Tanya Moodie: Motherland, mindfulness and my Medea freakout

As she wins a TV breakthrough award for playing alpha mum Meg in the BBC comedy, the actor talks about faith, focus and her passion for the stageAmid all the cancellations and chaos caused by the coronavirus this week, Tanya Moodie received one piece of news worth celebrating. She won the Royal Television Society breakthrough award for her performance in the BBC Two sitcom Motherland, in which she plays Meg, a dynamo of alpha-female energy who gives slummy-mummy Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) some life-changing – and, for us, newly apt – advice on working from home.Moodie may be only just breaking through in television, but she’s had a wide experience on stage. Indeed, when we met – before the RTA awards, and while Daddy, her now-postponed show at the Almeida, was still in rehearsals – Moodie relayed a recent conversation she’d had with one of her fellow actors at the theatre. “I just said to him today, very frankly, ‘You need to develop a ritual to leave the character in the dressing room. Don’t take them home.’” For Moodie, these rituals can be “something really banal, like, ‘I take off my costume, I hang it on the hangers’, but you do it with that mindfulness”. This has been part of Moodie’s practice ever since her Medea got a bit out of hand in the early 2000s. “Yeah man, that was weirrrrd! There was supernatural stuff happening all around. I’d leave the theatre and Medea was following me everywhere! I’d be in my flat and, like, the radio would turn on!” Continue reading…
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