How Ricky's funny girl stormed LA

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5 April 2012

When, at the age of 36, Ashley Jensen was named Best Newcomer at the British Comedy awards, she celebrated her success by buying a cod in a baguette from a chip van near Waterloo. Her role as the daffy sidekick to Ricky Gervais in Extras also earned her the award for Best TV Comedy Actress that night, though the sense that she was unbothered by the fuss, or as unambitious as her sitcom character, was undermined slightly by Samuel L Jackson. The Pulp Fiction star revealed at the ceremony that Jensen had signed up with his Hollywood agent.

A year later, Jensen's life has been turned upside down. Now a regular cast member in the American hit series Ugly Betty, she has sold the Holland Park flat she was doing up with her boyfriend, actor Terry Beesley, and lives in Los Angeles, with a holiday home in Umbria. Her belongings are in storage in Dartford. Instead of cod in a baguette, she has just enjoyed turbot in chocolate sauce at a restaurant in Covent Garden and, though dressed in Marks and Spencer's jeans and a vintage lace top, looks distinctly more glamorous than she did 12 months ago. The dusty shadows of eye make-up are a little more artful, and when she smiles, the teeth have an Arctic gleam.

She is back in London for a week to talk about her phenomenal success and to tie up a few loose ends. Her move to the States was sudden, leaving domestic arrangements in a state of flux - while she is talking to me, Beesley is out hunting for another London property. The new flat would be partly investment, partly safety net: they are not wholly committed to LA. This could be because each year dozens of British actors struggle to make the leap from London to LA. But Jensen's is the story of instant success in an industry - and a city - that is notoriously difficult to crack.

Despite her overnight celebrity, Jensen is just the same as she was when I interviewed her a year ago. She has an Olympian command of self-deprecation, peppering every anecdote with evidence of her own haplessness. "I do sometimes look at myself and think this wee Scottish person from Annan's been superimposed on a glossy American thing," she says, struggling to turn off her mobile phone. "I'm a little bit like: how did I get there?"

The long answer to this question stretches from a childhood of impersonating Frank Spencer in the Dumfriesshire town of Annan, through drama college in Edinburgh, to London, and a decent career with regular television work: The Bill, Silent Witness, Casualty, three series of City Central, and a few weeks as "a paedophile's wife" in EastEnders. All of which, as she tells it, was fine: she never wanted more than to be in work.

After which, LA was a culture shock. "It's a really unforgiving place. And I will not lie, it has been hard. I went out there on my own. I felt really, really out of place. I didn't know anyone. I didn't understand the city."

Jensen says all of this with no sense of self-pity. If anything, she is reluctant to complain, but there is definitely a sense in which her career seems to have erupted around her, leaving her excited and slightly bewildered.

Originally, Ugly Betty was set in New York, which would have suited her better. "I'm much more a New York person than an LA person. Little things like going for a meal - you don't know where to go, because nothing looks like anything. LA looks a bit like a wasteland - a postapocalyptic Camden."

Getting used to a city with limited public transport took time. For five weeks she walked until her feet bled, then gave in and rented a Mini, like the one she had in London. But, being an imported car, it was $200 a day, so the Mini had to be traded for a "random red car". This was cheaper, but didn't ease Jensen's fear of the roads. "I was almost licking the windscreen, I was so far forward in the car."

Her habit of self-deprecation was no help either. She collected hundreds of business cards, without ever believing she could call the numbers on them. And when shop assistants offered help, she found herself muttering "stop hassling me" to herself. Now, through necessity, she is beginning to warm to LA.

"I can fight it, and go 'grrr'. Or I can get over myself and look for the positive things. The sun does shine a lot and that does lift your spirits. And let's travel a wee bit further afield, and do something that you've not done. Let's go and have a manicure!"

The manicure, it transpires, was not entirely Jensen's idea. "I was told to! Somebody looked at my hands and they said, 'Oh Ashley, before the Golden Globes, go and have a manicure, for God's sake!'"

Her description of her visit to the manicurist is almost Attenborough-like in its anthropological detail. "There were all these moneyed old ladies in their seventies sitting there, and then there are all these middle-aged women that are a little bit pulled, a little bit tight, sitting with their straight backs, because they do three hours of Pilates a day. Then the women in their early twenties on their BlackBerries. And then the 10-year-old girls, going: 'No! I want this colour!'" Jensen's conclusion, as she inhabited this moment, was that she had entered another world. "And then," she jokes, "I went for my Botox."

Jensen's initial alienation subsided once she was joined by her partner, Terry, and their Utonagan dog, Barney. Beesley is using his time in LA to write, but may get an American agent if Ugly Betty returns - as it surely will - for a second season. At the end of January, the couple rented an open-top Mini, put the dog in the back, filled the boot with flowers, and drove up the coast to Big Sur, where they were married in a forest by Ric Masten, a poet, folk-singer, Unitarian Universalist minister and - Jensen's words - "Northern Californian hippie".

"He was just so non-judgmental, so open of spirit, and he was just the right person to be married by. He wears this thing, almost like a hippie habit, made of army blankets, and everybody that he marries has to make something and put it on his habit. He gives it to you the night before the wedding and together you've got to sew on this memento. We put on a very simple little bag with some roses on it."

The hippie theme was no accident. Terry had proposed in Hyde Park, placing a ring of grass on Jensen's finger, a reference to the closing line of Donovan's song Brother Sun, Sister Moon ("a soft blade of grass for a ring"). Jensen's wedding ring, by a Santa Monica designer, is in the form of pleated grass. Her engagement ring is "a big fat diamond. It's like if you were an eight-year-old and you wanted to draw a ring that a princess would wear.

"The whole wedding thing just evolved. It was very spontaneous. One thing just tumbled onto another. What I didn't want to be worrying about was 'Is the salmon undercooked and who's a vegetarian?' And my mum was brilliant. For a single parent with an only daughter to actually say, 'Why don't you just go and do it yourselves?' I thought: that is huge. What an amazing mum to say that."

Jensen signed to Ugly Betty for seven years, but few American shows last that long. If it does, she will be set up for life. If it doesn't, her heightened profile will surely guarantee her future. A recent stint as the guest host on C4's Friday Night Project showed she has the confidence and wit to conquer live television. But she says she and Beesley won't allow her career to rule her family life.

"Do you know what? If I get pregnant, I get pregnant. If I don't, I'm not going to tie myself in knots about the fact that maybe I can't have children. But if I get pregnant, they'll either deal with it, or they'll recast me. You can't not get pregnant because you might lose a job." In the meantime, she has started to appreciate the more surreal aspects of her new life, such as the evening of the Golden Globes when she wore a Junco Yoshioka dress, and had to stash a note of the designer's name in the tiny handbag she wasn't used to carrying for the benefit of the reporters on the red carpet. And, after spending her adolescence in Nature Treks, she can attest to the fact that Jimmy Choos are surprisingly comfortable: "The really expensive shoe designers are like that, they make the shoes for the foot. As opposed to other shoes, which are made for the hoof."

This no-nonsense approach to glamour is surely the bedrock of Jensen's success. "I felt the bee's knees in my borrowed frock at the Golden Globes, but, you know, I'm an ordinary-looking girl-next-door, vaguely healthy-ish person."

As Laurel to Ricky Gervais's Hardy in Extras, she was an unthreatening female presence. In Ugly Betty, she is the only character who isn't a cartoon. "They're both comfortable in their own skin. And I suppose maybe unthreatening, and women's women."

Though it is America Ferrera (Betty) who receives the sackloads of fan mail from grateful teenage girls saying Ugly Betty helped them overcome their insecurities, Jensen believes the programme does have a positive message, not least because its female stars are allowed to be curvaceous (if not exactly corpulent).

"Me, America, Vanessa Williams and Ana Ortiz are women with women's bodies. We have Salma Hayek who is executive producer, who is a womanly woman, a really sexy woman, who has breasts and a bum. And nobody anywhere, on any level, has ever said: 'Watch what you're eating, we've noticed you're eating a few wee bits of bun in the afternoon.'

"It's good if there are more confident women in the public eye who are happy with themselves, who can say that they love life, and they love going out for a meal, and they're not a size zero, and they can still look good. It is weird: I can see people looking at me, going: 'Has she lost weight, has she changed? What's her attitude towards her food?' Maybe I am in a position where I can let people know: eat a meal, don't deprive yourself of things, because we only live here once."

Jensen looks momentarily startled at this almost American outburst, then composes herself. "What's the point in suffering and not enjoying a good fish pie?"

Ugly Betty is on Friday on C4.

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How Ricky's funny girl stormed LA

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