'I love the stuff that makes people uncomfortable if you try to say it’s a comedy' | Sian Clifford on her new Sky series, Two Weeks To Live

'I love the stuff that makes people uncomfortable if you try to say it’s a comedy'

Sian Clifford on her new Sky series, Two Weeks To Live

In Sky’s new comedy, Two Weeks To Live, Maisie Williams stars as Kim Noakes, a strange young misfit raised in remote isolation by her survivalist mother Tina (Sian Clifford). Now Kim sets out into the real world for the first time  - but after encountering hapless brothers Nicky (comedian Mawaan Rizwan) and Jay  (Taheen Modal) at their local pub, a prank sets in motion a series of events that sees them all on the run from murderous gangsters.Here Clifford about the series, her secret talent for archery, and how this series was harder to shoot than Fleabag…


So, what drew you to the project? 

Well number one, Maisie Williams. I think she’s an extraordinary actor. It’s a measure of the project that she was already attached to it and that she’d been involved for quite a long period throughout its development. That really excited me, and then also the character of Tina was something that really appealed to me.

I’ve never seen a character like that played by a woman on screen before…  those kinds of outdoorsy types. It’s such an enjoyable one to play.

 Tina does have a somewhat crude sense of humour and penchant for swearing. I really pulled back on those moments because I think it’s much funnier if it’s more restrained.I still wanted her to be grounded in truth. 

The most fun days though were when the four of us: Maisie, Mawaan, Taheen and I, were all on set together. I’ve recently watched the entire series for the first time and those boys are just off the chain! Maisie and I would be screaming with laughter at the pair of them to-ing and fro-ing - in character and out!

Talk me through the new skills you learned. You wield a crossbow! 

Haha! Well I’m weirdly amazing at archery. (There’s a fun fact people don’t know about me.) But I’ve never fired a crossbow, not even in this, I just held it. 

Actually, there are some excellent outtakes of me trying to just place the arrow onto the crossbow. I think we did about 50 takes. They’ve made it look ridiculously swift and slick in the edit somehow, they are wizards! 

Although in my defence, any prop, as an actor, is a bit of a nightmare because the only time you get to handle those props is during the very brief rehearsal. You don’t have time to get used to it and on set they obviously want you to move fairly quickly. 

There were lots of practical things that I had to learn as Tina which brought me great joy because I was terrible at all of them.

In my opening scene I am painting, that was pretty hilarious. There was also another moment where I had to throw a glass at a picture on the wall which turns out to have a hole behind it so the glass should just fly through. I can’t tell you how many throws it took. Although there were some absolutely shocking misses, when I was hitting the target the paper wouldn’t tear and the glass would boomerang back at my face. I assumed it was because of my appalling technique but on that occasion at least, it turned out they had put up the wrong paper, it wasn’t just my incompetence. 

Are you up for playing an action hero? 

I think all actors are versatile by nature so yeah, given the opportunity I imagine we’d love to play all of the things. We want to play melancholy poets, but we also want to be superheroes. Ideally you want to play characters that have elements of all of those things and again that’s another thing that I loved about this project because it doesn’t fit cleanly into a genre, which is the stuff I love the most. 

The stuff that makes people uncomfortable if you try to say it’s a comedy. 

I do think there’s a new genre emerging or a new form of comedy maybe that we have to embrace. I think it’s a reflection of where we’re at in terms of our humanity and in terms of the creative content that we’re craving. 

Did you do any of your own stunts? 

Absolutely not! Haha! But in all seriousness generally insurance won’t let you. All those people that claim they do their own stunts? Yeah, I’d love to see what that actually means when you’re not Tom Cruise. 

We do as much as we can of course because it’s fun, but when it gets to a point where it’s just dangerous and you’ve got to be available for the rest of the shoot, we leave it to the stunt doubles. 

I can’t drive, so they have to help me out there too. Driving used to be one of those things that could lose actors jobs if they couldn’t do it, but more often than not now they use low loaders because they realised, unsurprisingly, it’s not really safe to drive and act at the same time. 

How did shooting this series compare to others you’ve worked on? 

It was intense. Like all production there was less time than we inevitably needed so it was really down to the efficiency of the team. Bearing in mind that we spent the same amount of time filming this as we did on Fleabag, but Fleabag of course doesn’t have any of the action sequences. 

So, it was a huge task and of course there were times that were challenging but it was a really well run and relaxed set. 

Do you think people might respond more to Tina as a survivalist following the pandemic?

 There are definitely parallels! Initially when it all happened, when it was really difficult to get food, I suppose I did go into a sort of survivalist mode. It wasn’t a feeling I’d ever experienced before that’s for sure, where you just have to make do. And also where you fear for people’s lives. You suddenly become incredibly practical, or I did at least. 

But I also noticed how that extended beyond myself and into my community, wanting to take care of one another, which was pretty incredible. That’s something that I hope we take with us beyond this moment in time.


 • Two Weeks To Live starts on Sky 1 at 10pm on September 2. Click  interview with the other stars Maisie Williams, Mawaan Rizwan and Taheen Modak. Interview courtesy Sky press office

Published: 18 Aug 2020

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