Carrie Hope Fletcher has been appearing onstage in London for the last 20 years—and she is still only 29. She also has a pronounced social media presence with around half a million followers on Twitter and over half a million on Instagram. Her YouTube channel has 700,000 subscribers with over 1 million views a month. In 2019, the Sunday Times named her one of England’s Top 100 Influencers. And yet this wily theatre vet and social media phenomenon has—as heady as her stardom in England can be—kept her Doc Martens firmly on the ground.
The version of the title character in the new musical Cinderella that Fletcher now embodies on the West End in the reimagining of the role by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the book’s writer Emerald Fennell, actually does wear Doc Martens. Fennell, who was nominated for an Oscar for her direction of Promising Young Woman and won an Academy Award for its script, has created a Cinderella who can belt out a Lloyd Webber ballad and break your heart while looking like a punk rocker out to break your balls. Fennell has found a way, in fact, to balance Lloyd Webber with Hope Fletcher and, in doing so, has conjured a take on this fairytale that can feint toward vulgarizing it with modernity while more deeply—even tenderly—delving into a narrative nudged knowingly forward by female empowerment. It is that empowerment that will be celebrated when Andrew Lloyd Webber hosts a gala performance of the musical on November 22nd to benefit the work being done by Malala Yousafzai through her Malala Fund to help educate the more than 130 million girls who still have no access to schools. Malala plans to attend and along with the composer who has pledged all the proceeds from the tickets sold that night will be donated to her work.
There is a stillness, a realness, to Carrie Hope Fletcher’s portrayal of this newly empowered version of the fairytale character while the slapstick all about her never alas slackens. “That’s Emerald’s very clever writing,” she tells me when we Zoom for a chat. “From the beginning, she always said that the whole show is meant to be like this almost-spoof of a perfect Disney panto glossy world. Cinderella is meant to be one of two very self-aware characters, the other being Prince Sebastian. She’s the one who can see this world for what it is. Everyone else is part of this world and everything they do is ingrained in this world. And Cinderella is the only one who’s going, ‘You guys know that this is weird.’ Everything Cinderella says is very dry and witty and sarcastic and everything everyone else says is very glossy and bubbly. So it is Emerald’s vision and her very, very clever writing.”
Fletcher’s many musical theater credits include both Éponine and Fantine in Les Miserables, Veronica in Heathers, Wednesday in The Addams Family, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Jane Banks in Mary Poppins. Her solo shows sell out concert halls and her 2018 debut album, When the Curtain Falls, went straight to the Top 20 UK Album Charts and reached No. 2 on the iTunes Soundtrack Charts.
Fletcher is also the author of six books. Her seventh, a novel titled With this Kiss, is being published in April of next year. Her first book, All I Know Now, a a nonfiction work which was based on her massively successful blog, went straight to No. 1 on the Sunday Times Bestseller list, as did her second book and first novel, On the Other Side.
And she created her own 18-piece clothing collection in collaboration with X Joanie which includes, along with its dresses, t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with the slogans “Born Weird” and “Complicated.” Was she born weird? “Yeah. 100 percent. There is no question about that.”
Here are some other things we talked about.
KS: Your brand is sort of effortlessly cool, Carrie. Young girls especially think you’re so damn cool because you do not bullshit them. There is a realness about you—which you bring to Cinderella. But did you have any qualms about being in Cinderella? I actually think the show needed you and your artistic brand more than you needed it at this point in your career.
CHF: No. I had no qualms about being in this. I love that you think I’m cool because I’ve always felt I’m very, very uncool. But that’s kind of the appeal. Every character that I’ve played Wednesday, Éponine, Veronica Sawyer—they all have this severe uncoolness about them that ends up making them so likable and so sort of relatable onstage. I’m not saying that I’m likable and relatable, but I feel that same sort of awkwardness. Especially when I was in my teens, I felt this really weird inability to be able to fit in. But as you grow up you realize that you don’t have to. That is not a requirement to get along in life. You can just not fit in and be an awkward shape that doesn’t fit the mold and that’s fine. That’s cool.
I am interested in all the things that people deem uncool—like being obsessed with Disney and loving musical theatre and spending evenings reading instead of going out. So when you’re a kid or a teenager, those things just aren’t deemed very cool. But I feel like that if you find the right crowd of people, you are cool. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. Because of social media it is now easier to find those people. It is easier to find your crowd.
The first ever meeting I had with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Emerald Fennell I went into the meeting not knowing it was about Cinderella. I was just told that Andrew had this new project that he needed a female vocalist for and that I needed to record three songs that he needed for demos that he could then share around. So I walked into this meeting having no idea that it was for Cinderella—or that it was this new version of Cinderella that they had cooked up between them. Andrew sat me down and said, “Okay. This is the project. It’s Cinderella. But it’s not the Cinderella that everyone knows. She’s very grungy. She wears a lot of black. She wears Doc Martens. She’s kind of like this alternative Cinderella.” As he was saying this, I looked down at myself and I was wearing a black dress with lacy tights and my Doc Martens and I said, “I see why you called me. I get it now.”
KS: I still think they needed you more than you needed them. That story sort of proves to me that you had the power in that dynamic. Are you comfortable with power?
CHF: No. Not at all. I am one of those people who never makes decisions unless they are for myself. If it is a group decision that has to be made, I’m more like: All right, what’s the consensus? What does everyone want to do? Because I’m pretty easy and laid back like that and I don’t mind. If it is a decision that affects only me, I am more like: This is what I want and this is what I need right now. But if it is a group thing, I’m never going to be the one to take charge. I’m never going to be the one who says, “You all need to listen to me and follow me.” I will very much sit back and let other people make decisions and be quite happy to go along with what everyone wants. So the idea of me being in power and in charge scares me a little bit. It is kind of different when it comes to leading a company when I’m in a production because I feel like that’s more about looking after people and making sure everyone is okay, which is something I feel like I can do. But when it comes to everyone looking at me and asking, “What do we do?” No. So I guess I won’t be going into politics. There is not enough money in the world to convince me to do that.
Speaking of looking after people, I rely on my mother so so so desperately. Both my parents. My mom and dad were such a perfect united team. The are not in the arts in the slightest. My dad works at a Kodak factory in silver recovery—whatever silver recovery means. I’m still not quite sure. Twenty-one years driving forklifts. My mom is a learning support teacher for students with special needs. Both my parents are extraordinarily hardworking people. They very much instilled in my brother and me [Carrie’s bother Tom is a lead vocalist in the pop rock band McFly and the YouTube video of their singing McFly’s “Love Is on the Radio” has over 1.6 million views] that you can have anything you want as long as you are willing to put the time and effort and money into whatever it is you want. There are always ways of making things happen. It might take a lot of time but there are always ways of making things come true.
KS: Let’s circle back to your discomfort at being considered a leader. You are a kind of leader on social media. People not only demean social media, but go on the attack against it. Many think of it as a modern evil. I think it is about how you use it—you can create a community of kindness or create chaos out of cruelty. My analogy is that it is a plinth and you can either defecate atop it or you can sculpt a piece of art and place it there instead. You have a huge social media presence. How do you balance all that?
CHF: I completely agree with that analogy about the plinth. I couldn’t agree more. Social media is just about how people use it. If you’re using it just to shout abuse into the abyss and to use it to spread hate and negativity… well, that’s not about social media. Social media is just a tool. It’s about how you use that tool. I mean, no one has a go at a hammer. It’s the person who’s smashing things up as opposed to building things with the hammer. No one says it’s the hammer’s fault. It’s the person who’s deciding to knock things down and to use the hammer who’s at fault.
It’s the same with social media. I do think there are down sides to it. For example, the rules and regulations regarding social media need to be worked on and need to be changed, but at the end of the day social media is a tool and it is how you use it. It’s the people who use it for bad instead of good who are the problem. So, yeah, I’ve always just used social media to spread the things that I enjoy and the things that I’m passionate about which has always been musical theatre and Disney and writing and reading. I feel through that I’ve made some amazing friends and built up this community of people who end up coming to see these shows that I’m in. I used to have a sense of mission about it and I do have to be aware [of the “messiah complex” aspect] when one has so many followers. I’ve seen it in others go horribly wrong before.
Very early on, I made a video I called “Honorary Big Sister.” It was part of a health department campaign about talking openly about sex, drugs, smoking, alcohol. It was about teenagers talking about those kinds of things. I named the video “Honorary Big Sister.” I opened the comments section and told them that if they weren’t comfortable with sharing their stories with people of authority or parents or adults, then use this comments section to find people who are going through the same sorts of things that you are and we will use this as a community-based type thing. That kind of snowballed and I really did become this kind of big-sister figure to my audience and I feel like that was maybe one of the best things I ever did because it became more big sisterly than I Am Your Leader.
I had a responsibility, of course, because I do have this audience now and I had to be careful of what I was saying and putting out there but only in so much as a big sister would. But I never felt like I didn’t have freedom. I mean I have a personal life and private life I don’t put in front of hundreds of thousands of people. But I still had my wild drunken nights with cast members and did all the things that people do in their early 20s as a young person working in musical theater. I still do all those things and had all those experiences and had a great time. But it’s just common sense what you put on social media and what you don’t. People have private lives and people have public lives.
KS: On top of everything else, you just ran the marathon here in London. How do you multi-task with such grace?
CHF: I learned my lesson. I used to take on way too much and was convinced that having a monthly breakdown was just a thing that people did as part of being an adult. Breaking down crying in the middle of supermarket because they didn’t have the brand of butter you wanted was just what one did. It was just normal. So I think I learned my lesson quite quickly. You can’t do it all—not all at the same time at least. You have to manage things in sort of smaller chunks. And ask for help. You can say, “You know what? I can’t do this alone.”
My first book was called What I Know Now. It came out six years ago. What I know now is that there is no point at which you do have all the knowledge. There is no point where you get to in your life when you go, well, okay now I have everything and I will carry on with the rest of my life with just this amount of knowledge. You are constantly changing. You are constantly growing. What I wrote in that book, there is probably about 30% I’d now go chuck that out the window. That doesn’t apply anymore. That doesn’t work. You’re constantly evolving.
Also, you think that other people have it figured out and people older than you know exactly what they’re doing. And you’re going, “Oh, I can’t wait to get to that point. I can’t wait to get to 30.” I’m weirdly not freaked out about turning 30 on my next birthday. I’m very calm about it. I’m weirdly okay with growing up. I think the further away I get from my teens the better. I was a mess during my teens. But the more I grow up and learn about other people’s lives, I realize that we’re all kind of messes in our teens because that’s really where you’re trying to figure things out. Even now beginning to look back on my 20s, there was so much I didn’t know and so much that I thought that I did.
KS: You seem to have trouble not only being still but also stilling your mind. Is being onstage the place you go to rest and be still and find a kind of respite?
CHF: I honestly think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I feel like when I’m onstage I have no choice but to think about nothing else except about being onstage. It’s my only chance to be completely and utterly in the moment. Every other moment of my life is about what happens next. Where am I in the next five minutes? What happens in the next hour? Where do I need to be? What do I need to do? It’s all about short-term future and long-term future. I very rarely just sit and be still and enjoy the moment. But when I’m onstage the only thing I can do is think about the words that I am saying at that very moment.
Reading also helps me be still. For the first time in a long time my reading has spiked this year. I reached my 50 book goal yesterday. I set out to read 50 books in 2021. And I am now on my 51st. My 50th one was a book titled Witch Girl. I have been reading a lot of Young Adult fiction because I am writing a Young Adult book right now.
The book that I remember the most from this year is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It’s my favorite book of all time really. I do not say that lightly. It’s about this old Hollywood actress. None of it is true but as you’re reading it you’re thinking, this woman has to exist. This has to be nonfiction surely because it’s so amazing. It’s about this Hollywood actress who married seven husbands throughout her career and it is also about how she worked her way up from nothing to become of the biggest Hollywood actresses of all time. I think it speaks to me because it’s about Hollywood and actresses although I’ve never been in a Hollywood film. There is something about being an actress that I understood. But because it was something I’ve never experienced before there was an element of wonderment to it. There is a sense of mystery about Hollywood and LA to me, especially about those old Hollywood musicals. I am fascinated with that era of time. The construct of the book is this writer writing this actress’s memoir right before she passes away. It is her giving this interview to this writer.
