Fleabag: Olivia Colman asked Phoebe Waller-Bridge to make her character 'a total ****'

'I always wanted to play the baddie and she’s written a really good one,' actor says

Olivia Colman has said she begged Phoebe Waller-Bridge to make her Fleabag character as awful as possible.

The Oscar-winning actor revealed she was overjoyed to be a part of the show, but wanted to use the opportunity to play a villain for a change.

“I think I begged Phoebe to be in it, when she was writing the first [season],” Colman told Entertainment Weekly.

“I will be eternally grateful to Phoebe, because she said, ‘What sort of things do you want to say?’ And I went, ‘Could you write me someone who’s a total [spells out a four-letter expletive]?’ So she made up this person for me.”

Waller-Bridge went on to cast Colman as the new love interest of her widowed father, with whom she has a fraught relationship.

“I always wanted to play the baddie and she’s written a really good one,” Colman added.

The British star, who will play the Queen in the third season of Netflix’s The Crown, also revealed she had asked Waller-Bridge for a role in Bond 25; the Fleabag creator has helped out with the film’s script.

It comes after it was announced Colman was to play a “femme fatale” in a future episode of The Simpsons.

The Crown will return to Netflix in November.