2024-01-22 11:15:17
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- Author, Alejandro Millán Valencia
- Role, @HayFestivalCartagena
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1 hour
Ruby Wax has not one, but many stellar careers. And in all of them it has been widely recognized and awarded.
So much so that in 2015, Queen Elizabeth II made her an Honorary Officer of the British Empire – one of the highest honors bestowed by the British Crown on its citizens – for her contribution to comedy and acting, and her services in raising awareness of the importance of mental health.
Born in the United States, Wax moved to the United Kingdom in the 1970s, where she studied drama and became famous for her hilarious monologues about her family and her talk shows “Ruby” and “The Full Wax,” where she interviewed personalities from the likes of Madonna, Pamela Anderson and former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos.
But as she says, “her baby” has been her work to bring to light and speak clearly about the depression and bipolarity that she herself has suffered, and other mental illnesses.
And she has done it as a professor at the University of Surrey, through several books – many of them bestsellers – and shows seen by thousands of people.
In his latest book, “I’Not As Well As I Thought I Was,” he talks about his time in a psychiatric clinic and various treatments he underwent to restore his mental health.
Wax, who is one of the guests at the Hay Festival Cartagena 2024, spoke with BBC Mundo about her multifaceted life, fame and the agony of psychological pain.
You say that your career as a comedian begins when you realize that you can make Alan Rickman (the actor who played Professor Snape in the Harry Potter saga) smile. What is that story like?
I met Alan at the Royal Shakespeare Company, after spending three years at the Glasgow Academy of Dramatic Arts (Scotland), dedicated among other things to working on my British accent.
When he started giving me the first advice as an actress, something very interesting happened: I realized that if I told him something about my personal life – nothing to do with acting – I would get a couple of smiles from him.
He was always a very serious man, it was very difficult to make him laugh; So a laugh was like winning a prize.
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Alan Rickman, who died in 2016, had an extensive career in theater and film. In addition to Harry Potter he appeared in films such as “Love Actually” and “Die Hard.”
Alan was the one who told me that I had to try to write the same way I talked to him about personal topics, and most of the time I talked to him about my family.
The most surprising thing was that he told me that when he had that written, he was going to direct me on stage.
This is how I began my first monologues as a comedian, and a partnership began that lasted more than 30 years: he directed each of my works.
And always, when I finished with one, he told me that it was the last one. But somehow I convinced him to direct me again.
What was it about your family that made you laugh so much?
When Alan met my family and realized they were so dysfunctional, he understood that nothing was made up, that every sentence they uttered was so perfectly nonsensical that they needed no editing.
To put it mildly, my family is pretty crazy, which makes them a great source of inspiration for my work material.
But, at the same time, that has its problems, because I was raised in it.
So, what I have been doing all these years is, let’s say, looking for a way to escape from that dysfunctionality, and I have done it not only with my work on television and in the theater, but also through my books on mental health.
I think it’s something I understood when I wrote my first book and I showed it to Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia in “Star Wars”), and she told me to leave only what was about my family, to get everything out. the rest.
In your career you have been very honest and vocal with topics that are not always discussed openly, such as mental health, sexism on television, age discrimination…
I would say that I have done a large part of my career as an act of revenge against the people who told me that I was not going to be anyone in life.
That was my path: prove them wrong.
It’s something that we all do in some way, and I was told that many times, by many people. My parents thought my aspirations as an actress were pathetic.
I’m not a brilliant woman, but I pushed to be directed by Alan, to get into the Royal Shakespeare Company, to get into television, to do my plays.
For all that I had to push a lot. And that was what drove me.
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Ruby Wax is one of the United Kingdom’s most recognized comedians and actresses.
And does that idea of revenge that leads you to theater or television also lead you to work with mental health issues?
It’s not exactly the same.
I have always been interested in the people I talk to.
One of the things about my talk show was that I spent about ten days with the characters before interviewing them.
So I established a relationship with them.
When the BBC took me off my show, I continued to be interested in people but from a different perspective. I invented myself again.
Since I had studied psychology in Berkeley (California), and I had a mental health crisis, I realized that I could do more through mindfulness, but above all I dedicated myself to understanding what happens to the brain when it collapses or when it experiences adverse situations, like a crisis.
At that time the subject was not talked about as much and sometimes it could be confused with esotericism.
I dedicated myself to the facts, to doing everything to avoid suspicions, because I have always wanted to be taken seriously, even if I was a comedian. That’s why I studied neuroscience at Oxford.
When you write about how television affected you, you talk about “the facade.” What are you talking about?
I think that all human beings – because we are vulnerable – have a mask, especially if you work in television.
And the reason you have it is because if it works it makes you a lot of money.
The problem occurs when you stay locked in that mask and you find, for example, people at 50 and 60 years old imitating what they were in their best moments. That’s the tragedy.
I interviewed famous people and I began to observe this phenomenon in the personalities who went to my program.
At first I was an observer, but I got infected and started acting the same way. I became addicted to fame.
So, when I was no longer one and I stopped appearing on television, when I was no longer welcomed in restaurants like before, when people on the subway stopped recognizing me, it’s as if they had taken away my dose.
That’s why I like what I do now much more in my conversations about mental health topics.
It is much healthier to be told at the end of conversations, “Hey, that helped me, it was good for my mind,” than “Hey, that was funny.”
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Wax became known for her comedy skills. She here in a scene from the comedy “Girls on top” on the British network ITV.
You have this definition of depression: “It is the black hole of illness, where you feel helpless while your mind hammers you with accusations. Your thoughts attack you as if they were little demons that eat your brain into pieces. It is very difficult to stay alive and listen.”
One of the things that I have understood over these years, not only working on these mental health issues but also through my monologues, is that many think that since depression in some cases comes and goes, it is not an illness.
It’s something I understood by listening to people.
It happened to me at the end of a show – I usually open the microphone to the audience – in which they talked, among several things, about what was worse, cancer or depression. And I always tell them “depression is worse, because you can’t see it.”
Most may not think so. And that hurts me a lot, because it’s real.
So, even though it sounds very dark, that is my definition of depression. You are in a hole. There is no movement, you don’t care if you get a manicure or if you fall down a chasm.
Everything you are is gone, and I don’t think people understand how scary that can be.
As you yourself say, “No one knows who he is”…
Exactly: when you are depressed, you are not even a complete human being. You don’t know how to get back to where you were before you got sick. There is no spirit. Everything is dead.
What is most terrifying is that you believe that this is how the rest of your life will be. That is the moment when you can make the decision to end everything, because it is impossible to continue like this. It is an unbearable agony.
Even when you decide not to take your life, the pain is still there.
And for me, the psychological pain is worse. It’s like someone is yelling at you inside your head all the time. You start to feel like you’re not good enough, ‘I don’t look good, everyone thinks I’m a fraud.’
And that, repeated endlessly, with the pressure of social networks, becomes impossible to sustain.
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The books written by Wax, full of confessions about his experience dealing with deep depression, have become bestsellers.
You’ve said you didn’t see yourself writing books about mental health, but you ended up being a pioneer in this field. What was that process like?
I couldn’t imagine writing a book on this topic because I was afraid of getting fired. It was a taboo subject.
But something happened that made me change my mind.
I remember that when I first spoke about my mental problems, I appeared in a campaign that is very famous in the United Kingdom called “Comic Relief”.
There was my face, which was a familiar face, and it had a caption that said “One in four Britons suffer from a mental illness.”
For years I was mortified by the idea of people finding out about my depression, but seeing my face all over the country I thought why not write a whole show about it.
In this way, people who suffer from these diseases became my audience.
I did several tours with the show and now talking about this topic is really like my baby, my son.
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Carrie Fisher, the actress who played Princess Leia, was also a close friend of Wax.
There is a powerful concept in your latest book: you have to move, you have to be in constant movement.
Yes. I’m moving all the time. It’s what gives me oxygen.
When you are depressed, one of the characteristics is that you do not move.
I always believed that I was moving as a way to accomplish things in my life, but as I was writing my latest book, I realized that what I was doing was running away, that I had been running away for many years.
From my family, from my illness, from the things that cured me of that illness. And so.
So what you have to ask yourself is what am I running from?
And when you understand the answer and face it, you start to move and get the oxygen you need to live.
We have to raise awareness. So, pure and simple.
I did not realize alone the severity of my illness. Only with the help of a psychologist was I able to unlock all this dark feeling.
At that time I dedicated myself to making jokes about my parents, nothing more. I didn’t understand that darkness or where I was going to go. Nor that I could be a little more understanding with myself. And forgive me many things.
If people understand that what they are experiencing happens to many people, they can understand that depression is a disease that can be treated.
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