Finding TV Inspiration in Internet Forums and Old Friends

The British writer and actress Daisy May Cooper spent a lot of time on the internet forum Mumsnet when her marriage was breaking down. The site is “like Reddit, but for mothers,” Cooper said in a recent interview at a London cafe while taking a puff from a small blue vape.

She was especially drawn, she said, to one of the site’s most popular threads, “Am I Being Unreasonable?,” a supportive community for women second-guessing themselves in relationships. It became the inspiration — and title — for Cooper’s latest television show, which she created with Selin Hizli. The show, which both star in, is available in the United States on Hulu.

Cooper, 36, rose to fame in Britain in 2017 after creating and starring in the BAFTA-winning BBC mockumentary series “This Country” with her brother, Charlie. She is a regular fixture on British comedy panel shows, known for her candor and colorful language.

But in November 2020, two months after the birth of her second child, she separated from her husband, moved out and began searching for solace online. She recalled feeling frightened and unsure of what her next project might be. “‘My career defined me, and now I don’t know who I am, or what I want, and these two human beings are dependent on me,’” she remembered thinking.

Hizli, a friend of Cooper’s from drama school, was also in the process of splitting up with a long-term partner. The two reconnected during this period and started writing the show that became “Am I Being Unreasonable.” A wild and twisty comedy-thriller, it stars Cooper as Nic, a bored housewife who strikes up an intense friendship with a fellow mother, Jen (Hizli).

“We thought, wouldn’t it be great to write something about a female friend being the partner you always needed, especially when your life’s falling apart?” Cooper said over a cup of tea, a wall behind her adorned with hearts.

In a phone interview, Hizli, 34, said she wanted to see mothers of her age and working-class background represented onscreen. “I had forgotten how important friendship was,” she said, “and how much I needed friends in my life.” In the show, Nic and Jen bond over shots of sambuca and dancing to the Spice Girls.

But Cooper and Hizli wanted to portray the darker side of female friendship, too. Cooper described past intense friendships “that felt like toxic relationships I’d had with boyfriends,” including a best friend who Cooper said was secretly sleeping with her boyfriend at the time. When she found out, it was like “a Keyser Söze mug drop moment,” Cooper said, likening the shocking discovery to the ending of the film “The Usual Suspects.”

“I can only write about what I’m going through, or at least base a character around my own experiences,” she said. Cooper described Kerry Mucklowe, the character she plays in “This Country,” as someone who knows exactly who she is. “Kerry was more of me before fame, and then Nic was more of me after,” she added. Reaching for her vape, Cooper seemed more muted than either of those characters, and described herself as an anxious person these days.

Cooper explored the humor and the hardship of growing up in public housing on the outskirts of a picturesque English village in “This Country” and in her 2021 memoir, “Don’t Laugh, It’ll Only Encourage Her.” In the latter, she described playing board games by candlelight because there was not enough money to switch the electricity on.

She had always acknowledged her faults to make other people laugh, Cooper said, and growing up she aspired to be like TV comedians who gave her parents “moments of complete escapism” from their financial struggles. She then channeled those tendencies into writing and acting.

On their first day as students at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, or RADA, in 2007, Hizli remembered a teacher telling them “they were going to dismember us and put us back together.” Cooper, Hizli said, would never have allowed herself to be remade: “She was always unapologetically herself, and never felt the need to conform to the expectations of this quite stuffy drama school.”

Miranda Harcourt, Cooper’s acting coach, praised Cooper’s unusual faculty for what she described as both light and dark fire. “There are some brilliant British performers who have got the capacity for lightness and comedy, but don’t show you their tragic side,” Harcourt said in a recent video interview from her home in Wellington, New Zealand.

After the success of “This Country,” Cooper and her brother finally had some of the financial stability they had been chasing. Their lives changed overnight, Cooper said. “Nobody tells you how to deal with it,” she said. “I think he’s as overwhelmed by it as me,” she said of Charlie, becoming tearful. “When we were poor, we were so much closer,” she said. “I think money and schedules and work have ruined that a bit,” she added.

Her collaboration with Hizli was the result of a similarly intimate bond. On both shows, Cooper said the writing was effortless. “They are the ones on the computer typing, and I’m just stomping around vaping,” she said, laughing.

Since RADA, Cooper had dreamed of acting in a film and attending a premiere, and so when the writer and director Armando Iannucci asked her to play Peggotty in his “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” she said she felt she had done what she set out to do. In a phone interview, Iannucci, who also cast her in the HBO comedy series “Avenue 5,” said that Cooper defies convention with everything she does.

“I think I could only do the acting thing for another few years,” Cooper said, adding that she preferred writing and being behind the scenes. Though several British newspapers recently reported rumors that she has been tapped to play M in the next James Bond film, she said that “no talks have happened whatsoever.” Cooper said she would have to make the character funny, though she was not sure if that ‌would work. “I’ve never actually seen a Bond film, so I wouldn’t know,” she said with a filthy cackle.

These days, Cooper is back living in her hometown, Cirencester, a historic town in southwestern England she said few people leave.

There, “people know me for eating crayons in Year 6 as opposed to being on television,” she said, adding that there was nowhere else she would rather be in the entire world.