Not every young actress gets to play Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois when they’re starting out. Take British performer Lorna Watson for example. One of her first jobs was dressing up as a giant strawberry at Wimbledon. “I did work at a rugby stadium too and I had to dress up as a pint of Guinness once,” she recalls.
“And they had to give me a bodyguard because I kept being body-tackled to the ground by very large men. That was one of the low days,” she sighs.
Thankfully Watson is over her ‘low days.’ But she’s still sporting an odd costume in her new role as the crime-solving nun in “The Sister Boniface Mysteries” arriving on BritBox Tuesday.
Ten years ago Watson did a bit as Sister Boniface on an episode of “Father Brown,” the popular series based on the G.K. Chesterton tales about a nosy Catholic priest who sniffs out evil-doers while saving souls.
People liked the character of the plucky nun, she says. “Then they thought it might be nice to bring her back in a series and the timing was right, and the rest is history.”
Watson, who began as a stand-up comedian, first unearthed her funny bone in grade school. “I went to an all-girls’ school, and I think that that environment encouraged us — being silly was part of the course. We were all quite daft. I think the programs I was watching at the time, they were all comedians and they inspired me,” she says.
“I started writing sketches when I was in secondary school. I found some sketches that I wrote when I was 15 years old. None of them were any good, but I was thinking about it ... I think comedy was a natural progression for me after university.”
Well, not a very natural progression as Watson majored in European languages and earned a master’s in French and German. Her mom teaches English as a foreign language and her dad is a math instructor, so it came as a Richter-scale shock when she announced she wanted to be a comic.
“My parents were devastated. They said, ‘We spent all this money on your education and you’re going into COMEDY?’ When I was in school I was always coming home and doing impressions. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t think they were surprised. I went to the University of Edinburgh and took part in the Edinburgh festival ... They said, ‘As long as you’re not a teacher. It’s very hard to be a teacher.’ And I said, ‘Well, at least I’m not a teacher. But it’s a very precarious career trying to make it in comedy.’”
It proved to be precarious for Watson. She remembers one night when her stand-up routine bombed big time. “It was the first time I’d really died on stage, and it was a terrible experience,” she remembers.
“I was sitting outside on the street thinking, ‘Wow, I really died!’ and a comic stand-up came over and said, ‘What’s wrong, what going on?’ I said, ‘I just died. It’s the first time I really, really died.’
“He said, ‘Oh, welcome to the club.’ He said, ‘That’s brilliant! You HAVE to die. It’s part of the job. We all die. I died tonight. It was so bad I threatened the audience if they didn’t start laughing I was going to set fire to my trousers. So I set fire to my own trousers on stage.’
“I thought, ‘Wow, that puts everything in perspective.’ I think it also taught me that it was a club that I wanted to be a part of, and that failure is OK, and it is part of getting where you want to go.”
Watson performed sketch comedy with her school pal, Ingrid Oliver, and appeared in several comedy productions as well as “Horrible Histories” and “The Great British Bake Off.”
But she admits that she’s hopeless at making decisions. One of those is when to marry her longtime partner, actor Marcus Garvey. “We’re terrible organizers,” she confesses. “Between the pair of us we’re just awful at organizing things, so we only do something significant every 10 years. So we’d been dating for 10 years and then he proposed, and then we were saying, ‘Maybe 10 years after the proposal we might get around to actually getting married.’ But we intend to get there, but it’s the organization.”
The couple has two children, a boy, 6, and a daughter, 3. “I did take time out to be a mummy,” says Watson. “I didn’t want to be away from either of them and that was quite a risky career step. It was just something that felt right for me, and we were in a position where I was able to do that.
“This job (as Sister Boniface) is one of my first jobs after having had my daughter. She was a year old when I finally went away and did the shoot and had to leave her. But it’s a long shoot, and it was very hard being away from the children. Fortunately they were able to come and stay in the Cotswolds with me in a lovely little cottage — spent the summer with me in the Cotswolds. Even though I was working long hours, some days I got to see them at the end of the day. And that was lovely.”
Actress thrilled with role
The popular Disney+ series, “The Book of Boba Fett,” lands on its finale Wednesday. One of the show’s stars, Ming-Na Wen, says she’s thrilled to be part of the show.
“I like representing the older, strong females,” she says. “I'm very fortunate. I do have a certain set of skills, whether it's with martial arts or whether it's with kickboxing, or learning stunt fighting — which is another incredible art form ... It used to be when women were 40, they'd get put out to pasture. And I'm far beyond that now, and it's great that I can still continue to do this. I feel very privileged and honored. And I'm living out my dream of being in a ‘Star Wars’ project, so you know I'm gonna kick butt for as long as I can ...”
Town traps visitors in new series
What if you stumbled on a town and were never able to leave? That’s part of the bubbling-trouble of the new sci-fi horror series, “From,” premiering on Epix Feb. 20.
According to creator John Griffin, the show is really about the people who are ensnared in this town and find themselves under threat from some mysterious “monsters.”
“We don’t really see them,” says the show’s star, Eion Bailey. “We just see the townsfolk, the people who come to you and express something of interest. They hone in on your vulnerabilities and what you might be susceptible to, and then go for that.
“And then when they actually do their — shapeshifting I guess you'd call it — it's very brief. Which I think is really effective. It’s Spielberg's approach to ‘Jaws.’ You don’t see a lot of the shark which makes it even more terrifying in the flashes where you do.”
Chef confronts culinary colleagues
Alex Guarnaschelli may have an unpronounceable name, but she’s one heck of a cook. Guarnaschelli has been exhibiting her skills on the Food Network’s “Chopped” and “The Kitchen” as well as the upcoming version of “Supermarket Stakeout.” But in her latest series, “Alex vs. America” she confronts three top chefs each episode to see who can master the culinary challenge best. The show has already been picked up for a second season on cable, but viewers can catch Alex and her antagonists now on Discovery+.
“I grew up as an only child with two parents who cooked,” she says. “They're both Italian Americans. So each one thought the other made better tomato sauce. The dialogue was constant. So, at the dinner table my mother would say, ‘Was this as good as your father's last week, and why?’ And I would say — it was a lesson in diplomacy. It was also a lesson in honesty. So, I learned two things at the dinner table: diplomacy and honesty ...” she says.
“Cooking came later. Talking about food started when I was 7. I was in the hot seat. My mom's like, ‘Is it spicier than last November's marinara, is it really?’ But the cooking, the actual mechanics of cooking, came in my early 20s. I was a late bloomer,” she says.
“I got out of college, I majored in art history, I don't know. And I just went in a restaurant and I was like, it’s ‘GO’ time! ... When I started cooking, there wasn't really much food television. So it wasn't an objective of mine to ever be on TV because there was no such goal. But I'm a Gemini. Half of me wanted to do something else and half of me loved charring peppers.
“And by the way, in the first year of cooking, I burned everything I cooked. I mean ... let’s not even talk about it ... I remember my mother writing down everything Julia Child did on PBS and then buying the food and cooking it. And I think viewers are doing that same thing.”
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