (who has cerebral palsy) and telling Gervais (who is dressed as a Nazi soldier) that “you are guaranteed to get an Oscar if you play a mental”.
“My son watched it. And he was, like, ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ And some of the kids in his year are quite divisive about that kind of comedy. And I’m, like, wow, gosh.”
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It is a “difficult time” for comedy, she believes. Is that why she is pursuing drama now? “No, it’s not a concerted move,” she says, questioning the difference between dramatic and comedic acting (if you have seen her leading the cast of the comedy crime drama Agatha Raisin you will know what she means). At another point she says with a laugh: “I’ve not been offered any that are any good.”
She is writing a comedy of her own, which her son is urging her to finish but which she is not sure she will. “I think there’s humour in everything, even in the darkest moments in life,” Jensen says. “Now I can be upset about something and I believe I’ll be able to laugh about this tomorrow. I think that if you’re having sad moments in your life, 24 hours a day isn’t just misery and sadness. I am definitely a glass half-full person.”
The new series of Shetland begins on BBC1 at 9pm on November 1
