In the wisteria-covered garden of a London pub, Phoebe Waller-Bridge comes to my rescue. “This is what we’re for, to zip each other’s jumpsuits up,” she says. She’s offering to extricate me from the one-piece outfit I bought on impulse, inspired by the silky jumpsuit she made famous in Fleabag. I hadn’t taken into account the zipper down the back of my version and the impossibility of getting it down every time I have to pee, but Waller-Bridge is two steps ahead. “If you need me to come with you…” she says, nodding toward the loo with impish kindness.

Suddenly, I am on the other side of the fourth wall—the one that Waller-Bridge so archly shatters in Fleabag when she speaks directly through the screen, using the viewer as a diversion from her sexual misadventures, her café business, and her fumbling familial interactions. There’s no television screen between us now. She can actually see me. The show’s mastermind is wearing a red sweater and jeans, her short brown hair nipped back with hairpins. She’s chatting in a voice that’s familiar and confiding, but then it’s part of her genius that so many fans already feel like she knows us in all of our awkward, oddball singularity.

Fleabag dropped in the US on Amazon Prime in 2016, a bingeable grenade that exhilarated and devastated in equal measure. “I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist,” Fleabag confesses to her father at one point. To which he replies, “Well, you get all that from your mother.” The series made “hot priest” and “guinea pig café” common parlance. Every moment crackles with mischief and surprise, nabbing the show some powerful fans, among them President Barack Obama, who included it on his 2019 “Quick List of TV Shows That I Considered as Powerful as Movies.” Only fair, since Fleabag used him as masturbation fodder.

Any suspicion that Fleabag was a fluke was quickly dispelled by Killing Eve. A thriller Waller-Bridge created about the obsessional cat-and-mouse relationship between an excitement-starved intelligence agent (Sandra Oh) and a fashion-forward assassin (Jodie Comer), Killing Eve mashed up black comedy, international intrigue, and unconventional lesbian romance. By 2020, the two series had won seven Emmys out of 32 nominations between them, and Waller-Bridge had sewn up her reputation as a transgressive figure who could unravel tired genres and make something brave and new.

Amazon signed the newly minted television auteur to an eight-figure overall deal even as she was being bombarded by the kind of outside offers that strain credulity. Among them were a role in a Star Wars movie (as a sarcastic droid in Solo) and a chance to write for James Bond on No Time to Die (earning her the eternal gratitude of the film’s actresses, who were transformed from accessories into actual characters). Topping off the blockbuster trifecta was an offer from Lucasfilm to costar with Harrison Ford in the last of the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

So how did a rogue British playwright swan dive into the center of American culture so quickly? A shell-shocked Waller-Bridge has been wondering the same thing.

“I haven’t had an interview like this in a really long time and so I was like, ‘Oh, shit. Long interview. Who am I? I’m just going to come to her with an identity crisis!’ But it did make me actually stop and think about what I’ve been doing,” she says, adding that the last five years have been a glorious blur. “You come out of the wind tunnel and your hair’s all crazy like, what the fuck?” She flashes a broad, toothy smile—you know the one.

“Fleabag changed my career, and then suddenly you’re so in the moment,” says Waller-Bridge. “And then years pass, pandemics happen, you do a Star Wars, you do an Indiana Jones. It gets more and more surreal.”

A day earlier, I’d watched Waller-Bridge take the stage at a Star Wars Celebration event. Wearing a glamorous silver lamé top and sleek black suit, she introduced a clip from Dial of Destiny to 4,500 delirious fans in various states of cosplay. “It’s amazing to feel the fandom that hard,” she says now. “It was just a shot to the arm. Like: Oh, yeah. This is what I’m doing!”

She first heard about the project from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who broached the idea at the behest of Ford, who—would you believe?—is a huge Fleabag fan. The two women met for dinner in March 2020. “We call it the Last Supper because it was literally the day before they started to shut everything down for COVID, and this was the last dinner I had for a long, long time,” Kennedy says. “When I said, ‘Phoebe, is this something you would ever even consider?’ she did exactly what you would want and expect Phoebe to do: She started screaming and then collapsed onto the booth that we were sitting in.”

Kennedy told her that James Mangold was on board to write and direct this final Indiana Jones picture, and that he wanted to really lean into what it meant to be an aging adventurer. The idea intrigued Waller-Bridge. “People have this idea of when [a franchise] should end,” she says. “And I always think the interesting stuff comes when you push a little bit beyond the end. What happens after the conversation? What happens after someone gets in a cab and goes home?” She read the script and quickly said yes to the role of Helena, Indy’s brilliant, sneaky, hard-charging goddaughter. She sees Helena as following in the footsteps of Karen Allen’s Raiders of the Lost Ark character, Marion Ravenwood—“the coolest motherfucker anyone had ever seen, and also a joyful and surprising match for Indy.”

Mangold says he wrote Helena with Waller-Bridge in mind. He’d recently devoured Fleabag and experienced it as “a lightning bolt of genius on every level—that kind of grand-slam home run project in which you see an artist not only putting themselves so entirely and vulnerably and fully into something, but having such tremendous creative control,” he recalls. “That series is so unafraid to be real, to be insane, to veer where it almost scares you, and then come back to something tender.” Mangold wanted to inject Dial of Destiny with “Barbara Stanwyck energy,” he says, a mix of screwball and steeliness that only a nimble actor could pull off.

Dial of Destiny also transforms Waller-Bridge’s posh, brainy persona into an unlikely but bona fide action star: leaping across buildings, jumping off moving vehicles, punching villains, fighting off creepy-crawlies. “I’ve always been such a lanky, gangly kind of awkward physical person, so I was as surprised as you are,” Waller-Bridge says with delight. “I remember quite early on saying to Jim and Kathleen, ‘So I’ll be doing lots of training for my stunt debut?’ And they were like, ‘I think it would be funnier if you don’t.’ What I love about the character is that she leaps before she looks. And she will just jump on the back of that car not knowing if she’s going to survive or not, and it’s just through her will that she manages to stay on.”

When I ask if any of the physical stunts actually scared her, Waller-Bridge says, “Do you know when the bottom of the airplane opens and all the Nazis fall out?”

She can’t help laughing at the ridiculousness of the words that just tumbled out of her mouth. Still, she admits it was thrilling to be hanging by a harness out of a plane: “So much of acting is getting rid of your self-consciousness and your self-awareness. When you have to jump out of a plane or jump on the back of a car, then it’s much easier just to let go.” On the other hand, she was surprised by her reaction to a scene that involved bugs swarming all over her body. Waller-Bridge suggested they first try a take in which Helena keeps her cool, but as soon as they threw plastic critters at her, she ran out screaming.

Waller-Bridge and the sometimes cantankerous Ford got on famously, which is just as well since they spent close to a year shooting in far-flung locales. “He made it very clear to me that I was his equal from the first day, and that was very liberating and allowed me to be mischievous and silly,” she says.

When word of her casting first leaked, rumors circulated that she was taking over the franchise for Ford. Waller-Bridge says that was never a conversation. “There’s no replacing Indiana Jones in any way,” she says. “But I feel like the character herself—she did feel fresh on the page, and there is a sense of, is there room in the world for someone like this?” She reminds me that Indy was always a flawed, reluctant hero, a professor who’s scared of snakes and gets sore after his punch-ups. “So I do think there’s room for a slightly clumsier, bruised, limping female action star, maybe, in the future.”

“She’s certainly capable of being a movie star,” says Ford, who surprised me one Sunday morning with a 7 a.m. phone call. “It’s a question of whether or not she wants to endure that responsibility.” He speaks glowingly of his costar but can’t even begin to guess what her future holds. “Whatever it is that we think she should do,” he says, “she’ll have a better idea. She’s sitting on top of the pile right now.”

My time with Waller-Bridge takes place in April, before the writers strike, while she develops the classic video game Tomb Raider for a live-action Amazon series. (By May, she will be striking in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America.) Tomb Raider, like Indiana Jones, may seem an unexpected move, but Waller-Bridge was a Tomb Raider addict as a teen. “My parents were very smart because they didn’t actually limit me. They could sense that I was going to just game myself into the ground, and I did,” she says. “I packed the PlayStation away, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to not do that because I’ve got to write and read and do other stuff.’ But Waller-Bridge’s love for Lara Croft stayed with her. “She had an attitude. She was very deliberate in what she wanted to do.” She remembers Croft’s balletic movements through tombs and the game’s moody serenity. “That all changed when they realized that they could market her to be a sex symbol,” she says with a twitch of annoyance.

During the pandemic, Waller-Bridge comforted herself by plunging back into the game, so it seemed like kismet when Amazon asked her if she’d be interested in developing a series. “God, it literally felt like that teenager in me saying: Do right by her, do right by Lara!” she says. “The opportunity to have, as we were talking earlier, a female action character…. Having worked on Bond and having worked as an actor on Indy, I feel like I’ve been building up to this. What if I could take the reins on an action franchise, with everything I’ve learned, with a character I adore, and also just bring back some of that ’90s vibe?” The project aroused “big roaring instincts” in her. “And it’s such a wonderful feeling to think you know what to do.”

The world embraced Waller-Bridge on the basis of her own totally idiosyncratic vision. I ask if she hesitates to participate in our endlessly recycling culture of reboots and remakes. “I feel like when you’re working in the industry, you’ve got to ride the waves and lean in,” she tells me. “There’s room to do something really quite dangerous. And if I can do something dangerous and exciting with Tomb Raider, I already have an audience of people who love Lara and hopefully will continue to. And that is a very unusual position to be in. It’s the old Trojan horse.”

The pub garden is suddenly swarming with little boys—blond English toddlers barely higher than Waller-Bridge’s knee. They are menaces, if not to society then at least to our interview. You try to make a celebrity interview smooth and casual, as if you are strangers who’ve been thrust together—on a train perhaps, or a White Lotus resort—but these boys are making enough of a racket that we pause and watch their antics. “I wonder if these guys like games,” Waller-Bridge says. We consider harnessing their energy in a game of hide-and-seek, with her as the hider. “I wonder which one would be the best? Who would find me?” she says. I gesture toward a towheaded boy squirming in his chair and intently staring at her. “He’s already found me,” she yelps. “He’s looking me dead in the eye. He’s like, ‘I know what you’re fucking thinking!’ ”

We dip back into conversation despite the noise, and Waller-Bridge very politely leans down mere inches from the tabletop, the better to funnel her voice directly into my recorder. I ask about her relationship with Amazon, which she says remains tight, though, since Fleabag, she’s brought nothing to air for them under two consecutive deals. Waller-Bridge dropped out of the streamer’s high-profile Mr. & Mrs. Smith series, in which she was set to star alongside Donald Glover. “I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it—still care about it,” she tells me. “And I know it’s gonna be brilliant. But sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave the party. You don’t want to get in the way of a vision.” Creative collaboration is like a marriage, she says. “And some marriages don’t work out.”

She squinches her eyes when I ask if she’s a perfectionist. Turns out it’s a word she despises. “Happy to be called creatively controlling,” she suggests jovially. “What I look for in something is that little bit of electricity, of danger or saying something, doing something that hasn’t been done before. If I don’t feel that, I can plow and plow and plow, I just won’t make it.” Amazon understands this, she says: “They’ve been with me along this process where I’m like, ‘I’m getting there, but I want it to be fucking amazing.’ ”

We leave the garden to the rambunctious boys and take a winding walk through London in search of Waller-Bridge’s favorite cheese shop. She grew up in one of the city’s upper-middle-class suburbs, the middle of three children, and describes her youthful self as a tomboy who loved imaginary games and instigating mischief. Scrolling furiously through her phone, Waller-Bridge finds a school picture of herself at 13: a pale girl with childish pigtails so big and fluffy, they look like Clifford the Big Red Dog’s ears. Teachers reprimanded her for making a mockery of official school photos, so she claimed her mother had done her hair. “They checked with her, and my mum—just a legend—she said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ ”

Just as she is embarking on another school-days anecdote, Waller-Bridge suddenly jerks away from me and starts chattering to a bird that’s landed nearby. “Good morning, Mr. Magpie,” she says. “How’s Mrs. Magpie?” I feel like I have tumbled onto another planet with customs I don’t understand. “Do you do that with magpies,” Waller-Bridge asks me. I’m married to a Brit but, no, I didn’t know I was supposed to. “What?” she shouts in mock horror. (At least I think it’s mock.) “You’ve never saluted a magpie?”

Waller-Bridge says she’s always had a knack for the dramatic and knew she wanted to be an actor by the age of five. At 18, she was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but traditional stage training hung on her like an ill-fitting dress. “I don’t think anyone thought much of me at drama school,” she says. The classes seemed to focus on perfecting your voice and movements—the whole Laurence Olivier bit about projecting the words clearly and to the back of the hall. “I just got really scared of getting it wrong. I’d always thought that the whole point was to kind of get it so wrong that it ends up being original.” She lets out a joyful whoop. “I think that’s basically what my career has been attempting: Just keep getting it wrong until it’s original.”

After graduating from RADA, Waller-Bridge watched her fellow alumni rise up the theater and film ranks while she scrambled to get work. She made her proper stage debut in the 2009 play Roaring Trade, where she sparred with Fleabag’s future Hot Priest, Andrew Scott. “I remember her being immediately charismatic and extremely comedically gifted—just a really courageous sort of person,” Scott says, his voice full of affection. “I remember her talking about these ideas of the way theater should be, and it was really obvious to me that she wasn’t just going to be satisfied with just being an actor, you know?”

The solution was DryWrite, a fringe theater company she had founded in 2007 with her friend Vicky Jones, who would go on to direct the stage version of Fleabag. “Vicky really lit that flame again,” Waller-Bridge says. “I just felt like I could make her laugh—she really reveled in the naughtier, more mischievous, less put-together perfect presentation of a person. We used to really, really love mucking around with that in our theater company.” Scott describes “incredibly fun, raucous evenings” at DryWrite where Waller-Bridge and company experimented with outrage, humor, and vulnerability.

A few of the characters that she developed onstage ended up being corralled for her first television series, Crashing, about six young friends living in a London squat. The flirtatious, foul-mouthed, and grief-soaked character that became Fleabag also emerged in those years. Transformed into a one-woman play, it won awards at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which triggered a cascade of opportunities: a supporting role in the series Broadchurch alongside Olivia Colman and the chance to create Crashing, Fleabag, and Killing Eve.

All three of those shows prickle with sexual electricity—particularly Fleabag, which opens with Waller-Bridge’s character having anal sex. (Her partner is thrilled that she can accommodate his plentitude, which causes her to confess to the camera, “You spend the rest of the day wondering: Do I have a massive asshole?”) Asked about the undercurrent of grief and loss threading through all these series, Waller-Bridge says she doesn’t quite know how to account for it, except that grief is the thing that most scares her. “I already feel it for the people I love in my life who are still alive,” she says. “I think I write about what I’m frightened of, maybe in a therapeutic way.” She also loves tackling emotions that unnerve the rest of us. Of pitching ideas to Vicky Jones and another close collaborator, Jenny Robins: “They say, ‘That’s heartbreaking. She can’t do that!’ Then I’m like, ‘Excellent! If it’s upset you guys that much, that’s the one.’ ”

Jodie Comer saw traces of Waller-Bridge in her own Killing Eve character, Villanelle—not the ruthless hired assassin bit but the fearlessness. “Phoebe would always encourage me to take a risk or try something that was more unexpected,” she says. “There is that element in Villanelle of saying exactly what she feels. And I think that’s the beauty of Phoebe’s work and what brings so many of us together in admiration of what she does. She says things that a lot of us don’t dare to say out loud or would be embarrassed to admit.”

Once she achieved household name status, Waller-Bridge felt like there were expectations being slung over her shoulders as a feminist role model. “You’re supposed to represent something now,” she says. “You’re someone whose voice is important, and you’ve got to be careful now. All that kind of stuff. And it’s a bit like: Fuck, how did I get back here?” She is smiling, but it’s clear that she’s serious. “It’s at that point that it’s most important to be the most rebellious that you’ve ever been. So that’s what I’m working on.”

I ask if she feels pressure to give fans—and executives—what they want. She concedes that she wants to do right by Amazon, who “took a punt” on her, but then recalls times when students ask her what she’d tell her 20-something self, knowing what she knows now.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she gasps. “I would be asking her to tell me everything! Remind me, remind me. And she’d say: Fuck ’em all. Get out there and burn shit down.”

As we wind through the streets of London, a man hails Waller-Bridge. “Really, really, really sorry to bother you,” he says sheepishly. “I know, you must hate all of this stuff. Just want to say, massive fan of Fleabag.” He’s a software engineer, he tells her. “Just want to say, you’re incredible. And your show is really, really awesome. You wrote it and you’re in it and it’s really funny.” He finally gets around to asking for a selfie, and we move on.

“The funny thing about Fleabag fans is they are so apologetic,” Waller-Bridge tells me as we set off again. “Gentle, gentle people. I think when you write a show about love, people come to you with love.” Earlier, at the pub, a newly married couple also asked Waller-Bridge to pose with them as their wedding party looked on.

When she’s recognized a third time and someone shouts out to her on the street, Waller-Bridge looks mortified. “My friend thinks that maybe I am still stuck in that moment pre–all this madness, because I still have no real awareness of how recognizable I am now. I think maybe it’s a kind of thing that I’ve done subconsciously on purpose, because I’m not going to hide out. But I’m always surprised!”

I saw Waller-Bridge at this year’s Oscars, carousing in the lobby bar with cinema cool kids like Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley, and Sarah Polley, as well as her longtime boyfriend, Martin McDonagh, who’d been nominated for directing The Banshees of Inisherin. But she insists, credibly, that fame still feels odd to her. “All these other kinds of doors open where you’re suddenly allowed to email someone that you admire and be like, ‘I really admire you.’ ”

Who is on her list? “I’ve always wanted to email Charlie Kaufman. I love his movies so much. But then I’m embarrassed to write. It’s like: Hey, I’m a software engineer and I really admire you.”

Talking to Waller-Bridge is like sitting by a nice fire, all warmth and sparkle. I’m hesitant to approach the topic of McDonagh, a relationship she closely guards, but I’m curious how their partnership works and whether they read each other’s work.

“We don’t really share anything beforehand,” she says. Because criticism would be demoralizing? “Probably a bit of that. And also, I just really, really fancy him. So if you show someone something, and you fancy them, it can become this blur.” Having admired his work long before she met him, Waller-Bridge of course wants him to admire her work as well. “It’s really useful being with someone who I think is a genius, it just ups your game,” she says with a grin. “I would always have wanted Martin McDonagh to think of my work as good, whether I was with him or not. I find out now, either way!”

We finally arrive at our destination—a narrow sliver of a café with the most extravagantly gooey cheese toasties (a.k.a. grilled cheese sandwiches). We end up trading breast-related stories, because that seems like a thing you should do when you’re hanging out with Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

“The boob conversation, we’re in it! We’re having it,” she announces gleefully as customers at a nearby table make their exit.

Breast references pop up in a lot of her writing, and Waller-Bridge says it became a heated topic in the Tomb Raider writers room. Should Lara Croft have an athletic build or the canonically busty figure? “She’s a tomb raider, so she’s incredibly fit,” she says. “She has to squeeze through tiny rock crevices all the time. It is a different experience squeezing through a small rock crevice when you have larger boobs than if you have smaller boobs.”

We talk a bit about the ongoing attacks on women’s bodily autonomy, and I ask if she ever feels tempted to address cultural politics directly in her work. “There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re being lectured when you were promised a party,” she says. “There are lots of shows out there that don’t hide the lesson that they’re trying to teach us. And they get boring quite quickly.”

Before the writers strike, Waller-Bridge told me that she dubbed 2023 “the year I’m doing everything.” In addition to Tomb Raider, she has been developing some other series, including Sign Here, a black comedy based on a novel by Claudia Lux, and hoping to get back to work on a play. I mention a recent tabloid rumor that her name’s been in the running to direct the next Bond movie. “My mum sent me that rumor too,” she says with a cackle, denying it with a flourish and pointing out that she’s only ever directed a single music video. “So the obvious leap is James Bond,” she jokes. That music video (for Phoebe Bridgers’s song “Savior Complex”) starred Mescal and a Chihuahua named Charlotte that Waller-Bridge extravagantly describes as “stoic and beautiful” and “the Lauren Bacall of dogs.” She has an idea for a project revolving around Charlotte, who was her iPhone screen saver until she recently changed phones. “ ‘Be more Charlotte’ was my mantra for a while.”

Charlotte’s star turn may have to wait, given all the options arrayed before Waller-Bridge at the moment. “I would give anything to have Phoebe write a film,” says Lucasfilm’s Kennedy. “Whenever I’m talking to her, she’s deep into commitments with current deals, but I would bring her on to write a movie tomorrow.” She marvels at Waller-Bridge’s gut instincts: “There’s just an underlying confidence in the way she makes decisions about herself and her career. She has this insatiable desire to do it all, but you never get the feeling that it’s stressing her out. That’s the amazing thing. She’s just doing it with joy, and that’s very, very contagious.”

Speaking about Waller-Bridge’s gifts as a storyteller, Scott compares her to the host of a dinner party who leads guests gently through the evening: “Her hands are on the smalls of their back and it feels like, ‘Okay, this is my party, and I want to make sure you have fun, so let me introduce you, first of all, to the bar. And here’s a handsome stranger….’ Audiences love to gasp and they like truth as well. And I think Phoebe’s able to juggle all those things because of her enormous brain, but also because of her enormous heart.” He pauses. “I’ve just found her to be incredibly thoughtful and fun—and just good at life. She’s good at life!”

The morning after our interview, I settle down in my hotel room to replay the conversation and discover that Waller-Bridge—ever the playwright and prankster—recorded a secret message for me while I was in the pub bathroom, struggling with my jumpsuit.

“I want you to know that I was really tempted after you went to the loo to hide somewhere in the garden and make you find me. But then I’d have to leave all of our belongings, so I was a responsible adult. Just so you know: It nearly happened.”

Hair by Gareth Bromell; Makeup by Lucia Pica; Manicure by Pebbles Aikens; Tailor, Michelle Warner; Set design by Phoebe Shakespeare. Produced on location by Partner Films at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, the Wallace Collection’s Great Gallery, and St. John’s Lodge Gardens at Regent’s Park. For details, go to vf.com/credits.