The world embraced Waller-Bridge on the basis of her own totally idiosyncratic vision. I ask if she hesitates to participate in our endlessly recycling culture of reboots and remakes. “I feel like when you’re working in the industry, you’ve got to ride the waves and lean in,” she tells me. “There’s room to do something really quite dangerous. And if I can do something dangerous and exciting with Tomb Raider, I already have an audience of people who love Lara and hopefully will continue to. And that is a very unusual position to be in. It’s the old Trojan horse.”
The pub garden is suddenly swarming with little boys—blond English toddlers barely higher than Waller-Bridge’s knee. They are menaces, if not to society then at least to our interview. You try to make a celebrity interview smooth and casual, as if you are strangers who’ve been thrust together—on a train perhaps, or a White Lotus resort—but these boys are making enough of a racket that we pause and watch their antics. “I wonder if these guys like games,” Waller-Bridge says. We consider harnessing their energy in a game of hide-and-seek, with her as the hider. “I wonder which one would be the best? Who would find me?” she says. I gesture toward a towheaded boy squirming in his chair and intently staring at her. “He’s already found me,” she yelps. “He’s looking me dead in the eye. He’s like, ‘I know what you’re fucking thinking!’ ”
We dip back into conversation despite the noise, and Waller-Bridge very politely leans down mere inches from the tabletop, the better to funnel her voice directly into my recorder. I ask about her relationship with Amazon, which she says remains tight, though, since Fleabag, she’s brought nothing to air for them under two consecutive deals. Waller-Bridge dropped out of the streamer’s high-profile Mr. & Mrs. Smith series, in which she was set to star alongside Donald Glover. “I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it—still care about it,” she tells me. “And I know it’s gonna be brilliant. But sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave the party. You don’t want to get in the way of a vision.” Creative collaboration is like a marriage, she says. “And some marriages don’t work out.”
She squinches her eyes when I ask if she’s a perfectionist. Turns out it’s a word she despises. “Happy to be called creatively controlling,” she suggests jovially. “What I look for in something is that little bit of electricity, of danger or saying something, doing something that hasn’t been done before. If I don’t feel that, I can plow and plow and plow, I just won’t make it.” Amazon understands this, she says: “They’ve been with me along this process where I’m like, ‘I’m getting there, but I want it to be fucking amazing.’ ”
We leave the garden to the rambunctious boys and take a winding walk through London in search of Waller-Bridge’s favorite cheese shop. She grew up in one of the city’s upper-middle-class suburbs, the middle of three children, and describes her youthful self as a tomboy who loved imaginary games and instigating mischief. Scrolling furiously through her phone, Waller-Bridge finds a school picture of herself at 13: a pale girl with childish pigtails so big and fluffy, they look like Clifford the Big Red Dog’s ears. Teachers reprimanded her for making a mockery of official school photos, so she claimed her mother had done her hair. “They checked with her, and my mum—just a legend—she said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ ”
Just as she is embarking on another school-days anecdote, Waller-Bridge suddenly jerks away from me and starts chattering to a bird that’s landed nearby. “Good morning, Mr. Magpie,” she says. “How’s Mrs. Magpie?” I feel like I have tumbled onto another planet with customs I don’t understand. “Do you do that with magpies,” Waller-Bridge asks me. I’m married to a Brit but, no, I didn’t know I was supposed to. “What?” she shouts in mock horror. (At least I think it’s mock.) “You’ve never saluted a magpie?”
Waller-Bridge says she’s always had a knack for the dramatic and knew she wanted to be an actor by the age of five. At 18, she was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but traditional stage training hung on her like an ill-fitting dress. “I don’t think anyone thought much of me at drama school,” she says. The classes seemed to focus on perfecting your voice and movements—the whole Laurence Olivier bit about projecting the words clearly and to the back of the hall. “I just got really scared of getting it wrong. I’d always thought that the whole point was to kind of get it so wrong that it ends up being original.” She lets out a joyful whoop. “I think that’s basically what my career has been attempting: Just keep getting it wrong until it’s original.”
After graduating from RADA, Waller-Bridge watched her fellow alumni rise up the theater and film ranks while she scrambled to get work. She made her proper stage debut in the 2009 play Roaring Trade, where she sparred with Fleabag’s future Hot Priest, Andrew Scott. “I remember her being immediately charismatic and extremely comedically gifted—just a really courageous sort of person,” Scott says, his voice full of affection. “I remember her talking about these ideas of the way theater should be, and it was really obvious to me that she wasn’t just going to be satisfied with just being an actor, you know?”