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“I have wonderful friends but I’m not a massively sociable person,” she says over video call from the comfort of her sofa, her dog Borage dozing beside her. “I know certain environments are going to make me anxious, so I want to avoid them.”
Reynolds is set to join Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, having just played Caroline Bingley in the BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister. She currently stars in 1536, a play backed by Margot Robbie which is the talk of London’s West End. It follows a string of successes since her breakout role as an alien-loving teenager in Netflix’s Sex Education.
“It’s not lost on me that I am remarkably lucky,” Reynolds says. “It probably makes me sound like a wanker, but I say out loud how grateful I am every day. My dream as a child was just to be a working actor, to pay my bills with money I’ve earned from acting.”
Reynolds grew up in a “tiny terrace house” in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, with her parents and brother. Her Italian grandparents lived two doors down. Her mother was a sign writer and her father a builder.
“Everyone was a builder,” Reynolds clarifies. “It was one of those houses where there were constantly people coming in the back door. It was lovely.”
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The 34-year-old blames her love of acting on a “strict schedule of Home and Away, Emmerdale, Corrie, EastEnders” and “a diet of British sitcoms like Dinnerladies, The Good Life and Only Fools and Horses”.
“As I got older, I got shyer and shyer and quieter and quieter,” she recalls.
“But then I found more of a ferocious need to act. It was a way of not being myself. Being someone else is just the most fun thing in the world, isn’t it?”
Reynolds studied at the Oxford School of Drama through a means-tested scholarship and counts herself lucky to have met the criteria. But she struggled.
“Even though it is obvious throughout my life that I’ve had quite bad social anxiety, drama school was the first time it was so apparent,” she says.
“What didn’t help with the anxiety was that I was on the wait list. I didn’t get a place immediately.
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“Someone dropped out. Part of me felt like I had slipped through the net and wasn’t as deserving or talented as everyone else.”
Reynolds says her social anxiety manifests in fixating on people’s opinions of her, adding, “If someone is looking at me, I think they’re thinking horrible things, that I’m awful or ugly. It makes me freeze. It makes me clam up.”
But at work, she thrives. She is on stage each night in 1536, and she and co-stars Liv Hill and Siena Kelly have neighbouring dressing rooms that feel like “university dorms”.
“It’s so rare to have a play that is so well-written, so vibrant and feral and hilarious and heartbreaking and to also have a cast that you adore. We love each other and love going to work every day,” Reynolds gushes.
“Before I go on stage, I have to hide behind a bush. I listen to Sienna and Liv doing the first scene every night, giggling to myself. I get so excited to get on stage and play.”
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Written by Ava Pickett, 1536 explores how the clash between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn ripples into a rural village. A rumour catches fire and the women see echoes of the royal drama in their own lives. Does Reynolds see similarities between the issues the women face in the play and those faced today?
“Definitely. The trickle-down effect of what is happening with the smear campaign of Anne Boleyn and the way this ignites a suspicion of women and kind of gives the men licence to bully and beat women in their own lives… do I even need to say how that is holding up a mirror to what is happening today?”
Tanya Reynolds and Siena Kelly in 1536. Image: Helen Murray
Reynolds got her first acting job in 2016, just before the explosion of the #MeToo movement. She says that, in some ways, the industry has changed for the better but adds: “There’s still work to do. We can never relax, particularly right now. It did feel like we were getting somewhere [but] there’s a big threat of regression.”
Does she feel that threat in the industry or in society? “Just as a woman in society.”
In August, the next season of Ted Lasso will be released, with Reynolds playing the new assistant coach of the Richmond women’s team. She says: “I love being in rooms dominated by women and non-binary people. I’ve been lucky that so many projects I’ve worked on have been very female led.”
And she’s gearing up to direct her debut film, black comedy Dog Person, later this year, “if the gods of independent film shine down on us”. She has written the script and will star in the film alongside James Norton and Hugh Bonneville.
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There’s a personal touch in the title. She excitedly shows me Borage (like the plant, pronounced “like porridge with a ‘B’’), a rescue she thinks is a Labradoodle-terrier mix.
“We won the lottery with him. He’s such a good boy. I worked hard to train him – I turned down a job because it was abroad. It was the best decision I ever made.”
As a writer-director, she hopes to tell stories that feel “ugly and real, where there’s sort of a layer of skin missing” but that also have a “sense of humour. Often when we think of real stories, we think of grit and devastation. But there’s so much humour in the tough stuff. That’s what 1536 does so well.
“It’s devastating and harrowing then one second later, it’s hilarious. I think that is what life is.”
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