This Country star on how her new comedy came from despair

They were the best of friends – until Daisy May Cooper went on to make This Country without her.

And when Selin Hizli was subsequently reunited with her drama-school buddy, she was at a low, having had a breakdown and all but given up on her acting dream, working as a cleaner instead. Shortly afterwards, Cooper’s life also hit problems when marriage collapsed – and the pair found solace in their mutual misery.

The result of all this turmoil is the new BBC comedy series Am I Being Unreasonable?, which starts later this month.

At a preview screening at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank, Cooper recalled that their first encounter in the canteen at acting school Rada was not especially auspicious.

‘When I met her I thought, "I can’t fucking stand her… this Lily Allen wannabe",’ she said. ‘And then we became friends after that.’

Hizli was cast in the 2014 pilot of This Country, then called Kerry, playing a role called Tracey Chambers. But when it transformed into the hit series three years later, the character was dropped.

‘I said that you mustn’t worry about that,’ Hizli told her pal. ‘But I think you knew it would be disappointing for me.’

‘I’m the biggest flake,’ Cooper replied as she re-lived what happened. ‘Just the most just awful [person]. So I just ghosted her. It was devastating. I avoided her for ages.’

Hizli recalled: ‘’I’d ring up and her mum would be like, "Oh Daisy’s just popped out the door."’

But they reunited at a drinks party following the season three premiere of This Country – also at the BFI – back in 2020.

Hizli admitted she was overwhelmed by the occasion: I  hadn't worked for a very, very long time,’ she said. ‘I lived out of London, I had kids by this point. And I was just feeling a bit sort of lost.’

‘You were cleaning toilets then,’ Cooper said.

Hizli confirmed it, saying: ‘I basically had a nervous breakdown.’

‘I saw her and she looked so lost,’ Cooper recalled. ‘You broke down and said how lost you were’ Before adding, as a joke: ‘I didn’t care that much about your breakdown – I just didn’t want to talk to other people.’

Cooper recalled having a ‘complete breakdown’ herself during lockdown, triggered by the most unlikely incident: ‘My daughter asked me to put a pair of dungarees on this Sylvanian Family doll and it just, it just completely….’ she said, trailing away.

‘I was beside myself and then I called you – which is very unlike me. We talked and the biggest thing that we bonded over was that a mutual friend of ours, we both though was a C.U.N.T. It was "Oh my god, do you think that too?I’ve been hanging around her for years and I hate her".’

‘It was trauma bonding, hatred bonding,’ Hizli added.

Cooper’s marriage to her long-term partner subsequently collapsed and she went to live in rented accommodation. ‘I felt so lost and on my own, and you called me,’ she told Hizli. ‘You said, "I'm going to come over."

Her friend recalled: ‘I said, "I know you're not doing anything else so you can't tell me not to come." I drove to your little rented place and we got really drunk. I think we both needed it.

‘Then you suggested writing something and we started writing this treatment. It was a bit mad, how quickly it all happened. But I think it came from finding each other in  the midst of this mad experience that everyone was  going through.  I think our lives had gone so far apart, the pandemic was the only thing that could have brought us back together.’

Cooper said Hizli was just the person she needed at that point. ‘I suffer from really bad anxiety and you're just the best friend because you're such a "yes" person.

‘I could say to you "I think I might have murdered somebody" and you'd go "oh god don't worry about it…" That’s what I need. I  want people to not tell me the truth.’

Am I Being Unreasonable is similarly based on female friendship, with Cooper’s character Nic unfulfilled in her marriage and grieving a loss that she can’t share with anyone.  But she strikes up a friendship with Jen (Hizli), newly arrived in town, after bonding over a shared dislike of another parent. It’s then that the secrets start to come out.

‘It’s almost like a love story between them,’ Hizli says. ‘When you have a friend you make a connection with you just fall head of heels in love with each other.’

‘And then it becomes toxic as a lot of really intense friendships do,’ Cooper adds. ‘They get so close that it’s got to go wrong.’

‘Nic is so focused on how Jen makes her feel, she starts to question who actually is she?’ Hizli continues. ‘What do I actually know about this woman who seems to be my perfect friend that’s just turned up in my life?’

Cooper admitted that working with friends can be hard - but not in this case. ‘It’s difficult to work with friends if you don’t have a really truthful, honest friendship,’ she said. ‘For example, if I come up with a really bad idea, she can immediately say, that’s shit without having to worry hurting my feelings, and vice-versa, you don’t have time to pussyfoot around each other or to take offence and that is what the perfect writing partnership should be.’

She said that the series had ‘got a little bit of horror in there, got a little bit of laughter in there, got a little bit of mystery in there, got a little bit of drama in there, got a lot of very serious subjects in there, but then you do a serious subject and you come out on a laugh.

‘It was new to us  because we wanted to write a thriller, to put drama in there. So I was more scared of that, and that's where Jack [Thorne, writer of the TV version of His Dark Materials and the This Is England series and executive producer here] was amazing at helping us. There was one point where we wrote to about the kids going missing and then he said, "Oh no, this is just too  upsetting".’

Thorne explained: ‘ I was trying to do was remind them of the central conceit: that journey of to two people who meet who are instinctively liars, but want to tell the truth, because of that alchemy between each other. They start to find ways to tell the truth, but unfortunately, telling the truth unleashes a lot of nasty shit.’

The show also stars Dustin Demri-Burns as Nic’s husband Dan and Lenny Rush as their scene-stealing son Ollie. Stand-up Helen Bauer also has a cameo role as a bored shop assistant.

• UPDATE: Am I Being Unreasonable?  starts on Friday September 23 at 9.50pm on BBC One and iPlayer.

Published: 6 Sep 2022