Carrie Hope Fletcher

“If our industry is worthless, turn off Netflix”

The Stage InterviewDec 16, 2020Actor

Tim Bano is an award-winning arts journalist who has also written for the Guardian and Time Out, and worked as a producer on BBC Radio 4.

...full bio

Singer, actor, bestselling author and vlogging star, Carrie Hope Fletcher has forged a diverse career since making her West End debut as Young Éponine in Les Misérables at the age of seven. She tells Tim Bano about her almost three decades of achievements and her excitement at being cast in the title role of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s modern take on Cinderella

Tim Bano

Tim Bano is an award-winning arts journalist who has also written for the Guardian and Time Out, and worked as a producer on BBC Radio 4.

...full bio

In live theatre, things go wrong – as Carrie Hope Fletcher is all too aware. At one extreme, it might be a pandemic blowing big-budget productions off course, like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, in which Fletcher will be playing the lead when it is finally allowed to open. At the other, as she is explaining with a mix of embarrassment and glee, it’s dropping a bucket of fake potatoes all over the barricade in the middle of a performance of Les Misérables.

“I was doubling in the ensemble as a woman who peels potatoes to feed the men on the barricade. The bottom of the bucket just fell out. There was an abundance of potatoes on and around the barricade. We really didn’t need that many fake potatoes.”

She hissed to a fellow cast member sitting next to her, and as Valjean and Javert faced off downstage, they quietly rounded up the potatoes, stuffed them into whatever crevices they could find, and hoped no one in the audience would notice – or that any would get stuck in the tracks.

Fletcher has been a part of Les Mis, on and off, for 20 years. Not only is that more than half of the show’s lifespan, but, given she is only 28, it’s more than two-thirds of hers.

Debuting as Young Éponine aged seven, she has since played older Éponine too (the only actor to have performed both roles) as well as taking on Fantine last year for the staged concert at the Gielgud and the reboot at the Sondheim Theatre earlier this year.

Impressive career

But that is nowhere near where her achievements end. With warmth and enthusiasm – super friendly, effortlessly chatty, but ever so slightly guarded – she rushes breakneck through three decades of achievements that most would struggle to fit into a lifetime: from a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial aged five to breaking through as one of the first wave of celebrity vloggers, writing five bestselling novels, releasing an album and cultivating an impressive stage career.

With a brother, Tom, seven years older, who is one of the lead vocalists in the band McFly, she seems to come from quite a performing family. “It sounds like it but it’s funny when you meet my parents, because they are so averse to any kind of fuss or attention,” she says. “They’re huge fans of music and musical theatre, and my dad plays the guitar. He used to be in a band and there are lots of pictures of Tom up on stage with him playing his little plastic guitar when he was six. But that all stopped before I was born.”

‘With Andrew Lloyd Webber as the producer and writer of the show, I knew that Cinderella would happen at some point’

While she was growing up, her dad worked at a Kodak factory. “He used to work 12-hour shifts in his high-vis jacket and hard hat.” Her mum was a learning support teacher at a school for children with special needs. But there was always a musical on the telly, and her dad would teach her and Tom silly songs on the guitar.

Every so often their parents would take them down to the West End for a show, and Fletcher has vivid memories of trips to Beauty and the Beast as well as her first visit to Les Misérables (“Mum won tickets in a competition, but I fell asleep. I think I’ve made up for it since.”)

Then Tom started attending Sylvia Young’s and three-year-old Carrie would tag along when their mum dropped him off and picked him up. “I thought: ‘I want to do this, I want to be involved in this as well.’ That’s where it all began.”

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Preconceived judgements

“There was this sense of other: why is Carrie not here today? Oh, she’s doing a matinee. What do you mean she gets to not be in school? At 13 years old, you can’t get away with that kind of thing without there being some preconceived judgements. I missed the first term of secondary school because of Mary Poppins. So by the time I got to school, the kids already knew that I was in Mary Poppins in the West End and that my brother was in McFly. Instantly, they were like: ‘She’s going to be one of those up-herself, snooty theatre kids with pushy parents who thinks she’s amazing because her brother’s famous.’ ”

Fletcher insists she was not a precocious stage kid, “although I can’t go back in time and see what I was like as a 13 year old. But I do remember being a real worrier. I was very nervous about everything. I was the girl who would burst into tears at the drop of a hat.”

Aged 16 she left school, not sure what she should do. She and Tom started casually writing a couple of songs together. “It started off as just a fun afternoon, ‘wouldn’t it be great to write a musical hahaha’. Then it just snowballed into this quite serious thing.”

Impressed by the music, and attracted by the cachet of McFly, Universal signed the soundtrack. They suggested the musical should be a film and asked the Fletchers who their dream director would be. “We said: ‘Steven Spielberg, wouldn’t that be fun?’ Cut to the following week and we are in a video conference with Steven Spielberg.

“It was the most intimidating thing I’ve ever done. He was having a day where loads of people were pitching ideas to him for his next big movie, and he was at the end of this really long boardroom with loads of people sat around, and he was there in his little baseball cap. We had 15 minutes to pitch this musical. We were planning to sing live on this call to show him a couple of the songs and give them a bite-sized version of what our musical was, but the sound quality wasn’t great and we thought it had gone really badly. Five minutes after the call ended, we had a call from his agent saying that he was flying us all to New York the following week to actually have a proper meeting. It was crazy.”

‘Pitching to Steven Spielberg was the most intimidating thing I’ve ever done’

Meanwhile, Fletcher was worried that she was missing out on her chance to go to drama school or do A levels. “I was like, it’s either have some kind of higher education, or take this risk, take this chance. And I thought: ‘This may not happen again, I may not get the chance to meet Steven Spielberg, to do all these things. I can always go back to drama school, I can always go back and do my A levels another time.’”

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Carrie Hope Fletcher in The Christmasaurus Live, based on her brother Tom’s bestselling children’s book, at the Eventim Apollo, London, in 2017. Photo: Alastair Muir

Carrie Hope Fletcher's vlogs have been a hit with tens of thousands of viewers. Photo: Darren Bell

The project was in development for years, with endless workshops and rewrites and being asked to compose new songs, but eventually the buzz died down and it didn’t work out. So Fletcher was at home, unemployed, and completely bored. Desperate for some kind of creative outlet, and having heard about a group of young people messing around on the nascent website YouTube, she started to record videos of herself – singing, chatting, going about her daily life.

“It was just a fun thing to do in my bedroom because I was bored. I never intended it to be anything serious, because at the time it wasn’t anything serious: no one had become a YouTube sensation or made it as a vlogger. It was just this thing that people did because they were bored.”

Backstage experiences

But people started watching. Soon she was amassing tens of thousands of viewers and subscribers and hanging around with other emerging celebrity vloggers. Even as that took off, she was determined that stage performance was what she wanted to pursue as a career and set up lots of meetings with agents. Soon she was back auditioning for Les Mis, 14 years after her first appearance in the show.

Her backstage experiences were fodder for the videos, but for a while the shows she was starring in were resistant to the idea of being vlogged about. There were some big beasts that were slow to cotton on to the potential of new media. Eventually they realised that people like Fletcher had been introducing whole new generations to these long-running musicals and they eased up.

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Carrie Hope Fletcher on...

… the value of culture
I really hope post-Covid no one asks me when I’m going to get a real job again. I tell them what my job is and they say: “But what do you actually do to earn money?” This is what I do. This is it. Why is that not good enough? We all know we’re not doctors directly saving lives on a daily basis, but I genuinely don’t think you can say our industry is worthless. Because if it is, turn off Netflix. Close your book. Don’t listen to the radio.

… having a good agent
When I was signed by my agent, we hadn’t really met. But he said to his assistant: “Can you go out and watch a few shows and tell me if there’s anyone interesting that maybe we should have our eye on?” She came to see me in Les Mis, then went back and told him: “The girl playing Éponine’s quite good. Maybe we should have a look at her.” He said thanks, and thought: “I wonder who her agent is.” He googled it and realised: “Oh, it’s me.” I will never change agents. I love them so much. The mark of a good agent is someone who you feel is on your side, fighting your corner. And also [knowing] that it’s not about the money and the commission but about whether the job you’re doing is genuinely right for you.

As for Fletcher, next year her YouTube channel will be 10 years old – that’s a decade of revealing her life to strangers. She’s very clear, however, that her videos only represent one aspect of who she is, and despite the candour and honesty of her vlogs – in which she has talked about mental health, sexual health, body positivity as well as the more quotidian moments of her life – there is still a very firm line. She keeps plenty back for herself.

Still, the public profile does mean that she loses a bit of control of her own narrative. “Recently, I’ve heard some rumours about myself. I’m like: ‘Who is this person that you’re talking about?’ Because I really hope that’s not me.’ I was talking to my boyfriend about it this morning, we’re both going into shows in the new year and I’m really excited. But I had this sudden thought: I wonder if they’ve heard any of these weird rumours, and if they’re like: ‘Oh God, I’ve got to work with Carrie Hope Fletcher.’ ”

What are these rumours? “I’ve heard that I’m really difficult to work with and I’m a massive diva, and that I make life really difficult for anyone who understudies me. I really hope that’s not who I am. It’s not that I pride myself on being a really nice person, but I just don’t understand anyone who goes out of their way to be difficult to work with.”

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Carrie Hope Fletcher with Cinderella the Musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and its book writer Emerald Fennell

Beyond the rumours, there’s another, more sinister repercussion to being a stage performer and vlogger, which is that people know where she is every night, six days a week. “Not only are we accessible via social media, we’re literally, physically accessible. It’s created a very strange environment.” It has also led to some “very scary” situations in the past for Fletcher, at one point involving the police.

But that’s behind her. For now, despite the pandemic, the future is looking hopeful. In February, while playing Fantine in a new production of Les Mis at the revamped Sondheim Theatre, Fletcher was announced as the lead in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical Cinderella. His first show since 2015’s School of Rock, it promises to be a fresh take on the old story, with a book by Killing Eve writer Emerald Fennell (who also plays Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown). They had one workshop before theatre doors closed and productions were put on ice.

Communicate with people

The forced lockdown meant that Fletcher was, just as she had been 10 years earlier, “bored senseless”. The vlogging resumed. “My YouTube stuff suffers when I’m in a show. I don’t have to answer to anyone with YouTube, it’s not like I have deadlines, so that can wait while I make this book deadline, or while I’m in the theatre. So when lockdown happened, I thought: ‘Well at least now I can make a video every day to up the revenue a little bit.’ What I’ve really missed on YouTube is just being able to sit down and make a video with a cup of tea and communicate with people who love musical theatre and Disney as much as I do.”

While Fletcher waited for Cinderella to go to the ball, there were twice daily videos from home, often with boyfriend and fellow stage star Oliver Ormson, as well as candle-making, TikTok dances, blogs, songs, skincare routines, one novel finished and another begun.

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Q&A

What was your first non-theatre job?
I’ve been very lucky to have worked in theatre all my life.

What is your next job?
Cinderella at the Gillian Lynne Theatre.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Never take criticism from someone you’d never go to for advice.

Who or what is your biggest influence?
All the amazing women in the industry I’ve worked with, who have imparted their wisdom in many a dressing room heart-to-heart.

What is your best advice for auditions?
If I had any advice for auditions, I’d be less of a nervous wreck for them myself.

If you hadn’t been a performer/author/singer/vlogger, what would you have done?
Maybe something behind the scenes in the book world.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
I never whistle in the theatre and I always have a bottle of port in my dressing room for a little post-show wind-down.

Meanwhile, Lloyd Webber was energetically pushing for ways to get theatres open again and to keep the Cinderella momentum going. One day, six flight cases arrived at Fletcher’s door containing the elements for making a home-recording studio. She set it up and they managed to record the cast album, with producer Greg Wells in one ear, Lloyd Webber in the other, and an engineer trying to get a word in between them.

“I felt very lucky that I was cast when I was and that Andrew Lloyd Webber is the producer and the writer of the show. Because I knew that no matter what, Cinderella is probably going to happen at some point.”

Fletcher had met Lloyd Webber once before when she was storming the stage as lead character Veronica in the dark musical comedy Heathers at the Other Palace. Lloyd Webber was co-producing, and after seeing her in the show – in which she played an angsty teenager who falls in love with a high-school psychopath – he invited her to take part in a workshop for Cinderella.

‘When lockdown happened, I thought: Well at least now I can make a video every day to up the revenue a little bit’

“I thought that I was just going in to be a voice on the demos and further down the line they’d cast somebody like Taylor Swift.” But she was invited back to workshop after workshop and, ultimately, she was offered the part.

Rehearsals have started back up again and Fletcher – who has never originated a role before – is pinching herself at being in a room while the writers shape the show around her.

“It’s amazing to be in the room while they’re working and to have them ask a question every now and again: ‘Does that line feel natural’, or Andrew sat at the piano saying: ‘Is this key all right?’ Also being in a room when you hear him have an idea, and then four weeks later, hear that idea become a song. I can’t believe it. I often just sit very quietly in a corner and watch everyone do their thing until I’m spoken to, because I’m in awe.”

Everyone remains tight-lipped about the specifics of the show, although the cast recording will be released before the show opens, following the tradition of the lord’s erstwhile hits including Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

And from the newest show in town to the oldest, this week Fletcher is returning to revolutionary France to die nightly as Fantine in the staged concert of Les Misérables at the Sondheim Theatre for a few weeks, along with a starry roster including Michael Ball, Alfie Boe, Matt Lucas, Rob Houchen and Bradley Jaden.

Fletcher, who has long been an advocate for talking about mental health, arrived on day one of rehearsals assuming they were going to jump straight into a sing-through. “Instead, our company manager said: ‘No, we’re having a mental health awareness afternoon.’

“If you’d asked me at the beginning of this year what needs to change in the industry, it would have been the mental health side of things: producers taking responsibility not only for the physical health of performers – because there’s a physio on hand if you twist your ankle or pull a muscle or whatever – but the mental health too. During the concert last year, I noticed on one of our emails there was a thing that said: ‘If you ever need to speak to a counsellor or go through any kind of therapy because of something happening or something worrying you, Cameron will take care of it.’ And, in fact, last year I had reached a kind of breaking point and I needed to speak to someone, so it was amazing. I don’t remember that ever being a thing. So on our first day back at this concert I couldn’t believe we were actually taking a whole day’s worth of rehearsal to sit and talk about what’s happened to us over these last eight months.”

The cast members have all been rehearsing in person, with Covid tests every 48 hours – “We’re all very used to that routine now of getting there an hour before your call time and sitting in the dress circle until you get your negative result through” – and they all seem overjoyed to be back in a rehearsal room with other actors, rather than working remotely. But what makes it even better for this cast of familiar faces is that they all know the show backwards, having starred in it multiple times. “Everyone seems very relaxed about it. Because it’s the concert version, there’s less to worry about in terms of quick changes and set… and dropping potatoes.”

CV Carrie Hope Fletcher

Born: 1992, London
Training: None
Awards:
• WhatsOnStage award for best actress in a musical for Heathers (2019)
• WhatsOnStage award for best actress in a musical for The Addams Family (2018)
• WhatsOnStage award for best takeover in a role for Les Misérables (2014)
Landmark productions:
• Les Misérables, Queen’s/Sondheim Theatre, Gielgud Theatre (2001-present day)
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, London Palladium (2002), UK tour (2016)
• Mary Poppins, Bristol Hippodrome, Prince Edward Theatre (2004)
• The War of the Worlds, UK tour (2014)
• The Addams Family, UK tour (2017)
• Heathers the Musical, the Other Palace (2018)
Agents: Alastair Lindsey-Renton and Helen Clarkson at Curtis Brown