‘A list of my failures? I did do a film with Woody Allen’

As Lucy Punch finally takes the lead, in Amandaland’, she tells Hannah Ewens how blind optimism serves her in an uncertain job, and why real-life motherland needs magic

- Hannah Ewens

Lucy Punch thinks she lacks a lot of mothering skills. But there is one area, the comic actor concedes, where she truly thrives: in making every day fun and silly for her two sons, aged seven and three. Even after wildfires came dangerously close to her house in Los Angeles, where she lives with the boys and her mystery husband (Punch, I discover, is very private), she managed to keep the children entertained.

Returning home after being evacuated, one of them acted as though he’d been on holiday because he’d had such a brilliant time. “Meanwhile, we’d been looking at our phones, going ‘Fucking hell, help,’ and crying,” the 47-year-old says, her elastic features miming her hysteria, hunching over an imaginary iPhone. “It’s such a small window when you’re a kid, so I’m just trying to make it magical until they’re confronted with teenagerdom and the reality of life.”

That Punch is now synonymous with motherhood has almost everything to do with a hit BBC One comedy, in which she starred as the blow-dried alpha mum of the playground, the devil in a Land Rover. In Motherland, which ran for three seasons and two Christmas specials until 2022, her character Amanda was the person viewers loved to hate, whether she was whipping her battalion of fellow mummies into shape, or using any opportunity to put down the beta parents.

When she’s not playing the school run’s pretentious elitist, Punch is usually on screen being sneaky and faintly evil. Think of her doomed thesp in Hot Fuzz, or the passive-aggressive thorn in Cameron Diaz’s side in Bad Teacher. But now, for the first time, she has a well-deserved starring role, in her character Amanda’s very own spin-off, Amandaland.