INTERVIEW:You want to tell Amy Huberman to slow down and stop making the rest of us slobs look bad, but there's no point – the woman just can't help staying on top of things, writes TARA BRADY
AMY HUBERMAN'S TOTEM animal must be a hummingbird. Dainty and wee – you saw the waistline on the wedding dress, right? – there's a constant fluttering urgency about the Nation's Official Sweetheart. Today, in a characteristically Huberman-esque whirl of activity, she's packing for a business trip to LA, promoting the new Irish movie Stella Days, gearing up for rewrites on her latest book, looking at scripts for series two of Threesomeand, oh, isn't there a husband somewhere? "I don't know how I'm going to fit it all in," she laughs. "It's mad."
Within days word filters through that La Huberman has indeed landed the female lead in Animal Kingdom, a new sitcom from NBC, the TV people behind Friends. It was her first US audition. Typical.
You want to tell her to slow down and stop making the rest of us slobs look bad but there’s no point. The woman just can’t help staying on top of things. Famously sensible and good-humoured – though we have seen her stretch to very “unsensible” shoes – she’s like the fun-loving head girl you would have happily taken orders from at school.
“You think?” she demurs. “No, no, no. I was good at school. But I did spend a lot of time faffing. I’d organise my stationery and get nothing else done. But the stationery was impeccable. I’m one of those. When I have a deadline I get a bit less precious and start moving. But even now when I’m supposed to be writing I’ll end up cleaning the house and putting seven washes on instead. Oh, and I might as well do some online shopping while I’m here. That sort of thing.”
The 32-year-old author is already deep into editing I Wished For You, a new romantic novel about a Cinderella stylist and a retired Hollywood wardrobe mistress who steps up as life coach and fairy godmother. The book, Amy's companion to the bestselling Hello, Heartbreak, is scheduled for a summer release in Penguin paperback.
The ignorance of the first-time novelist, she recalls wistfully, is bliss, indeed. “For the first book I didn’t research anything,” she says. “I had written – I had overwritten – a hideously long first draft before I went to a publisher. This time I’ve been working with the same editor since the beginning so she’s watched it evolve and there’s a lot less waffle to cut out. In theory anyway.”
You forget, until she starts rattling off anecdotes about Edith Head – Paramount Pictures’ indomitable, eight-time Oscar winning costume designer between 1924 and 1967 – that Ms Huberman has a tidy string of letters after her name, including a masters degree from UCD.
What’s this? Are we drifting back toward academia? “Not forever. But I did love using my academic muscles again. And it’s such an amazing subject. When you think about the films Edith Head worked on and the people she dressed (Ginger Rogers, Natalie Wood, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, to name but a few) you realise how hugely important her work was to the business of storytelling. Her work is something that lasts longer than the dialogue or plot. It’s how you come to remember the films she worked on.”
Additional historical archive materials were supplied – though not necessarily incorporated into the current draft – by her yarn-spinning Stella Days co-star, Martin Sheen.
“All his acting and career aside, he is just a very special man,” gushes Huberman. “He is incredibly intelligent. Loves his stories. You can tell he’s Irish. He is so affable; very much a people person. He talks to everybody on set. He ignores nobody. He will happily seek out and sit down with anyone. We were chatting about writing – Stephen Rea was there too, who is amazing fun, and Martin said: ‘You’re a writer?’ So for the next few weeks he’d be telling stories about completely arbitrary things – about some tailor in New York or a pair of trousers – and he’d keep saying: ‘You should put it in the book’.”
Stella Daysis a proudly old-school Irish drama, calculated to make the viewer think "they don't make them like that anymore". Set in the draconian Ireland of the 1950s, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's drama features Martin Sheen as a progressive parish priest torn between his love of movies and professional duties. He wants to build a cinema but the bishop has his heart set on a new, modernist church. Meanwhile, small-town busybodies rail against foreign celluloid "filth".
In common with Albert Nobbs, the incoming Glenn Close vehicle, it’s a non-voguish film that probably wouldn’t exist without a foreign A-listed benefactor.
“It maybe takes another voice to come in and shine a light on these things,” she nods. “And there’s a link there because Martin’s mother is from Ireland and he is a religious man. So he didn’t feel like a fraud coming in and telling that story. And it shows.” Huberman was recently nominated for an IFTA for her own Stella Days performance as an ESB demo cook.
“Cookers were big news back then,” she laughs. “People were still a bit wary of them in a newly-electrified country. They really did get priests in to bless them. There is a photo that the continuity girl took of me cooking scones. My mother thought she’d died and gone to heaven.Me, making scones?”
So the captain of the nation’s rugby team isn’t getting freshly baked scones at home? “No, I’m afraid. I can do the basics. And I used to love playing with my Easy Bake oven. But sitting down and cooking for three hours is not really a goer.”
Today, she hasn’t required quite the same prep time as she did for her hugely Googled night on the red carpet at this year’s Iftas in that faux-vintage gown. “I probably ended up doing more fittings than I did for my wedding dress,” she admits. “I love that side of it. But it’s so time consuming. Especially when you have to be there for 5pm or 6pm. But look, if it’s a proper red carpet thing, you have to put the time in.” She laughs. “And now I’ve no idea where I’ll ever get to wear that dress again.” Think fast.
Another month, another nomination: this time for her role as Alice in Comedy Central’s Threesome. Come May, Huberman will face-off Tina Fey and Academy Award nominee Melissa McCarthy in the Best Comedy Actress Category at the Glamour Awards.
“It’s almost embarrassing,” says the Cabinteely contender. “I couldn’t concentrate on anything for the rest of the day when I heard. Nothing.”
Threesomeis an unlikely success story. Though tucked away in satellite schedules, the seven-part Comedy Central series is now distributed on iTunes by BBC Worldwide and has just been re-commissioned for a second season.
"It's funny being an actor," she says. "You never know how these things are going to go. It did so well considering none of us are known and it's playing alongside Two And A Half Men. We don't have an Ashton Kutcher in there. So it could have been completely overlooked. But the writer Tom MacRae is a hugely talented guy who really thinks outside the box. And the show hits the right note. Often these projects can take a while to get momentum. But it's really taken off."
The Glamour nod – not to mention the NBC gig – is, perhaps, a comfort to us indigenous Amy stalkers. It’s not just us, right? There is something about Amy Huberman, something that made her a cover star long before Brian O’Driscoll came a’ courting. The Wag status has rarely worked in favour of a woman’s career or earned her popularity among the sisterhood but somehow, nobody holds it against Amy Huberman. Indeed, try as you might, you will eventually find yourself fondly referring to the former Loreto College girl as “Hubes”.
We know better than to ask her about the phenomenology of Amy Huberman. She'd laugh us out of Dublin for the trouble. When she talks about fellow Irish celebrities there's no trace of Celebrity Islandabout it. Stephen Rea is just "bloody hilarious" and Chris O'Dowd is just a guy who used to "crash on the couch when we were at DramSoc in UCD".
And yet she is royalty. Even the English aristocracy knows and recognises as much. It was, after all, Amy Huberman who represented Ireland in the pews at last year’s wedding of Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton.
Come on, then. We’ve seen her play a duplicitous brunette in Rewind, so we know she can stretch beyond the Ireland’s Little Miss Sunshine tag. Dirt-dishing, please.
“All I can say is, fair play to Kate Middleton,” says Amy.
“It was so generous of her to let Pippa look that glamorous. I’d have been looking at peach fabrics for the bridesmaids. Actually, if somebody came to my wedding dressed like that, I would shoot them.”
Oh, Hubes. No you wouldn’t.
