Those sweetie darlings—the appallingly self-centered, hard-partying PR maven Edina "Eddy" Monsoon ( played by Jennifer Saunders ) and her constant gal pal, the blonde beehived man-trapping, chain-smoking sometime fashion editor Patsy ( played by Joanna Lumley )—are back.
These iconic characters, first seen in the hit Britcom Absolutely Fabulous that Saunders created and wrote, were sensations on both sides of the Atlantic from the get-go. Beloved from the start by the gay community, AbFab mania reached a fever pitch in the early '90s, when the show was at its height. Although the pair have been occasionally glimpsed in the ensuing years, not much has been heard from Pats and Eddy since the mid-'90s.
All that is about to change with the impending release of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie. Saunders and Lumley are most definitely back—as are the rest of the show's familiar characters, along with a batch of new ones—and are as over-the-top as ever.
Saunders again took on writing chores in addition to playing Eddy while Lumley, who makes 70 look enviable, hams it up as the nasty but delightful Patsy. The wacky plot revolves around this horrifically funny duo fleeing to France after Eddy accidentally knocks super model Kate Moss off a balcony and into the Thames.
Windy City Times participated in a teleconference with the two stars from their home base in London during Pride weekend.
Q: Happy Gay Pride from Chicago, ladies.
Jennifer Saunders: Thank you.
Joanna Lumley: Oh, we love Chicago.
Q: Joanna, you announced recently that Patsy has gone transgender. Will Edina be far behind?
JS: She's always far behind.
JL: Patsy's been a man before. Patsy was a man in series two. We had a flashback to the '60s, [when] she had a mustache and was dressed in a Sgt. Pepper coat to be like a Beatle.
JL: This time she didn't bother to go the whole hog and take the hormones and have something stitched on. Through her experience, she's knows that they drop off after a year, so this time she just glued a mustache on and put her hair back and thought she could probably get away with it. After all, she's only trying to attract a 90-year-old person who can't see.
Q: I'm still a little bit confused about Patsy's gender, so I—
JL: You're confused?
Q: Patsy does some very mild cross-dressing in the movie, and it's hinted she was once a man. I was wondering: Is she a transgender person who was born male and transitioned to female? If so, was that always the intention, or is that a recent thing in the movie?
JL: Patsy was born a girl and was a woman, but she took some hormones in the '60s because she fancied being a man, and then went down with Edina, her best friend, to Morocco and had a very poor operation, and it withered away and dropped off after a year.
So, she stopped taking the hormones, shaved a bit and went back to being a woman. She was a man again.
JS: It's always been just something to play within the kind of Euro-trash idea, too, I think.
JL: She thinks by combing her hair back and putting on a very bad false mustache. And [she] keeps the mustache on even when she's blatantly wearing women's clothing. I don't think they care. That's the truth. As it turns out, nor does the woman that she's marrying.
JS: I think it's about it doesn't matter. Be who you can be and want to be.
Q: I loved all the celeb cameos in the film. Was there somebody you wanted who you didn't get—Anna Wintour, perhaps, or Kate Bush?
JS: No. I mean, to be honest, no because you always end up with the people who are available on the day and who you love and who you know and who are easygoing and happy. I don't think we ever—we just said, "Look, we're having a party. Will you come and be in it?" Lots of people turned up and were incredibly generous.
Q: How do you update the characters from the end of the series to the movie? Does the time—
JS: Well, we just get older. It so happens. Edina gets older and fatter, and actually Patsy doesn't change at all. She's just sort of embalmed and remains exactly the same.
Q: You have an exciting low-speed chase in the film. Jennifer, you have to exercise from your front door to your car door and Joanna, you have to grab a cigarette from the mouth of a man in the caf��© as you pass by. Can you talk about the difficulty of doing your stunts in your fabulous frocks?
JL: We insisted on doing our own stunts. Obviously, it's a reach from a car traveling at almost three miles an hour to take a cigarette off a completely supine man. It was a bit challenging. I managed it. Jennifer, would you like to add something about how you managed to get on the scooter to go—
JS: Yes. I'd never been on a scooter before, and they wouldn't let me wear a helmet. I was very, very brave. It's almost the most exercise I've ever done.
Q: Do you want to talk about your costumes, though?
JS: Patsy, cool as ever. Edina, well…
JL: Well, Edina is always over-ambitious, should we say, with her costume. She always thinks she's going to be really thin by tomorrow and never is so is squeezed into some appalling outfits.
Q: She looks fabulous
JS: Thank you. Thank you.
Q: I want to know. How did this current move toward political correctness in pop culture affect your writing of the screenplay?
JS: Quite a bit, to be honest, only because people are much more ready to be offended these days. Also, if you write a movie, you have a raft of lawyers telling you who you can offend and who you can't offend, and who's going to sue you and who won't. So, it was quite an issue, I have to say.
Q: I'd like to know which celebrity you would like to kill in real life.
JS: I would never kill anyone, but I'd quite like to slap Donald Trump.
Q: So, Ab Fab is unique in a lot of ways for me because it was a show about women, written by women. Has the environment changed very much for women as far as the television world goes?
JS: I don't think it has, actually. It makes me a bit sad that, if anything, that people seem to want to go back to an old model of normality, and sitcoms seem to want to be about ordinary families and things that aren't very interesting. I just think it's a bit sad. It's a shame that life is still depicted in a very straight way, I think.
Q: Yes, it is interesting to me. It's one of the other things that I always find so striking about the show, too, is you involved gay characters and trans characters and a broad cross-section back when it wasn't really that PC to do it. So, thank you for that.
JS: Oh, it's been our pleasure, actually. We owe the gay community a huge deal, too, because they've helped make the show popular, and we love having them as fans.
Q: Your gay fans have always adored both of you. I was just wondering why each of you think you've connected so deeply with the LGBT community because you have.
JL: I think, from Patsy's point of view, she's very easy to copy if you're a boy and want to dress up as Patsy because Patsy's quite tall. You just want to get your good, yellow wig on. Lots of lovely, red lips. Most men have very good legs—much better than mine—so men's beautiful legs showing in good stockings. Nice pair a high heels. Glass of champers. Cigarette on the go. Dark shades on. You're there.
JS: I think as far as the characters go, they live for each other, and they live a life they don't apologize for. They don't need men. They don't need a relationship in order to have fun and get on in the world.
Q: All the drugs and the drinking and the facial injections and all of that really resonated with the hard-partying, 1990s gay male crowd, many of whom have toned it down in the meantime. I was wondering whether you were concerned at all, when writing this, if that wouldn't resonate with today's LGBT crowd.
JS: Do you know, when you write it, I write it to amuse Joanna, really. I think if you wrote it with too many people, too many audiences in mind, you'd die of the pressure. I just basically write what I think will be funny, and what I wanted is if people could see this film, and not have known the series and still enjoy it, but that it would also satisfy people that knew the series extremely well.
Q: I want to know if you guys are friends outside the movie.
JS: We are friends. We're very good friends.
JL: We've known each other now for 25 years, and we know each other very well.
Q: Do you think there's going to be a sequel?
JS: Well, Joanna keeps telling me there's going to be a sequel, so there's going to be a sequel. [Laughs]
www.foxsearchlight.com/absolutelyfabulous/ .
