Emily Head: The Inbetweeners actress on the men in her life (including her famous father)

Thanks to a starring role in the hit TV sitcom The Inbetweeners and its big-screen finale, Emily Head has had a great start to her career – and it’s not, she tells Stuart Husband, because of her famous (embarrassing) father. Here she explains why she’s ready to leave sixth form behind

'The Inbetweeners is so loved because it is true to life. It's been four great years of my life,' says Emily

Emily Head breezes into a South London studio clutching a bottle of Diet Coke, dumps her bag, and blows a blonde wisp out of her eyes. ‘Just been to an audition,’ she says, nodding at her smart attire – polka-dot blouse, black skirt, redoubtable heels.
It’s the kind of outfit that would set off feverish adolescent fantasies in The Inbetweeners, the E4 sitcom in which Emily stars. The show follows the clammy fortunes of a quartet of suburban teenage boys as they negotiate friendships, females and growing pains in a no-holds-barred fashion that’s made it a huge cult hit. According to one critic, the show has ‘captured the pathetic sixth-form male experience quite splendidly’. Emily plays Carli, object of an unrequited crush on the part of Simon (Joe Thomas), one of the quartet, which may or may not be resolved in The Inbetweeners Movie, due for release next month.
The Inbetweeners has made stars out of all its young cast, but Emily, 22, hails from acting royalty: her father, Anthony Head, was the smoothie in the Gold Blend ads and has starred as Rupert Giles in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and as the Prime Minister – the object of a serious crush himself – in Little Britain. That’s what you might call a head start. And, as she discusses life before and after The Inbetweeners, it quickly becomes apparent that, unlike the hapless kids in the series, Emily has a pretty wise head on her shoulders. 
If anyone had told us four years ago that we’d be doing a movie version of The Inbetweeners, we’d have laughed in their face. But I guess the show is so loved because it’s true to life. In some ways, it’s the anti-Skins [the E4 series where all the sixth-formers are cool and good-looking]; this is what the teenage experience is really like, in all its messy, fumbling, clueless chaos. But the biggest surprise is that parents enjoy it as much as their kids, and they watch it together. I guess everyone remembers being at school, and they can identify with one or another of the characters and their problems and longings and highs and lows. We’ve all been there. I think some people still are… That’s a chilling thought!
The show’s been so much fun to do. I’m really going to miss it now it’s finished – well, we’re guessing it’s finished. Nothing’s set in stone but the film kind of ties everything up neatly, and we can’t all be stuck in the sixth form when we’re getting into our mid-to-late 20s. But it’s been four great years of my life. I love everyone on the show – the boys are like my brothers – and I’m already feeling bereft. A lot of actors have big embarrassments on their CV, but this is something we can look back on and be proud of.

From left: Emily with her fellow Inbetweeners at the British Comedy Awards earlier this year; taking part in a fashion show (far right) in the TV series

From left: With Joe Thomas as Simon in The Inbetweeners Movie; Emily’s father Anthony (left) as prime minister with David Walliams in Little Britain

The Simon-Carli unrequited crush thing has been great fun to play. I think every group of friends has that situation where there’s an attraction that unbalances the group dynamic, and everyone else is, like, ‘Just figure it out.’ A lot of people think Carli is a complete bitch but I don’t think so – I have to like her, or I couldn’t play her. It’s simply that she’s exasperated because Simon is such an idiot around her. She never sees the sweet, lovelorn side of him – she just sees him throwing up over her brother, or trying to woo her in urine-soaked shoes.
We’ve tried to hang out off-set. For most of us, this was the first major job we’d done, so we all felt it intensely. A couple of us had acted before, but most hadn’t, and we’ve all come out of the other side together. So we try to make it to each other’s birthdays, though we don’t see as much of each other as we hoped we would. Life gets in the way. We’ve tried the Inbetweeners reunion thing a few times, and Blake Harrison (who plays Neil) and I are the only ones who’ve turned up to every single one. In fact, there was one reunion where it was just the two of us and a couple of our friends who were nothing to do with the show. Commitment levels have varied.
The one life lesson the show really nails? Boys are dweebs and girls run rings round them. It’s true. Girls mature much earlier than boys and that’s when it all gets a bit witchy, because they’re aware of their power over them, and it’s all about how they exercise that. Do they play dumb or do they wield it for all it’s worth? At my school, there was a group of 11 of us that were really close friends. We were considered the popular girls, but we weren’t cliquey – at least, I hope we weren’t cliquey. And the guys we were friends with were the same. I was never the subject of an intense Simon-style crush, but, of course, there were hormones flying back and forth, and sometimes crushes were reciprocated and sometimes they weren’t. But no borderline stalkers, no.
It was inevitable that I’d be an actress. I don’t ever remember not wanting to be one. I was always a bit of a performer. When I was five, I told my sister’s godmother that I had a secret – I wanted to be an actress. She said, ‘Darling, that’s never been a secret.’ I used to put on plays and even make the programmes and tickets. I found one of those old programmes a while ago, and I was the usher, props person, director, writer, lead role, lead role’s mother, all the parts virtually, except the dog, which was played by Daisy, my sister – who’s also an actress now.

‘My parents could never be as mortified by me as I’ve been by them,’ says Emily

My mum is the only one in the family who doesn’t act. She’s an animal behaviourist. She does something called the Tellington Touch, which is a way of finding tensions in animals that make them behave in a certain way. A dog that is agitated and barks a lot probably has very tense hindquarters, so there’s a series of movements you can do to alleviate that. Mum’s written books about how to look at animal behaviour; you can study the way the ears are set and coat patterns – apparently, a new swirl in a coat means the skin has constricted with tension – to detect the root of the problem and how to treat it. She fosters puppies with behavioural problems and runs training courses. We grew up with a bunch of rescue dogs and even rescue rabbits roaming the house. We moved from London when I was four to a ten-acre spread just outside Bath, so I had a great, outdoorsy, pony-riding childhood.
My dad never tried to talk me out of acting. But he did mention to my mum that he didn’t want my sister and me to get heavily into it at too young an age – he thought all the disappointment and rejection would be too crushing for us. I eventually did a BTec in acting at the Brit School in lieu of A-levels – the singer Katy B was in my year, and Adele was in the year above me, though I didn’t know her – but I’d actually had an agent since I was about 13. I did a few plays early on, then focused on GCSEs (at my mum’s insistence) and did my first TV show at 16 – a Lynda La Plante drama where my sister and I played the daughters of a serial killer. It all felt perfectly natural to me. I’d grown up hanging around the Buffy set, which was really cool. The cast loved having me and Daisy around. At least, they said they did.
I’ve acted with my dad a couple of times, but I don’t think his name has either helped or hindered my career. I’ve never wanted to mention his name, because I never want to feel I’ve got where I am because of him. There were a couple of snarky remarks at school when I was just starting out, but I feel like I can more than hold my own now. Actually, when I was cast as my dad’s daughter in a film called The Invisibles, they didn’t know that I was his daughter – the names were left off the audition tapes. So nepotism played no part there.

‘Has my dad ever embarrassed me? Hello? The studded leather posing pouch he wore as the Prime Minister in that Little Britain sketch? Now, I loved the show, and it was so cool for him to be in it, but I was actually in the studio aud

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