From the early days at the Edinburgh Fringe to recognition as a gifted character actor with comedy chops, Lolly Adefope has always cherished the camaraderie of the cast
Switch on any of your favourite comedies from the last five years and there’s Lolly Adefope, glamorous and wry, not just stealing the show, but holding it aloft as she marches out of the shop to the sound of rapturous alarms. She was Fran, the droll, sexy best friend in Shrill, a comedy about, among other things, the politics of being fat. She was Ruth Duggan, the reporter who treated Steve Coogan’s character with venomous contempt in This Time with Alan Partridge. She was Lady Daphne in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, exquisitely disgusted by her husband and the aristocratic world in which she has landed and, in fact, by everything. It’s tempting to carry on, actually, listing Adefope’s supporting roles, because each one leads me down a merry wormhole of video clips that bring different, particular joys. But instead I get on the train to meet her.
It’s midday in a busy Peckham café and we cram ourselves on to a table and order toast. Adefope was born nearish here in south London; her dad a doctor, her mother in IT. Her early obsessions with kids’ comedies like Kenan & Kel led to later obsessions with Catherine Tate and Peep Show. After university, she interned at a comedy production company and started going to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she suddenly saw, in lights, her future. She found a “gang” of “attention-seeking people who, like me, had a part of their brain missing”. At her first Fringe solo show in 2015, she wrote and performed a character called Gemma, a comedian doing her first standup gig. “I was working in an office at the time and it was really boring while still a lot of work, which is the worst combination. And so I wrote this character whose friends from work have come to see her do this gig…” When Gemma realises they haven’t turned up, the tone shifts to a sort of hysterical sadness. “I think I was just trying to cheat a little bit.” By playing an inexperienced comedian, “I could mask my inexperience.”
