Ella Smith

Ella Smith

Age: 24. "I feel like the young person in this," Smith says of her role in the Neil LaBute play Fat Pig, due to start performances May 16 at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End, "but my character's more mature than any of them."

Hometown: London-born, Smith grew up in Wales and then in Bath before returning to London for drama school (Webber Douglas, which has since closed). "Growing up," she laughs, "was a bit of a tour."

Currently: Rehearsing her first major West End theater gig in the London bow of writer-director LaBute's 2004 provocatively titled off-Broadway hit, where her role as Helen was taken by Ashlie Atkinson. Smith was actually in New York when the play was running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, "but I couldn't get a ticket because it was doing so well." Flash forward three and a half years, and here she is in its U.K. incarnation, alongside a cast of TV names that includes Robert Webb (Peep Show), Kris Marshall (My Family) and Joanna Page (Bafta winner Gavin and Stacey). "We're all keeping it American, all battling on with the accents," says Smith, speaking one Friday afternoon after rehearsals. "That's tough because it's a very, very hard accent to do; technically, it's one of the hardest."

What's In a Name?: It's crucial to the play that Helen should be, shall we say, plus-sized, since it is her capacious physique that prompts sometimes fractious chat among the co-workers of her new boyfriend, Tom (played by Webb, who is one half of the Mitchell & Webb comic duo). As a large woman herself, doesn't Smith find that title demeaning? "Honestly, from the point of view of being an actor and thinking work is good, you see past those things pretty quickly. It's punchy as a title and has a lot of issues surrounding it, so if that brings interest, great. I think people are going to come out feeling different compared to what their expectations might have been, and Neil's title gets any politeness out of the way in order to get to the issue. I don't think anyone's going to see the play to poke fun at me."

One for the Ladies: Indeed, Smith points to what she finds attractively subversive about the prolific LaBute's comedy. "Neil's been very clever: he's not displaying the behavior that he's written in this play because he enjoys it, really. In fact, though he'd probably hate me to say this, I think Neil's a feminist and shows it by displaying the behavior of men so truthfully. I wouldn't want to speculate on why he writes what he writes, but for me this play is certainly on the woman's side. It's about a man who falls in love with someone and then he can't deal with the issues that are sort of thrown at him; it's about a guy and his issues rather than anything to do with her. Some of the behavior is scarily recognizable in the men I know. [Laughs.] It's like an exorcism for me in a way."

Weighty Affairs: Since leaving drama school in 2004, Smith says she's been "quite shocked"—albeit agreeably so—"that there are actually parts out there for large people. I honestly assumed I'd be playing approachable friends or funny cameo roles the whole way through, [whereas] I've got to play a lot of raunchy characters on TV." In the series Cape Wrath, shown in America on the Showtime channel, she adopted a Liverpudlian accent in order to play "a complete madam, a complete princess, and I really enjoyed doing it." She and Fat Pig co-star Marshall both appeared in the BBC series, Sold, about real estate agents in and around London: "The fact was, we were all nice on the surface but pretty ruthless underneath." Has that program helped Smith in her own dealings with such folk? She laughs: "I went to help a friend look around a flat and I was being really savvy and the estate agent said to me, ‘You probably more about this than I do,' because he had seen the show."