Seven-year-old Gracie has no problem dishing the dirt. When I ask her if she has a secret about her mum she can share with me, she speaks up immediately. “She has a tarantula!” she says.
Amanda Abbington, sitting next to her daughter, nods. The actor and Sherlock star, also known as the lovelorn Miss Mardle in Mr Selfridge, confirms that there is indeed a pet spider in their home called Ariana. They also have a cat and three rescue dogs, and the family has recently said farewell to Nelly the hamster, who passed away last month. “If I could, I’d be like Doris Day and just have a big farm,” says Abbington, short blonde curls framing her pixie features. “But I’m not allowed any more or Martin said he’d leave.”
It’s easy to imagine the way he said it. Her partner is Martin Freeman, and in your mind you picture Bilbo Baggins, overwhelmed by a dwarf home invasion, or Arthur Dent putting his foot down to a bureaucratic Vogon. Or, indeed, you consider the manner in which Dr John Watson might lose an argument to his wife Mary in Sherlock. After all, Abbington plays that very Mary.
The pair will appear on screen again when this year’s Christmas special of the BBC’s uber-popular adaptation airs. Until then, Abbington’s Twitter feed – surreally named @chimpinsocks after a stuffed monkey she once saw at Derren Brown’s house – is chock full of posts about animals and passionate defences of animal welfare.
When we meet, Cecil the Lion has just met his untimely end, and Abbington has made it very clear that she hopes the dentist who shot him deserves whatever abuse he gets. “I get irrationally angry,” Abbington admits. “It makes me so cross because you feel so redundant. You can’t do anything other than signing petitions and sending money. If I could, I’d go out there and save them all!”
It would be pretty hard to fit a life as a peripatetic animal rescuer into her current shooting schedule. In among the rhino petitions and puppy gifs, there is an occasional selfie of Abbington in Edwardian costume or a detective sergeant’s uniform that reminds you how busy she has been this summer shooting both the final series of Mr Selfridge and the new BBC cop drama Cuffs.
For six weeks she had to juggle her obligations to both productions. “I’d be up at 5am to do Cuffs in the morning in Brighton, and then I’d get a car about midday and I would get driven to the Mr Selfridge set and end up filming to about eight or nine at night.”
Normally she would also be looking after Gracie and nine-year-old Joe, who have, according to their mother, “grown up on film sets”. But right now Freeman has a fairly light load – just the occasional spot of shooting in the US and Germany for the blockbusting Captain America sequel. At any rate, he has been free to do the bulk of the childcare – “which is great for him because he’s at home and he’s being a dad. And that’s something he’s not been for three or four years while he was doing The Hobbit.”
Abbington misses her children terribly when she’s away from them, but she also knows how important it is to enjoy the work when it’s this good. Next year’s will be the final season of Mr Selfridge – and Miss Mardle’s last hope of a happy ending – while Cuffs is a primetime evening drama. “I hope it’s good and I hope people like it,” she says, fully aware that nothing is certain in TV. She is, as she points out, the woman who finally got her big break in ITV’s Married Single Other after 15 years in the business, only for the show to be cancelled after six episodes.
It’s hard not to feel rather humbled by Abbington’s honesty and kind, easy manner, not to mention her extraordinarily well-mannered children. At one stage, when their mother is changing her outfit in another room, the pair are unattended in the photographer’s studio and surrounded by a host of temptingly curious items. As Joe’s arm reaches for one, Gracie warns him off: “They’re breakable things, Joe – we mustn’t touch.” When their mother tells them to go away and play while she “has a little chat”, they keep each other quietly entertained, models of old- fashioned decorum.
Abbington herself grew up an only child in Hertfordshire, where she and Freeman still live. Her grandparents were pretty big on politeness, she says, and she’s always been close to her parents and still hates the idea of letting them down. Then there were the dance classes that she took from the age of five, three or four a week, that instilled a sense of discipline. At 16 she ripped her groin muscles doing the splits, and her future as a professional dancer was over, but her teachers had seen enough to encourage her to act instead.
But there followed many long periods when she didn’t get any acting work at all. “I used to do lots of front of house in West End theatres. And it was really sad because you were watching performances every night and seeing people doing what you wanted to do, and you weren’t doing it.”
She’s seen plenty of talented friends fail to make it in the industry, and that knowledge has formed her chief acting principles. “Don’t be difficult. Don’t be a princess,” she says. “A lot of people don’t know their lines! And you think: ‘Come on, mate – this is your job.’”
She has said before that Freeman is one of the most professional actors she has worked with. They fell in love almost at first sight, when they met up in a make-up trailer on set; within two months they had moved in together. She has watched his star rise, first in the UK as Tim in the infinitely popular The Office, and now in Hollywood. It must be strange to see someone you know so well became a global star.
“I’m just dead proud of him,” Abbington grins in response. “He makes brilliant choices as well – he’s turned things down because they haven’t been right and I think: ‘Oh God, I would take everything. Whereas he’s careful, he’s discerning. He’s not your typical actor – he mulls things over. He has good morals, and I admire that.’”
Their shared sense of values probably made it even harder when, a couple of years ago, she had to go through what she describes as a “deeply shaming” bankruptcy after she failed to put enough money aside for her tax bill. Freeman helped her out with her debts, but she has insisted on paying him back. “I just want to,” she says. “I hate the fact that it happened. I don’t understand how some people can go bankrupt three or four times – it was the worst year of my life.”
But she has weathered it, and stayed true to herself throughout. Freeman has been asked to move to LA “a lot”, says Abbington, but she loves where they live, in the countryside, close enough to the city. “Martin’s more of a townie, but when I was a kid trips into London would be a real magical thing, and I want ours to have that same feeling.” And it helps the family maintain their normal routine. “He has to come back and tidy the house and do the washing, and it keeps your feet on the ground.”
Freeman probably needs it right now. The Marvel films are mega-franchises, which makes it even funnier when Abbington admits she doesn’t even know what part he’s playing. “I don’t really know much about Marvel,” she says. “Joe loves all that stuff, but I ask Martin about it and then I cloud over. I think he’s part of the government – he has to do a lot of stuff into walkie-talkies. He says: ‘I have to order Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr round all day’, and I’m like: ‘Oh stop name- dropping, stop it.’”
In the meantime she has been having her own fun fighting crime in Cuffs. It’s not the first time she has played a policewoman – she starred alongside Jason Isaacs in Case Histories – and while you suspect that her social-justice-crusader side might not naturally align itself with the fuzz, she admits that she has found a new respect for their job. “The policeman who came to tell us about proper procedure was explaining how it’s tough because there’s cuts, police stations are closing, you’re losing beat bobbies and they’re fighting a losing battle.”
Plus, Abbington says, it’s a pretty powerful feeling playing a detective. She even tried to persuade the props department to let her take her warrant card home so she could flash it at people in traffic. “I wasn’t allowed,” she laughs. “Apparently you can get arrested for that.”
There will be plenty more on-screen action for her in Sherlock. As the kickass Mary Watson, she has done some of her own stunts, and while the contents of the Christmas special remain a closely guarded secret, she does reveal that there are more to come. It may be set in Victorian times, but Mary Watson will not be hampered by smelling salts and a bustle. “Oh no,” she says. “She’s got these fantastic breeches. She’s got an action costume.”
Playing alongside Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock has, she says, been the best fun she has had in her life. She recalls the week they shot John and Mary’s wedding, when the cast sat around in a marquee in the grounds of a Bristol hotel, eating ice cream and playing Give Us a Clue with Una Stubbs. It is the third time, she admits, she has married Freeman on screen, and she still feels no need to do it in real life. “There’s no point,” she shrugs. “I’ve got photographs of me in three different wedding dresses with him.”
So what does Abbington long to do next? She thinks. More theatre would be lovely, she says; she starred in God Bless the Child, a play about the education system, last year at the Royal Court and would love to work with its artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, again. She’s always had a hankering to play Lady Macbeth, although she’s not clear who she would prefer to play her husband. Freeman’s the obvious candidate, but then there’s Andrew Scott, Sherlock’s Moriarty and a man she admits to being “slightly obsessed” with. She’d love a part in Doctor Who, too, if she can persuade her friend Steven Moffat to cast her.
With her dancing background, does a high- profile stint in a musical – Chicago, say – not appeal? She shakes her head. “I can’t sing very well,” she says self-deprecatingly. “I’ve always wanted to be in Cabaret – in my head I’m the perfect Sally Bowles. In reality I’m the opposite of that.”
Far more important than any future role to her, however, is simply to be around her children as much as possible. She reckons she is a natural carer – “I just want to look after everyone all the time,” she smiles – and you realised that you’d have to be, with a home as full of animals as hers.
Looking over at Gracie, Abbington remembers her own time at school and tells a story of how she would get detentions for cutting hedgehogs free from the cricket nets when they got caught in them. “They were really expensive cricket nets!” she laughs. Her partner may be in a superhero movie, but Amanda Abbington is saving the world one hedgehog at a time.
Main picture: Amanda wears Long Tweed Dress, £1.450, Simone Rocha (brownsfashion.com) and Nude shoes, £375, jimmychoo.com. Fashion Editor: Jo Jones. Fashion Assistant: Hannah Davidson. Hair: Christos Kallaniotis at One Represents using Aveda. Make-up: Valeria Ferreira at Caren using Dr Hauschka. Photographer’s Assistant: Sam Copeland
Cuffs will air this autumn on BBC1
