Amanda Abbington is here to talk about her new play, a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family. And yet, through a combination of an interviewer’s desire to get the story (guilty) and her own desire to vindicate the strong stance she took, all roads do lead back to the Strictly Come Dancing furore.
“It is done now,” she says, her hair pulled back after a day’s work in an anonymous-looking rehearsal room in north London. “I don’t regret anything,” she tells me more than once. She says she wants to spend less of her life thinking about the events that have dominated so much of the past 18 months for her. First the unpleasantness of the rehearsals for the series she took part in in 2023, then what happened last summer after she went public to accuse her professional dance partner, Giovanni Pernice, of “unnecessary, cruel and mean behaviour” during rehearsals.
She knows, though, that it casts such a shadow on her recent life that the topic can’t help but come up. She is talking publicly for the first time since a grave Newsnight appearance in October. This followed an apology from the BBC after an internal report that upheld six of Abbington’s 17 complaints against Pernice. The BBC upheld accusations of bullying and harassment, but cleared him of accusations of physical aggression. She had pulled out of the competition after seven weeks because of a health scare.
“It was an ongoing litany of being verbally abused, sexual innuendo, sexual gestures. There was a 35- minute rant at me,” she said on Newsnight. “This went on for seven hours a day for seven weeks.” Pernice last year admitted that he could get frustrated during the process, but denied all accusations of abuse. He accused her of trying to destroy his career; she insists she was simply trying to say, “Let’s just have a safe space, let’s just take five minutes to make sure we are all happy.” And yet, she says, “I was made out to be the villain.”
Abbington, who turned 53 last month, is a self-doubting figure in many ways. Yet if the topic of Strictly comes up she understandably finds it hard to touch lightly on it, but instead goes into a kind of mantra on the subject. “The fallout from it wasn’t something I was anticipating,” she says, “but I’m glad I did it, I am. I’m glad that I stood up for myself because it’s the first time I’ve ever really done that.’”
Anyway, her new play, (This Is Not a) Happy Room at the King’s Head Theatre in north London, is a lippy comedy by Rosie Day about a dysfunctional family. Abbington plays Esther, a matriarch who once left her family but is reuniting with her grown-up children for the latest marriage of her ex. “I think it’s the character I’ve played that is furthest away from me,” she says. “She’s cruel and distant and doesn’t understand her children and doesn’t understand motherhood. Which I hope I do. I’ve got two kids and they seem to be thriving, dare I say.”
Day also acts in the play. They worked together on a play last summer, When It Happens to You, at the Park Theatre in north London. Day played a young woman who had been raped; Abbington played her mother. Who, it turned out, had also been raped. “Abbington has a warmth and ease that holds your attention,” said The Times’s four-star review.
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It was “harrowing”, and “exhausting” to do; Tawni O’Dell’s play was based on a true story too. Yet it was while the Strictly controversy was still at its peak, so there was something about the intensity of it all that was a welcome distraction. At least when they managed to shut out the outside world. “We were getting death threats and rape threats and bomb threats sent to the theatre. So we had to manage that.”
She says she doesn’t regret how she behaved in the aftermath, but does she, with hindsight, regret signing up for it all in the first place? At this point the publicist, who is sitting in on the interview, asks us to change the subject. Abbington says nothing, but gives a tiny grateful nod. “I don’t regret much,” she says. “I regret the way I was treated by certain individuals.”
The atmosphere eases as we move on to her background. She was born Amanda Smith in 1972 — Abbington is the maiden name of her mother Patsy — growing up in the Hertfordshire village of Little Heath, where she still lives. Her father, John, worked in the photographic industry before becoming a taxi driver. Both parents live close to the house Abbington shares with her fiancé, the retired stunt performer Jonathan Goodwin, and her children Joe, 19, and Grace, 17, from her 16-year relationship with the actor Martin Freeman. They split in 2016.
Mention of being bullied at primary school leads us back to more recent matters. “That’s why I did what I did last year, because of being bullied extensively as a child. I’ve seen what happens when people are bullied and how introverted they become and how it can affect them. You see it on social media right now. You do get sucked into this insular world of negativity. And if you go out into the world, there are people who are lovely. So many women came up to me and gave me hugs and thanked me for what I did.”
Which made a nice change, she says, from getting “20 to 30 death threats a day on social media. That’s why I left [Twitter/X] in the end. ‘I hope you get stabbed. I hope your daughter gets raped.’ It becomes your main focus. And people are not actually like that.”
At her secondary school, Chancellor’s in Potters Bar, she learnt to use humour as a defence mechanism, making herself popular by making people laugh. Then, having taken ballet lessons from a young age, she went to a full-time dance school for sixth form. Once there, she realised how much less accomplished she was than most of the other students.
Then she got a bad injury, ripping all the muscles in her groin by doing the splits without warming up properly. Her dancing dreams, such as they were, were done. She went on to study at Hertfordshire Theatre School in Hitchin (since closed), where an agent saw her in a play in her final year. She became “a jobbing actress”, getting an early break in Plotlands, a 1997 BBC period drama, when she was 25. Three years later she met Freeman while working on a film called Men Only.
Her big breakthrough came in 2013 when she had regular roles in Mr Selfridge on ITV and Sherlock on BBC1. In the latter, she played Mary Morstan, the reformed assassin who went on to marry Freeman’s Dr John Watson. She felt she was finally being taken seriously as an actress. “It was nice to be recognised, and not just recognised as Martin Freeman’s girlfriend. And I loved that, but it was great to be out and be recognised as Mary.”
When they shot the last episodes of Sherlock in 2016, she and Freeman had just split up. “It was fine. We had mutually split up. That’s what we wanted. We didn’t want that to overshadow anything. And we had to keep thinking about Joe and Grace because, when the news finally came out eight months later, the kids had accepted it. We’d gone through it privately, grieved our relationship and moved on.”
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Now it turns out that she is the matriarch of an acting dynasty. Without her or Freeman knowing, Joe got an agent to come and see him in a school production of Guys and Dolls. He then put himself up for auditions and at the end of last year spent four months in Nova Scotia shooting an eight-part Stephen King adaptation, The Institute, starring alongside Mary-Louise Parker and Ben Barnes.
“There was no nepotism in that,” she insists. “Even on the set nobody clocked that he was my and Martin’s son. It’s his first big job and he’s really, really good in it.” Grace, she adds, “is really good at acting too, and an artist”.
It’s nice that something is going so uncomplicatedly well because nobody could say Abbington has had an easy decade. In 2021 she had only just started going out with Goodwin, an experienced escapologist, when he had an accident on the set of the TV show America’s Got Talent: Extreme. It has left him paralysed from the waist down.
“Yeah, it’s been a weird ten years. You know, splitting with my partner of 16 years, then I meet Jonathan, and we are together for about three months, we only see each other for eight days during that time, the rest of the time is on FaceTime, and then he has his accident, and then he is in a wheelchair, and then the fallout from that, and then Strictly …” She laughs. “It’s not a carousel. We’re definitely not on the carousel. We’re definitely on the rollercoaster.”
They were due to get married this year, but now plan to do it next year. Between now and then “there’s a lot of … what’s the word? … Litigation.” This is for Goodwin, not Abbington. Blimey. Is there any element of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” in all this?
“Absolutely. Last year was one of the worst years of my entire life. I was very close to having a breakdown because of the constant barrage of abuse and hideousness. And you just think, ‘How can I refuel the positivity?’ And Jonathan was amazing. My friends were amazing. My kids were wonderful, though I was trying to shield them from it.”
She knows it might sound cloying, but her pets were a great source of comfort too. She helped her dachshund to give birth to 11 puppies at the end of last year and has kept three, including one, Lucky, that she saved from dying during the birth.
Meanwhile, she hopes to work with Goodwin on a film script and a TV series he has written. The magic show he directed in the West End last year, Jamie Allan’s Amaze, is touring America. “He doesn’t rest. He doesn’t let anything get him down, he’s never sad, he’s never cross. He’s the most utterly positive person.”
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She wants to keep acting, and would like to direct too. “I don’t know what the industry thinks of me at the moment. I’ve been immersed in the aftermath of it all for a year. I don’t know whether I’ve been cancelled or whether people don’t like me any more, but I know I did what I did for the right reasons. I feel good about the future.”
Is she happy? She smiles. “Yes, I am actually.” And if I’d asked that question six months ago? “I’d probably have started crying.” So what’s changed? “I’ve learnt a lot about myself, about the world. I can block certain things now, whereas last year I just couldn’t. It all felt too personal.
“My Nana always used to say to me, ‘Minute by minute, Mand, minute by minute.’ So spread the love. Life’s too short for anything else.”
(This Is Not a) Happy Room is at the King’s Head Theatre, London, Mar 26-Apr 27, kingsheadtheatre.com and at Theatre Royal Windsor, May 13-17, theatreroyalwindsor.co.uk
Hair and make-up Celine Nonon at Arlington Artists using Erborian skincare and Paul Mitchell
