Daisy May Cooper press clippings - Page 4

Daisy May Cooper: "Have I seen 'Barbie'? No, f--k that!"

The filter-less comic lets loose on Buzzcocks, Bond, boy bands and Pete Doherty's drinking habits.

James Mottram, NME, 18th August 2023

Daisy May Cooper says relationship with brother Charlie has suffered since This Country

"I've got to sort my relationship out with my brother," the actor said of her This Country co-star.

Isobel Lewis, The Independent, 3rd June 2023

Daisy May Cooper and Dara O Briain launch debut podcasts via Audible

Audible has announced a new batch of shows, with Daisy May Cooper and Dara O Briain amongst those making their first podcast series via the platform. There's also new podcasts coming from Lolly Adefope and Mo Gilligan, and the company has renewed the podcasts by Alan Partridge, Kurupt FM, French & Saunders and Jack Whitehall.

British Comedy Guide, 26th April 2023

Leave it to dialogue by Cash Carraway, creator and writer of BBC One's eight-part, soot-black dramedy Rain Dogs, to best describe her lead character: deadpan, defiant single mother Costello, played with lairy elan by Daisy May Cooper (Am I Being Unreasonable?). As stated by Adrian Edmondson's Lenny, a wheezing, ruined Lucian Freud-esque artist: "The problem is, you don't know your place. But that's the best thing about you."

Similarly, Rain Dogs (based on Carraway's visceral memoir, Skint Estate, and already on HBO in the US), refuses to play out as an anguished, one-dimensional treatise on class and poverty for audiences to sigh and weep over. After Costello and her daughter, Iris (a nuanced performance from newcomer Fleur Tashjian), are evicted from their flat, the aspiring writer and alcoholic (barely three months sober) scrabbles for work at a peep show, wrangles a room from a stranger by modelling a "nightie" (he says she has a "food bank body... lots of carbs"), breaks into a car, and more. And that's just in the opener.

Accompanying her on this odyssey to dysfunctional welfare-Oz are "proud pervert" Lenny (he paints her vagina and masturbates as she cleans his flat) and ditzy, spirited Gloria (Ronke Adékoluẹjo). Then there's putative father figure to Iris and Costello's main trauma-bonded foil, "classical homosexual" Selby (Jack Farthing), a drug-addled, rehab-resistant Withnail who's insulated by family wealth. As the episodes unfold, Costello and Iris end up skidding and reeling through various scenarios (entering a women's refuge; cos-playing yummy mummydom; socially cleansed from London). This, you feel Rain Dogs is saying, is the fever dream of modern poverty: humiliating, exhausting, random.

There are missteps. What should be a deep dive into Costello's dark family history is kept blankly surface-level. As brilliant and merciless as Rain Dogs is at skewering poverty voyeurism ("I will not be your liberal victim of the week"), the same point is endlessly replayed until it loses its bite. Still, what a bold, wild-hearted ride, and what a fiercely original performer Cooper is shaping up to be.

Barbara Ellen, The Observer, 9th April 2023