Aisling Bea on Take That film, Greatest Days: 'The dances were the easy bit'
Aisling Bea in Greatest Days.
Aisling Bea used to worry that she might be too funny for her own good. The Kildare-born actor has worked steadily on stage and screen for the past 20 years. But she has a parallel career as a comedian and is a familiar face from British panel shows, such as 8 Out Of 10 Cats on Channel 4. There was a time when she fretted that there was an excess of her out there on the light-entertainment airwaves and that this undermined her as a serious performer.
“I’ve always acted. You’ll do something small that you’re so proud of. But then you do three hours of 8 Out Of 10 Cats and five million people have seen you overnight," Bea explains. "I used to be a lot more afraid of it: that the omnipresence of my panel show work would in some way get in the way of the acting. But I think that was my own snobbishness that I might have had around that. Now I’m grateful because you have an audience. You learn how to graft. I’m a lot more stable in myself. Thank God for those jobs [on TV]. They paid my bills for a long time.”
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