Anna Friel of ABC’s “Pushing Daisies” was a teen star in a U.K. soap called “Brookside.” Her character, Beth, murdered her father, fell in love with another woman and died in prison — off-screen (Friel said she was done with the show, and the producers wrote her out unceremoniously).
After 13 years of little to no decent work, Friel feared “Brookside” doomed her career. Until, that is, she read for Charlotte “Chuck” Charles, the undead pixie in “Daisies.”
Sadly, “Pushing Daises” won’t return until fall, but selected episodes can be seen on www.abc
.com.
Here are three things we learned about her in the U.K. edition of Esquire:
•She loves that her character Chuck can’t touch her love, the Piemaker Ned, played by Lee Pace: “It’s fantastically tantalizing. It’s the longest foreplay in history. I think it goes back to those black-and-white movies of the Forties where you would watch the entire film and be happy with just a kiss at the end of it.”
•She has twice needed medical attention for breakdowns she attributes to stress and overwork: “I’m just a worrier. If 10 great things happen and one negative, I concentrate on the negative.”
•Director Barry Sonnenfeld helped her regain confidence lost in the years between “Brookside” and “Daisies”: “He’d just go, ‘Anna, you’re adorable.’ And if you hear that enough times, you start to believe it.”
