Ruth Jones: ‘I’m so proud of James Corden but I would never want what he has’

Two weeks before lockdown, Ruth Jones and I are standing in the deserted restaurant of a very low-key London club. The waitress makes it clear she is put out that we have turned up early for our pre-ordered lunch. ‘Your food might not be ready,’ she says curtly. We prepare to sit down at one of the empty tables. ‘Not there!’ the waitress shrieks. ‘Builders need access for decorating.’ She points to a small window table. ‘You ladies go there.’ ‘Isn’t this brilliant?’ Ruth whispers, as we meekly gather up our belongings. ‘I love this sort of thing.’ She is looking good: swishy chestnut-brown hair, a cosy pale-blue M&S jumper and dark trousers.

As co-creator and star of one of Britain’s most successful comedies ever, Gavin & Stacey, actor, author of a second soon-to-be bestseller, and one of a handful of wave-making female showrunners in the UK (including Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I May Destroy You creator Michaela Coel, who also write, produce and act), Ruth is a major power player in the entertainment world. But she is clearly delighted about the distinct lack of ‘celebrity’ treatment from our waitress, who could give the brilliantly rude Nessa (the Welsh rock chick played by Ruth in G&S) a run for her money in the attitude stakes.

‘Absolutely,’ she laughs, when I put this to her. ‘I’m way more comfortable with this than standing on a red carpet with people shouting my name and photographers taking my picture. That to me is always rather bizarre and awkward. When Gavin & Stacey started, I used to dread them. I’d be anxious about what to wear, how to stand, who to talk to, what to say, how not to trip over. But recently I went to a ceremony and really enjoyed myself. I wore palazzo pants, a jacket from John Lewis and a top I’d bought for my 50th birthday and felt really relaxed. It makes me realise how much I’ve changed.’

Ruth Jones has spent the last few decades working out exactly who she is. Her warm, poignant new novel, Us Three, follows three childhood friends and is about relationships, loss, love, and the ability to recognise true happiness. It reflects many of the preoccupations of her own life – from the real meaning of success to the benefits of age, overcoming a lack of confidence and the importance of carving out your own path.

At 53, Ruth still lives in Cardiff – half an hour from where she was born in Bridgend, and her mum’s home – with her husband of 21 years, David Peet. A writer and producer, he’s her business partner in Tidy Productions, the company behind the hugely successful Sky One series Stella, which ran for six seasons from 2012, as well as the 2010 BBC series The Great Outdoors and last year’s Gavin & Stacey Christmas special. ‘We live together and work together and somehow it works,’ she says. ‘To be honest, it’s never been difficult being together as much as we are so I can’t pretend it is. It actually makes life easier.’ It’s a tight family unit. She is stepmother to David’s three children, Fiona, 35, Louise, 33, and Alex, 31, from his former marriage, and close by are her two older brothers Mark and Julian, younger sister Marie and her mum, Hannah, a retired GP, who remains very much at the heart of the family since the death of Ruth’s lawyer father in 2018.

Her family sounds marvellous and – while they have always been extremely supportive of her talent – she has never had the uncomfortable experience of them treating her like a star. When Stella was first shown, her parents couldn’t watch it because her dad refused on principle to have a Sky dish installed on the roof (they watched it at her brother’s house instead). When she wrote her debut novel, 2018’s Never Greener, about an affair that breaks up two marriages, her mother was not impressed. ‘She thought the story was good and the sex didn’t bother her, but she thought the swearing was “uncalled for”,’ says Ruth. ‘My dad used to say swearing was “the sign of an impoverished mind”! I don’t think I’ve ever said “f—” in front of my parents.’

Ruth’s life could have gone very differently. At school she loved drama but when choosing a degree, thought the safest bet was to combine it with English. At her Manchester University interview she was asked which book she was currently reading and replied: ‘Jackie Collins, Hollywood Wives’; somewhat unsurprisingly, she got rejected. We both guffaw at the story.

She ended up at Warwick University followed by a stint at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where she was told that despite her talent as an actor, her future only held character roles because she did not have lead actress looks. Regardless, she persevered and for the first two decades of her career this prophecy proved to be correct. She played a maid in the 1996 film adaptation of Emma, a ‘best friend’ in the 1999 movie East Is East, and long-suffering salon assistant Linda in BBC comedy Nighty Night.

And then came Gavin & Stacey. It first hit our screens in 2007, when Ruth was 41 and her co-star and co-writer, James Corden, was 29. They’d met seven years earlier and bonded when they both played slimming club members in Kay Mellor’s TV series Fat Friends. One night in a hotel bar in Manchester, they decided to have a go at writing a script.

‘At the end of filming, we’d be the only ones in the bar in places very much like this,’ she laughs. ‘We had a very similar sense of humour and one night he was telling me about a wedding he’d been to in Barry where the girl had married a guy from Essex. And we started writing it over the next few months in either of our rooms. One of us would be sleeping, or lying with eyes closed shouting out the occasional line.’

Neither of them held out great hopes, but the then commissioner of BBC Three, Stuart Murphy, loved it. Gavin & Stacey, their warm, eccentric creation bringing together two very different families, captured the viewing public’s imagination.

In a space of months, Ruth and James were catapulted to stardom. Ruth’s portrayal of the tattooed, grumpy, miniskirted Nessa inspired everything from T-shirts to greeting cards. The show won every award going and Ruth and James (along with Matthew Horne as Gavin, Joanna Paige as Stacey and Ruth’s old school friend, Rob Brydon, as Uncle Bryn) quickly had to adjust to a whole new future.

At the 2008 Baftas, they were the feted stars of the night. ‘James was in his element talking to all these famous people and being completely entertaining,’ recalls Ruth. ‘He was so excited about the after-party but I remember thinking, “I’m going home now.” I just got in my car and drove back to Wales.’

Agents and colleagues advised her to move to London, and she turned down many TV and advertising opportunities, deciding instead in 2009 to set up her own production company with David, whom she had met working on a comedy pilot, and stay put in her beloved Valleys, carefully guarding her private life from any invasion. At home she rarely gets pestered for autographs. When in London, she has been known to put on a Scottish accent to avoid being recognised.

As Corden’s star rose to incredible heights, people have tried to infer she is jealous of his stratospheric celebrity. Last October, I spent a few hours with them in LA discussing the Christmas special they had written – the first Gavin & Stacey episode after a 10-year break. They were worried it would bomb, but could not have been more wrong. More than 17 million people tuned in to see it end on a cliffhanger, making it the most-watched TV show of the decade.

‘We all watched it round at James’s house, and when it ended James’s younger sister Ruth just screamed: “No! You can’t end it there!” But there’s nothing in the diary. We are both pretty busy.’

The day after we met, Ruth was preparing to go home and James was up at 5am waiting to be picked up by Kanye West on a private jet. ‘I’m so proud of James but I would never want what he has. It’s not me,’ she says. ‘But it is him and he does it brilliantly and all of us – him David, Julia [James’s wife] and all the children – love spending time together.’

James, meanwhile, views her as his anchor in the swirling seas of fame. They describe each other alternately as best friend, brother/sister and therapist. He told me about a time a decade ago when things got too crazy. ‘I knew there was one place I had to go: I turned up in Cardiff, a bit all over the place, and Ruth didn’t ask me any questions, she just laid me down on her sofa with a duvet. I closed my eyes and slept for nine hours straight. I just needed to be with her away from everywhere. It’s a massive thing in my life for me to have her as my friend. She is always there for me.’

There is a character in Us Three called Lana Lloyd who dreams of being an actress and moves to London, launching a career on the back of her good looks. It’s written with Ruth’s trademark style: laughing with, not laughing at, her characters. ‘I can’t do bleak, I always prefer to focus on the positive,’ she explains. ‘Even when bad things happen, you always want to move forward.

‘I don’t think anyone really has a clue what they are doing in their 20s and, in a lot of cases, their 30s,’ she continues. ‘I definitely didn’t have a lot of confidence. I was very fortunate I was in my 40s when [fame] happened to me. The older I’ve got, the more comfortable I’ve become. I loved my 40s but my 50s have been even better. I care less what other people think and I have a life I really enjoy. For me, knowing who I am and where I belong is massively important.

‘Losing my dad was incredibly hard so family becomes even more precious,’ she adds. ‘I love travelling round Wales with my mum. She’s an amazing woman and I want to spend time with her. We go to places we used to visit when I was little: Lake Vyrnwy in Powys, Strata Florida Abbey in Pembrokeshire.’

Like the women in her book, she remains close to women she has known since childhood: Nicole she has known since the age of eight, Cerys, who she met at 15, and her sister Marie; and there was Lucy, who she lost to cancer two years ago and to whom she dedicated her first book. ‘We call ourselves the Merry May Makers and we go on a little trip each May. We try to read a book set in the place we’re going. We’ve done Oxford, Paris, Lyme Regis and Glasgow. There’s something so special about being with a group of female friends who have known you since you were little – we’ve been to each other’s 18ths and weddings and parents’ funerals and childbirths. All of life’s milestones.’

Months later, we are back in touch. She spent lockdown hunkering down with David (‘we frequently commented on how lucky we were that we get on so well’), helping her frontline worker sister, Marie, by taking over history lessons for her 10-year-old niece, Flossy, on FaceTime and doing yoga sessions with her 15-year-old niece Noush.

She desperately missed her mum, who was looked after by her brother. She stood in her mum’s garden for chats, and – like the rest of us – did Zoom calls and family quizzes. She’s grown a couple of pansies, a lettuce and two desultory radishes. Her best friend Nicola gave her Ken Follett’s book The Pillars of the Earth, which became an obsession. She tells me has stopped drinking after reading Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. ‘It’s so enlightening,’ she says. ‘And it’s science based – a practical approach to drinking less or just looking at our relationship with booze. I get loads more done, plus the anxiety has gone right down.’

Then surely, I say, with lockdown and the entertainment industry put on pause, she must have had the time to do some writing with Corden? She shakes her head. ‘James and I did Zoom a few times. But we didn’t do any writing. In fact, I remember us both saying how uncreative we both felt. And since then we’ve not even mentioned work, just talked about the family and how we’re feeling. It does seem like a waste doesn’t it, not to have spent all those lockdown hours writing? But I just couldn’t get into the groove.’

Her groove, however, is now back. She promises more writing with Corden (‘it may not be Gavin & Stacey but it’ll be something’), plus she’s working on a new book and three more projects with David. ‘I just want to be optimistic, to continue to blessing-count and appreciate the little kindnesses. And hopefully help each other out till we reach a better place.’

Well said, Ruth Jones.

‘Us Three’ is published on 3 September (Bantam Press, £14.99)