fleabag

First with “Military Wives” and a brief yet spellbinding appearance in “Fleabag,” but most importantly with “Slow Horses,” in which she plays MI5 second-in-command Diana Taverner alongside Gary Oldman’s sidelined but still tricky operative Jackson Lamb.

Though her character in “Fleabag” famously rhapsodized the postmenopausal life, for female actors, she says, the reality can be a bit less glorious.

The “Fleabag” role was, she says “a stroke of complete blissful luck. Out of the blue, never met her, I got a phone call from Phoebe Waller-Bridge asking, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and I said, ‘You have to be kidding, of course I will do this, I will do this now.’

It's premature to predict that it will follow Fleabag and Baby Reindeer as a one-person Fringe comedy-drama that becomes a TV hit, but it could well end up on that trajectory.

Women creators, of course, are often the ones taking up that charge, as Pamela Adlon did in “Better Things,” along with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who wrote a bar-setting monologue in the second season of “Fleabag,” delivered by Kristin Scott Thomas.