Tell us about your character in The Outlaws.

I play Myrna, who is a lifelong citizen of Bristol. She's an activist who cares very much about the community and about how political decisions affect society - particularly the black community. She set up a group called the Bristol Justice Collective and she's finding herself an old person in a young person's world for the moment.

How did she end up on the Community Payback Scheme?

I don’t think this comes out until episode three, but you know those little things that they have in the town centre saying, ‘Come and join the police,’ where a couple of people sit inside a booth on a trailer and they sit there all day? She gets a car, hitches it up to the trailer and kind of kidnaps them and drives around Bristol with them in the back. Shouting out the window things like, "If you enjoy beating up young black men join the police!" She’s an old-school activist. Not interested in online petitions.

How does she find the community service scheme?

I think she resents being there. She doesn’t get on with anybody at first. And then as time goes on, they're sort of all thrown together a bit. She looks at Gabby [Eleanor Tomlinson] and she's like, who is this person What is it that she does for a job? From the younger people I think she's interested in Rani [Rhianne Bareto] and Christian [Gamba Cole]. She feels for them and she doesn't know what they've done to be there. But I think she takes a shine to the younger people rather than the older ones. She hates John [Darren Boyd] immediately. Frank [Christopher Walken] gets on her nerves and with Greg [Stephen Merchant] she’s just like, wha?

What do we learn about Myrna as the series goes on that helps explain her character?

With all tropes or stereotypes there's always a person behind them, isn't there? With Myrna we find out that it comes from the heart. It all started after the riots in St. Paul's [in 1980] where she witnessed police brutality as a child against her friends. You could say she's the angry black woman or she's some sort of old hippie fighting for outdated values, but it all comes from a real place and she passionately believes in it.

I think Bristol as a city does have that heart, as we saw last year when they tore down the statue [of slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020]. They do have a very immediate sense of righting wrongs rather than, oh, let's just wait seven years and go through the official channels. I think a lot of people in Bristol are more like, let’s get out on the streets and show them how we feel. So she's part of that.

With her group (the Bristol Justice Collective) they have changed people's lives for the better and she's selfless in that way. That's what she wants to do: to work to raise awareness of the issues that she feels are important and raise money to help people who she feels may need it.

How much is Bristolian culture front and centre in this drama?

Possibly it's front and centre - through Myrna. The other characters are Bristolian, but to me they don’t really have that full, angry heart that I find in Bristol. I really like the city. I lived down there for a bit, and though I’m back in London now I miss it, it's got a really nice vibe. People seem to care about stuff, there seem to be a lot of independent high streets and when you have to queue for stuff, everyone seems much more chilled in Bristol than they do in London. I do think it's definitely got a big heart, that city. If it's not in all the characters, it's definitely in the story.

What were your first impressions of The Outlaws scripts?

The storyline does get quite dark at times, but it's funny. It made me just laugh out loud with Stephen Merchant’s humour. It's got a lot of heart and it’s quite nice to see these characters eventually interacting once they see each other's humanity. And I loved Myrna. She’s older but she’s a really active, central character in the story. I liked the fact that she's an older woman but she's not a grandma. She's not a mum. She's not an auntie. She's a woman and a character in her own right, with decent intelligence. That’s not necessarily somebody who we’ve seen on screen before.

She’s a lefty, socialist character (unapologetically) - and she’s front and centre in the drama. A lot of the conversations or arguments that people are having now about political correctness and being ‘woke’ and all that sort of stuff… that is in the show, often with a humorous edge, but it is characters having those conversations on TV. That's one of the things that drew me to it.

And of course Myrna’s concerns actually came true during filming…

It's funny because in the first episode there was this big argument about statues, and she was determined that the statue of Edward Colston shouldn’t be there. And so there was a scene about that. By the time we came back to film after lockdown... it was gone! So we had to change it. They put it in the story that she was part of the group that pulled down the statue.

What’s it been like having Stephen Merchant as writer, director and co-star all at the same time?

I'm flabbergasted because I’m there trying to remember my lines and think about what scene are we doing next… and he's doing all of that. And he's thinking about the editing. And he's thinking about the shots. And he often comes over and has some other funny new alternative line to try. His brain must be just constantly on the go. But it’s great for us because we're right next to the source of the material.