Hello, Substack!
Here I am, finally pushing myself out of the nice little comfort zone that I’ve been in for the past couple years. Life offline has been so nice that I’m in danger of never coming back, and letting the remnants of my online presence drift away like cobwebs. However, in the past few months I’ve felt the itch to get out there and be part of things outside of my own realm again, so I’ve decided to lower my boundaries and let some more of the outside world in.
Where I’m at now
How to describe the past couple years?! Basically, I took a long holiday from being myself. I just got sick of her! She had too many friends, too many commitments, too many causes and none of it felt all that authentic. Last year I ran out of energy to keep up that persona and so 2024 brought about a big energetic shift. I said no to pretty much every invite, job, campaign, etc (albeit a few appearance jobs, girl’s gotta eat…), I stopped messaging everyone back, I dyed my hair black (I’m such a cliché, it kills me) and took a long, lovely extended break from me. What did I do with my days?! Whatever I damn felt like! It was fabulous! I wrote, I read, I did yoga, I walked everywhere, I tried to cook, I volunteered at local charities, I listened to thousands of podcasts and I knit a lot. It was an extended exercise in how I’d live my life if I wasn’t trying to please anyone.
On a surface level my life has not changed much. I’m still acting, still writing, still yapping about vegan life and my cats’ mental wellbeing so there’s no controversies to kick things off (phew!). The biggest change is that I now have a bigger private life than a public one. I didn’t used to have a sense of normality in my personal life, I think, because I entered the professional world quite young when I hadn’t figured out my life beyond it. So I’d hop from project to project - be it a book, a play, a podcast series – and in between each thing I’d stare into the abyss and soliloquise to my cat about the pointlessness of existence when you don’t have a job.
Fast forward to 2025 and I am in a much better headspace because I’m a boundary enforcing queen! 🙅♀️ You can ask me to do something now and I will cheerfully reject it without spending the whole day wringing my hands in guilt at the thought of having hurt your feelings. Your hurt feelings are your damn business!
Anyway, now life is this: I live in London with my partner, Den, and our animals. Den is a gardener and I’m writing at the moment. You may already know Puff, my persian cat (aka my queen and ruler). She is 11 now and has completely lost her sight and hearing but is in a much better mood for it (you can run the hoover all the way around her as she sleeps and she doesn’t even crack an eyelid). There’s Malo, our dog, who came with Den, and who is the most elegant, affectionate lady and has opened my heart – previously the domain of cats, only cats – to the sweet and beautiful nature of dogs. And then there is Pablo, who we rescued a couple summers ago from The Arc sanctuary. He is an asshole. No, really, he is. He is a big hulking adolescent now who lives to steal your lunch when you get up to answer the door, or to make you late for a train when you’re trying to tie your shoelaces. But I love him too, he is really funny and wild, and he would be the polar opposite of Puff in terms of his skills as a pokemon; where she is clumsy, helpless and unconscionably cute, he is a broad-shouldered athlete with no sense of mortality and a glare you’d cross the road not to meet. There is a nice equilibrium in the home.
Why ‘Penfriendship’?
I’ve started this blog to establish a connection with my followers again. My home life and my creative routine are firmly rooted now and I’d like to invite some chaos in. JUST A SMALL BIT, I SAID! At the same time, I’m a slow-moving beast and I prefer the long-form method of communication that a letter allows.
This love of letter-writing harkens back to my childhood when surrounded by siblings, friends and the accompanying background noise, I chose instead to seek new friends via a Penfriend club! There was something about the idea of having the time and space between interactions to be able to express your innermost self at length to someone far away, who might understand you, that really appealed to me. (Something uncomfortably calculating about it too but I digress...) I had about nine pen-friendships on the go at one particularly prolific period of my youth and I loved the way I slowly and intentionally got to know these strangers from around the world, and vice versa. After the novelty of each other wore off, that number dwindled to two regular pen-friends who I really got to know (it would’ve been three, except my mum became convinced that a kid I was writing to was actually a serial killer when she saw his address was in the area where a double murder had recently taken place, and my mum then chose not to post any of my subsequent letters. I found the letters years later stuffed into her glovebox! Dear Henry, I cried for weeks…) and who have remained good friends.
The oddest thing is that apart from our love of writing letters, we really don’t have that much in common and I’ve often reflected that we wouldn’t have become friends if we’d met any other way. But there is just something about writing letters that gets you to the core of who we really are, which is not all that different at its essence.
So, every Friday from now I will write a letter on this blog to connect with the outside world a bit more. I would love to hear what you’d like to talk about so please comment or send me a message which my assistant or I will read on Fridays, and then I’ll choose one to reply to or I will go off-piste and talk about whatever’s rolling around my head.
If you’d like to submit a letter/question to be answered, please do the following:
Comment on the weekly post, aka. this post!
Write me a DM here on Substack. (Please state in the message whether or not you’d like the question/letter shared anonymously)
Make sure to submit your message by Friday morning GMT, which is when I’ll choose a message to answer.
Please note that my assistant, Lucy, and I aim to read all the messages but cannot respond to them all. Requests for autographs, videos, donations, petition signatures etc will be ignored as this is my online space for writing blogs only. I appreciate your understanding ♥️
To get you started, I am happy to talk about anything related to acting, writing, books, my book, mental health, veganism, cats, my cats, animals, just any kind of animal really… My other great passions are crafts and aerial hoop, and I am happy to rhapsodise about either.
Looking forward to your letter! Write me back, ok!! Henry, do you ever think about me too?!
Lots of Love,
This was such a nice surprise! As someone who has the urge to write and also wants to pull a Victor Hugo disappearing act, how would you say you handled that more weepy mindset? I have playlists that help me, but hearing things that work for other people is always a treat :)
Welcome back!