Felicity Ward on her personal growth: ‘I’ve turned into a version of myself that never existed before’
Self-confessed show pony Felicity Ward is back at the Fringe for the first time since 2018 and she’s got a lot to catch us up on: divorce, bisexuality and ADHD to name but three. The comic and actor tells Jay Richardson why she’s evangelical about the dating apps and how a stint on Australia’s version of Strictly rewired her brain
‘Welcome to the Fuckzone!’ Felicity Ward’s war cry to her WhatsApp friendship group resounds whenever someone splits from their long-term partner. The Australian comic and actor separated from her husband three-and-a-half years ago but, for 12 months, she didn’t date anyone.
‘I didn’t know how much shame I was carrying about being over 40, divorced and a single mum,’ the London-based stand-up admits. Ward believes younger women are told these qualities mark them out as damaged goods. ‘I didn’t know I still carried that,’ she says. At her sister’s urging, she tried dating apps and discovered that not only were her goods still viable, but being an older woman was ‘actually something incredibly desirable to lots and lots of people’.
Ward realised she was bisexual while still married but hadn’t acted upon it. In 50 dates over two years, she found herself dating women and non-binary people for the first time. ‘To meet all different types of people, all different genders from all over the world and realise you don’t want a relationship with any of them: what a gift! It was almost like an anthropological experiment,’ she reflects.
Despite a reputation for ‘saying things others are too embarrassed to say’, she feels liberated by a recent official ADHD diagnosis after decades of having her compulsion to overshare attributed to the condition or to good old-fashioned cultural directness (‘Australians and Scots can both say “cunt” gently, lovingly, and it be received as such’).
It’s all territory covered in the ironically titled I Wish I Could Come Out of My Shell, Ward’s first Fringe hour since her 2018 Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated show. Although she describes herself as ‘joyful by default… my perception of myself is I’m a happy person’, Ward has struggled with anxiety, depression and insomnia throughout her life. ‘From 2019, I was pretty sad most of the time. I got post-natal depression pretty badly. Covid was really hard. Then I was dealing with divorce and being a single mum.’
Acting was some consolation. She shot the Time Bandits remake with Lisa Kudrow (‘really fun to work with, un-fucking believable’) and starred in Australia’s version of The Office, the first female iteration of the David Brent character worldwide. Leading an ensemble that also featured Steen Raskopoulos, ‘was the greatest job I will probably ever have in my life, being funny 12 hours a day for seven weeks.’
Frustratingly though, despite the challenging exposure the role brought, it didn’t lead to further work. When the show was cancelled after just one series, ‘my mental health was pretty shot and I was the saddest I’d been in years,’ Ward admits.
But then came the call from Dancing With The Stars. Australia’s version of Strictly was demanding, involving learning five dances for nine episodes over 23 days, in a whirl of clothes fittings and spray tans. But Ward made it all the way to the final.
‘It gave me so much dopamine and serotonin, so much joy, because I’m a natural extrovert,’ she says. ‘I feed off other people’s energy; it genuinely gives me life. That combination of hard stuff and good stuff in the background felt like it was changing the way my brain processes information. And it wasn’t until I was about to fly back to the UK, I realised that for the first time in 13 years I was looking forward to coming back.’
Calling herself ‘evangelical’ about the apps, Ward nevertheless met someone nine months ago and ‘fell madly in love . . . I’m ADHD and chaos, he’s autistic and structured’. She stars in the upcoming Netflix animation Dad’s House, guests in Tom Basden’s BBC One sitcom Here We Go and, in her publicity shots, is trying to high kick the Las Vegas showgirl look back to ‘incredibly camp’ from Taylor Swift’s polished sexiness. ‘My bum cheeks were out!’ That reversion to type notwithstanding, Ward says, ‘between the dancing and dating, I’ve turned into a version of myself that never existed before’.
Felicity Ward: I Wish I Could Come Out Of My Shell, Monkey Barrel Cabaret Voltaire, until 30 August, 3.50pm.