Tanya Reynolds: ‘I was 10 years too old to be in Sex Education’

“I struggle with not finding the humour in anything,” says Tanya Reynolds. That’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen one of her irrepressibly funny recent roles. 

After coming of age as an alien porn-obsessed teen in Netflix’s Sex Education, she’s currently bringing welcome levity to some of the most irreverent historical dramas you’ll find on stage and screen. We chat while she’s hanging out in her book-lined flat, between performances playing a sweary Tudor midwife in the wildly successful West End drama 1536. In Netflix’s The Decameron (2024), she was still more mischievous, playing a Machiavellian servant girl who pushes her snobby mistress off a bridge.

And this spring, she took on her funniest role yet, in the form of the oh-so-cutting Caroline Bingley in the lively Austen spin-off The Other Bennet Sister (“she’s like an iconic mean girl”), who cattily describes the put-upon Mary Bennet’s fumbling piano recital as “truly unforgettable”. So is she fond of a witty put-down in real life?

“Oh my god no, no, no,” says Reynolds, sinking back into her chair in horror. “I love playing characters that are as far as possible away from myself – it’s like putting on a costume. It’s so much easier because you become a different person.” She drops her voice to a diffident murmur. “I’m actually a very introverted person, very shy. I don’t feel particularly comfortable talking about myself… she says, in an interview,” she adds, wryly.

Even so, there’s an innate confidence to her performances – a self-awareness that makes her characters feel modern, and not just because at 5ft 10in, she’s reached heights that undernourished historical ladies could only dream of. On Instagram, she shares little videos that point out the absurdity of the television studio machinery that she’s a part of: she shows off the rustling waterproof underwear she wore in The Other Bennet Sister by swishing her long limbs about in front of the mirror, or glides through her scenes in The Decameron on a motorised chair, kept just out of shot (she broke her ankle during filming). Forget staid, starchy period dramas: these are period larks.

Still, these very funny women have serious points to make. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall looked head-on at the stately court machinations surrounding Henry VIII’s marriages. Ava Pickett’s 1536 does something refreshingly different, but equally weighty – it shows how Anne Boleyn’s beheading had an effect that rippled out from the palace, all the way to an ordinary field in Essex where three working-class women secretly discuss the rising tide of misogyny in their village.

Reynolds plays Mariella, a bluntly spoken midwife who’s proud of her skills – but discovers that they can’t protect her in a world where women with agency are suddenly in danger. “The men are changing,” she says, fearfully, in a line that speaks to today’s rising current of misogyny, too. “These men really feel that women are their enemies,” explains Reynolds. “This play is so relevant to the time we’re in now, when it feels like history is repeating itself. We’re really seeing the dangers of giving power to people who have no respect for women.”

Moving 1536 from the Almeida to the West End has given its director, Lindsey Turner, a chance to take a fresh look at the play – including swapping out the ending for something even more nail-biting. “She’s fantastic,” says Reynolds, visibly hyped up from this spring’s re-rehearsal process. “She’s so obsessed with this play that even when we had tea breaks, she’d be thinking about it really intensely. We were all just living and breathing it.”

Something that Reynolds particularly loves about 1536 is the way it’s not another tale of imperious kings and queens swishing about grand houses – it’s about sweary villagers with messy love lives. “We don’t see a lot of Tudor dramas that focus on just normal people,” she says. “People of importance would be very corseted and mannered all the time, because they were constantly observed. But ordinary people would have been unguarded and unselfconscious, just like we are, and that’s really such a delight to me.”

Reynolds’ ability to wear heavy historical costumes with lightness is also shown off in The Other Bennet Sister, another fresh spin on a familiar story, this time in the form of Jane Austen’s most famous novel. “Me and Siena [Kelly, her fellow cast member] were both auditioning to play Caroline Bingley at the same time while we were in 1536 at the Almeida – in The Other Bennet Sister and Dolly Alderton’s forthcoming TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, respectively – which we found so funny. We were in our dressing room, being like: ‘So what are you doing with Caroline?’ ‘Yeah, I’m gonna be a bitch too’,” she laughs.

Then, only half joking, she launches into a heated defence of one of Austen’s most famous villains. “I really maintain that she’s just deeply misunderstood,” she says. “She and Mr Darcy would have been very well matched, then fucking Lizzy Bennet pops up and that would have really hurt her. My heart kind of breaks for her, bless her. She’s just insecure and terrified. Justice for Caroline!”

Despite her sympathy for Austen’s famously haughty, snobby character, Reynolds herself grew up in a decidedly normal home. “No one in my family was an actor, or even close to the industry,” she explains. “My dad’s a builder, and my mum worked in a factory. I always wanted to be an actor, but I don’t really know why. It’s kind of bizarre. It must be because I watched so much telly,” she jokes. Still, even though she describes her parents as “quite quiet people”, she says they never doubted her. “They were just so delighted that I knew what I wanted to do, and they always made me feel like it was doable.”

After an undergraduate degree, she studied at Oxford School of Speech and Drama, because it was the only place that offered a full scholarship – “the tuition was £15,000, which was crazy, and I just got it for free!”, she says.

Still, when she graduated, it took a while for her to find her feet, and her lucky break didn’t come until she was put forward to play Lily in the teen drama Sex Education, at the age of 26. “I didn’t think I would get that job, even for a second, because I was 10 years too old for it,” she says with a laugh. “And I think that’s why my audition went so well – I didn’t have any nerves. Even to this day, I don’t know how I got it, but miraculously I did.”

Another surprise was just how significant Lily’s part turned out to be, with her bisexual love story becoming a fan favourite. “When it started, I only saw the scripts for the first four episodes,” she explains, “so I thought she was just like a cameo role who’d just be kind of funny. I didn’t know she’d be back for another season, or that she was going to have this really gorgeous arc.”

Sex Education did a seriously impressive job of finding new talent, with the likes of Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa and Aimee Lou Wood (White Lotus) going on to forge careers that hop between major screen roles and the sexier end of London’s theatre scene. “We try and go to see each other’s shows all the time,” says Reynolds. Over the past few years, she’s been alternating filming with some well-chosen parts in challenging avant-garde productions, including German director Thomas Ostermeier’s Barbican staging of The Seagull, and Sam Holcroft’s frame-breaking Almeida play A Mirror.

Soon, she’s leaping up a league, exposure-wise, with a role in massively well-loved Apple TV series Ted Lasso, which follows an American coach who tries to turn around the fortunes of Richmond FC. In the forthcoming fourth season, Reynolds plays an assistant coach who helps Ted navigate the world of women’s football. “I’m not an athletic person,” she says, with a faintly incredulous laugh. “I’m watching a lotta football… more football than I’ve ever watched in my life.”

The show will introduce her to a new, predominantly American, and absolutely huge new audience (the previous season of Ted Lasso was the most-watched streaming original of 2023). And it feels like it’s a step that will come with a certain mindset. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I discover where my comfort zones are,” says Reynolds. “I feel quite protective of my personal life. So I’m trying to be more boundaried, because we live in a weird age where we’re obsessed with sharing things.”

Then, unable to resist a literary reference, she adds, “I’m more of a Mary Bennet than a Caroline Bingley.”

‘1536’ is at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, until 1 August (almeida.co.uk). ‘Ted Lasso’ series four premieres on Apple TV on 5 August