Meeting actor and comedian Lolly Adefope—who was born in South London and now lives in Peckham—for an interview at the London West Hollywood in Los Angeles feels almost too on the nose. We take a seat in a hotel bar so plush and well-appointed that I momentarily regret wearing shorts. Luckily, Adefope is wearing shorts too, along with a T-shirt, a green baseball cap and a pair of Simone Rocha ballerina sneakers. I feel compelled to point out the “British Lady” cocktail, a gin-lemon-and-ginger concoction that Adefope smiles at before ordering a far more demure oat-based coffee.
Adefope is in LA to do press for Jon Brown’s new satirical comedy The Franchise, which follows a film crew working on the kind of big-budget superhero film that reliably sells out theaters and gets women harassed. Veep creator Armando Iannucci is executive-producing the series, and it shows in the rat-a-tat-tat pace of the dialogue and the density of jokes. Adefope plays Dag, a new on-set hire whose relative lowness on the storied Hollywood-production totem pole doesn’t dissuade her from chatting cheerfully with everyone she meets, including A-list stars and executives who are clearly unused to seeing assistants as anything other than a kind of three-dimensional wallpaper.
Adefope has been acting since 2015, but a previous role as an intern for a comedy production company helped her relate to Dag, she says. “I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll be behind the camera!’ And then I was just sort of…not great. It’s easier to be in front of the camera.” While that is almost certainly not the case for most of us, Adefope has a gift for making it look easy. Her role as Fran on the Aidy Bryant–led Hulu series Shrill led to some of the best one-liners in recent TV memory. (“I don’t apologize to white people,” Fran flatly tells Bryant’s onscreen boyfriend at one point.) It also provided a too-rare onscreen example of a Black, queer, female character who’s comfortable in her own skin—or comfortable enough to smoke a bowl and do solo karaoke in front of strangers, anyway. Fran is the character that Adefope is most often recognized for, she tells me, and she’s still in close touch with Bryant: “Having that connection with Aidy really made doing press feel less overwhelming.”
“I think I brought along my own disbelief that people get treated so differently on sets,” Adefope said of her Franchise character: “I like that Dag is like, ‘I’m going to treat everyone exactly the same,’ which is how it should be.” Like many in Hollywood, Adefope has seen an industry-wide slump since last year’s successful WGA and SAG strikes, and she’s cognizant of the ways the business has changed and (perhaps more crucially) the ways it hasn’t. “Bad behavior might be pulled back a bit, but the hierarchy is so fixed that trying to mess with it doesn’t always work,” says Adefope as we sip our coffees. “I’m hopeful about representation, but AI just makes me feel so hopeless.” (Shortly before Adefope and I met, California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed an AI safety bill that had received the backing of many in the entertainment world, including Hollywood labor icon than Jane Fonda.)