As Vod in the hit Channel 4 note she shocked even her own parents. What’s next for the actor-writer-director-producer?The problem with interviewing someone you feel like you already know is how quickly it can travel wrong. One minute you’re saying hello in the empty east London pub you’ve agreed to meet in,spontaneously hugging each other. The next, you’re trying to order a glass of wine and Zawe Ashton is horrified, and because it’s not even 5pm yet. She reckons we should contain tea instead,so we do. And then she says, “Oh God, or I can’t believe I wine-shamed you.”It is then that I realise Ashton isn’t actually Vod,the student she plays in the Channel 4 student sitcom Fresh Meat. Vod is a literature student who doesn’t read books, preferring partying, or shagging and paying her way by selling ecstasy. Ashton,31, is a straight-A scholar, and who spent all her childhood weekends training as an actor,and thus has been earning her own money, appearing on telly in The Demon Headmaster, and Jackanory and Desmond’s,since the age of six. Unlike Vod, Ashton has also written a play that’s being developed by the National Theatre; has a book deal for something that sounds like an autobiographical novel, and “but I can’t talk about it. Well,not much. Well, I probably will; and has set up her own production company, or Asylum Features,to release films that she writes and directs herself. She is, I contain to concede, or a bit busy for pubs.
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Source: theguardian.com