All adequate training for the future, but probably difficult to appreciate that way at the time. “Mum really had to find her feet, try to find a career.” Every time Watts was tipped into a new playground, she says, she’d stand on the fringes and try to work out what role – what accent – would get her admitted to the group. The moving-around started in earnest for Watts and her family after that. I think they gave my mum a few thousand dollars to help get things under way. “When he died, my dad hadn’t saved money, and I guess my mum didn’t have any. Watts doesn’t go into details, but talks instead about how the members of Pink Floyd responded to the tragedy. Miv Roberts has said that the cause of his death was a heroin overdose. Her parents divorced in 1972, when Watts was four. I wanted my parents to wear three-piece suits and tweed, not leather pants and four-inch platform boots.” She recalls being a kid who craved the opposite. (He narrowly missed his daughter’s birth in 1968 because the band were touring Scotland in a Ford Transit.) Among the few surviving photographs Watts has of this era, there’s one in which she and her parents are on a beach in St Tropez with Pink Floyd, all wild hair and skimpy swimmies. Miv modelled and Puddy was the sound engineer for Pink Floyd. Her mum and dad, Myfanwy Roberts and Peter Watts, or “Miv” and “Puddy”, were young when they became parents. ‘How do I get into that group? How do I get accepted? Who should I be? Who do you want me to be?’ That’s part of where the Gypsy world taps into my life, that constant reinvention.” So, a lot of moving, a lot of new schools, a lot of reinventing myself. We lived in Norfolk, we lived in Suffolk, in Wales – that was where my grandparents were. I mean, I went to nine different schools in England. And perhaps it’s something about the clinic-configuration of the furniture, her on the sofa and me in the chair, but Watts wastes no more time before plunging headlong back into her childhood. Her expression reads: you sure want to go there? “Well, OK,” she says. What was she better hoping to understand about herself with this one? I went into auditions thinking, ‘What version of me do they want? What will it help me to understand about myself? “There has to be a point of doing it.” Looking back, I know why people weren’t hiring me. She explains that there are lots of considerations that tend to lead to her accepting a job, but key among them is a basic, selfish question. “I should have, right? But then, what they say is, you don’t get anything out of it for yourself if you’re not the one paying.” “Four hundred dollars an hour,” she says. Got some proper help at points of crisis.” To drill deeper into the cognitive behaviour aspect, she shelled out specially for sessions with a CBT therapist. Gearing up to play the therapist, Watts drew as far as she could on her own experiences of treatment: “I’ve definitely done periods of time in a therapist’s office. “Gypsy’s all about wanting the things you don’t have,” says Watts, who was directed in the first two episodes by Sam Taylor-Johnson.
In Gypsy she plays Jean Holloway, a New York therapist who practises cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and starts to feel so suffocated by her life that she fakes new identities in order to insert herself into strangers’ lives. We talk about her new Netflix show, which is, perhaps surprisingly, her first substantial work for TV.
Otherwise, she’s dressed with minimalist chic: bare arms, stitched black top, heels. She wears an ankle-length cream skirt that takes a bit of marshalling on the sofa. Her cheeks are youthfully pink-touched, her blond hair inventively pinned. Sitting in front of Watts today, it’s hard to believe she isn’t still 32.
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