I am such a Phoebe Waller-Bridge fanboy it's ridiculous but hey.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge : “This is what I fucking do. Do you want it?”

From The Times, August 25 2019

Phoebe Waller-Bridge nearly became a star through a different type of programme, Downton Abbey. But she was turned down for being too funny. She had just graduated from drama school, was unemployed and was ordered by her agent not to “fuck up” her first big audition, in which she was asked to try out as one of the aristocratic Crawley sisters.

“It was a really moving scene . . . it was meant to be sort of profound and moving and emotional and I went in and I performed the scene and honestly I was like: I have nailed this.” The director, however, was “pissing himself laughing” and said: “I had no idea this character was funny.”

“And I was like, ‘Neither did I. What?’ . . . Anyway, I didn’t get a callback.”

Waller-Bridge said she has developed a theory about actors and auditions: having a hangover can often help.

“There were some times when I would wake up in the morning and I had spontaneously gone out the night before and I would be hung over and I would be late and it was those auditions that I always got,” she said at a Fleabag screening in America.

“It’s a dangerous thing to say to people, because maybe it was the parts I was going for, but I remember sometimes when my inhibitions had simply gone out the window, I just felt like saying: This is what I fucking do. Do you want it?”