Jessica Hynes can make a character funny without making their embarrassment seem trivial. We value the untidy timing and the sympathy beneath it, most clearly in Spaced, where she helps write the people she makes worth following.
Fi1m perspective
As Daisy Steiner in Spaced (1999), Jessica Hynes makes having little money seem both funny and uncomfortable. Her untidy comic manner leaves room for embarrassment that a brisker performance might have brushed aside. Beside Simon Pegg’s more precise Tim Bisley, she gives the exchanges a useful unevenness. The comedy does not require either character to be particularly good at managing life. We felt protective of the pair because the embarrassment of being broke was still recognisable beneath the extravagant film references.
Hynes’s part in writing Spaced matters here. The Royle Family (1998), in which she played the recurring part of Cheryl Carroll, belongs to the same breakthrough period. Daisy also gave her a say in what the comedy noticed: she co-created the programme as well as co-writing it. With Pegg, she made young, skint Londoners worth spending time with, without pretending they were coping well. Shaun of the Dead (2004), in which she played Yvonne, continued her work with the Spaced collaborators.
There is a limit to how much help these performances need. Edgar Wright’s direction of Spaced sometimes insists on spelling out a cinematic connection after Hynes and Pegg have already made the situation funny. We find ourselves watching the reference being set up rather than the people caught in it. This is an irritation in a programme we otherwise warmly recommend, and it makes Hynes’s contribution easier to see. Her performance gives us enough to enjoy in Daisy’s ordinary difficulties before the direction adds anything else.
Later parts include Siobhan Sharpe, the PR executive in W1A (2014), and Emily Yates, a mother in the drama There She Goes (2018). The latter gave her a dramatic lead after supporting film roles and television comedies. That move is worth noting without treating comedy as something an actor ought to outgrow. Our clearest recommendation remains the programme in which her writing and acting work together to make small problems matter. For a first encounter, choose Spaced and allow for a director who occasionally explains a joke the actors have already landed.
Biography
Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) is an English actress, director and writer. She is known for co-creating, co-writing and starring as Daisy Steiner in the Channel 4 series Spaced (1999–2001) and for playing Cheryl Carroll in the BBC sitcom The Royle Family (1998–2010).
Hynes was born in Lewisham, London, on 30 October 1972 and grew up in Brighton. She joined the National Youth Theatre at 15 and later appeared in sketch shows before working with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Her other notable television roles include Siobhan Sharpe in Twenty Twelve (2011–2012) and W1A (2014–2017), and Emily Yates in There She Goes (2018–2023). In film she has appeared in Shaun of the Dead (2004), the Bridget Jones series and the Paddington films. She has won two BAFTA awards and two British Comedy Awards.
