“It’s always fun to play a character who’s on the edge,” says Tanya Reynolds, who shot to fame as Lily Iglehart, Sex Education‘s maverick writer of alien erotica. Reynolds left the envelope-pushing show in 2021 at the end of its penultimate season, but now she’s taking another bold swing in another edgy Netflix romp – one set nearly 700 years ago.
In The Decameron, a comedy that unfolds in Florence during the Black Death, she plays a character called Licisca who realises she has absolutely nothing to lose. “When you first meet her, she’s pretty downtrodden because she’s been born in servitude to a family of nobles,” says Reynolds, speaking over Zoom from her cosy-looking home in north London. “And then she makes a decision about 15 minutes into the first episode to push her mistress off a bridge, because she deserves it. She was being a bitch.”
Reynolds isn’t over-egging the pudding. At the start of episode one, we see Licisca’s mistress Filomena (Jessica Plummer) being rude, self-absorbed and horribly entitled, so it’s hard not to cheer internally when she gets shoved into a river. “Licisca is right at the end of her tether. She’s like, ‘I’m not spending the rest of my life with that brat!'” Reynolds adds.
Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s short story collection The Decameron, which was written as the Black Death was ebbing away, the eight-part series follows a motley crew of nobles and servants who try to evade the plague by retreating to a luxurious country villa. With Filomena seemingly out of the picture, Reynolds impulsively decides to impersonate her mistress and embrace the life of privilege she has only ever been allowed to glimpse.
“She’s really leaning into the chaos,” Reynolds says of her character who is essentially living a medieval version of a brat summer (though we see her hoovering up fancy pastries rather than anything chemical). “She feels like she probably doesn’t have much time left, so she’s like: ‘I’m going to do whatever I want.'”
Created by Kathleen Jordan (Teenage Bounty Hunters) and exec produced by Jenji Kohan (Orange Is the New Black), The Decameron is silly, filthy and fun to watch, partly because the cast includes familiar faces from some of the best comedy shows in recent memory: Zosia Mamet from Girls, Saoirse-Monica Jackson from Derry Girls, Leila Farzad from I Hate Suzie and Tony Hale from Arrested Development.
“I am the biggest Arrested Development fan, to the point where I could probably quote the first three seasons effortlessly, so I was incredibly starstruck to meet Tony fucking Hale. And I probably stayed starstruck for the entire six months,” Reynolds says. “But all the actors were just extraordinary. It turned out to be a real masterclass in comedic acting.”
Reynolds more than keeps up by displaying the same flair for physical comedy and deadpan line delivery that made her stand out on Sex Education. A scene in which she goes chin-to-gills with a wriggling fish is a masterclass of its own. “I actually have a tiny, tiny scar on my finger from smacking my hand when I smack the fish on the fountain,” Reynolds says with a playful roll of her eyes.
Reynolds, 32, is funny and self-deprecating throughout our interview. At the start, she admits to taking a lifesize poster of herself home on the tube following the first ever Sex Education premiere, prompting bemused looks from fellow passengers who hadn’t watched the show yet. But her sense of humour never feels like a deflection technique to keep the conversation frothy – actually, she’s happy to go deep.
In a 2022 interview, Reynolds revealed that she had “absolutely no self-esteem” during her twenties and described this formative period of her life as “10 years of anxiety, dithering – so much dithering – and just so much mess caused by the dithering.” Has she managed to ditch the dithering since then? “It’s funny, because I really wish I could say I haven’t dithered since I was 29, but, no, sadly I still do it.”
Happily, though, Reynolds’ sense of self-worth has definitely improved. “I felt like I’d been walking around in the wrong size shoes for a decade, but then when I hit 30, I was like, ‘Oh, finally a pair that fits,”’ she says. “My shoulders dropped just a little and I got back a tiny bit of the self-confidence that had completely vanished in my twenties.”
In fairness, Reynolds’ twenties were defined by huge life changes. After finishing university, she won a place at the Oxford School Of Drama on a full scholarship. Coming from a low-income family – her father was a builder and her mother a signwriter (someone who paints commercial signs and advertisements) – she would never have been able to study acting otherwise.
“Even though my parents had no connection to the industry and no idea of how to get in, they always made me feel like it was completely doable,” Reynolds says. The lifesize poster of their daughter from the Sex Education premiere now has a permanent place in their house. “It’s slightly hidden behind a door, so whenever you close it, it’s like a jump scare,” she says with a laugh.
After she graduated in 2015, Reynolds picked up steady work in short films and TV series including Delicious, in which she played the daughter of Dawn French’s chef character. But it was being cast as Sex Education‘s socially awkward, lovably nonconformist Lily that really levelled up her career. “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that it would explode the way it did,” she says. “I’d been working for a few years at that point and kind of gotten used to the idea that you do a job, it goes away, then you move onto the next one.”
Sex Education definitely didn’t go away when it premiered in 2019. The show’s brilliant scripts explored everything from masturbation to vaginismus with wit and sensitivity, helping to launch the careers of Emma Mackey, Aimee Lou Wood and Ncuti Gatwa, among others. The agenda-setting series also pioneered the idea that film and TV productions should employ an intimacy co-ordinator to ensure that sex scenes are safe and comfortable for everyone involved.
“I wasn’t remotely nervous about doing those scenes in The Decameron because I’d already worked with a few intimacy co-ordinators at that point and I knew my voice would be heard,” Reynolds says. “When I think about some of the early jobs I did that didn’t have one, I can’t believe it even happened.”
After Sex Education exploded, Reynolds was finally able to break into theatre, which she calls her “first love” as an actor. Earlier this year, she earned an Olivier Award nomination for her performance opposite Jonny Lee Miller and Micheal Ward in the acclaimed dystopian play A Mirror, which premiered at north London’s prestigious Almeida Theatre before transferring to the West End.
After The Decameron, Reynolds has several movies in the pipeline, including Timestalker, a sci-fi comedy co-starring Nick Frost and Jacob Anderson. As she has gained experience, she’s learned not to “waste energy” by trying to hide her social anxiety on set. “It’s OK to be quiet and introverted as an actor – as long as you’re not a dick,” she says. “In a way, I feel like ageing is my friend. Every year I get older, I’m really grateful for the fact I feel a little bit more like a proper person.”
‘The Decameron’ is streaming now on Netflix
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