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‘I always told myself I wanted to try comedy, because I wanted a break from dying,’ says Jessica Plummer, laughing, as she reflects on her latest career move. We’re speaking in a restaurant on the South Bank on the first sunny afternoon in May, and the 31-year-old is in an appropriately cheerful mood.
She has good reason to be. This month, she stars in a new eight-part Netflix series, The Decameron, which promises to bring her to global attention after a winding route up through British entertainment, from pop music to EastEnders, I’m a Celebrity and a dark drama, The Girl Before. Having taken some turns that have ended in cul-de-sacs for other actors, Plummer finds herself in an enviable position. ‘I’m excited to see what happens next,’ she says. ‘I’ve got the majority of things in my toolbox from learning on the job. I feel sure that whatever’s in the future is going to be OK.’
While The Decameron is more upbeat than some of Plummer’s earlier work, there is no shortage of death. It’s a comedy about that jolliest of periods: the Black Death. It is based on Boccaccio’s 14th-century book of the same name, about a group of citizens who flee plague-ridden Florence in 1348 for a country house outside the city. Piled in together, they scheme, plot, fall in love and bump each other off with glee.
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The new version plays it for laughs and a good amount of romping, a medieval Love Island with better one-liners, albeit with a healthy side order of pandemic-inspired anxiety and death. Plummer plays Filomena, a noblewoman who flees with her scheming handmaiden, played by Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds. The two of them have natural comic chemistry, finishing each other’s sentences and generally having a grand old caper. Plummer more than holds her own in a cast full of comic talent, including Arrested Development’s Tony Hale and Zosia Mamet from Girls.
‘When I auditioned, one of the notes from Kathleen Jordan, the showrunner, was, “Don’t be afraid to be weird,”’ Plummer says. ‘I was like, “Excellent”. The programme is about the madness of what can happen when 10 individuals come together to quarantine.’
There is no need for The Decameron to labour the parallels with the pandemic, which come naturally, while its diverse cast takes merry liberties with the races, ethnicities and accents that might have been on display in 14th-century Tuscany. Netflix is betting that enough time has passed since Covid for audiences to start to laugh at how they behaved during those strange years, and realise that humans have been responding in unexpected ways to terrible diseases for centuries.
‘It’s definitely going to be relatable for audiences when they watch it,’ Plummer says. ‘But it’s done in such a contemporary way. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s a bit strange. I can’t wait for everyone to see it.’
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Gold and champagne diamond hoops, £17,595, Nada Ghazal
Over the long months of shooting – shuttling back whenever she could to see her daughter, Noa – Plummer fell in love with Italy, never having visited before, even taking up eating ham, when she had previously been vegetarian. But the experience was not without its oddities.
‘I ended up living in a hotel, because the flat I initially stayed in was haunted,’ she says. ‘The production team think I’m crazy, but I kept hearing these weird noises. It was probably a mouse. If I thought I’d made the bed, I would get home and one side of the sheets would be lifted up. One night it got too much. I packed a bag and went to a hotel round the corner. I didn’t think I believed in ghosts, but there was some sort of ancient Roman spirit in that flat.’
If Plummer is glad to have the chance to display her comedy chops, you also get the sense she feels she has something to prove. Hers has not been a typical route into Netflix stardom. She grew up in Streatham, south London, near where she still lives today. Her mother was a teacher, her father worked in the ambulance service. She says both were always very supportive, although her father was more inclined to ‘blow smoke up [her] ass’.
‘He was my biggest cheerleader,’ she recalls. ‘He really wanted me to be a tennis player, but I was so bad at it.’ Instead, she wanted to be an entertainer.
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Gabardine blazer, embroidered bralette and matching shorts, all price on request, Valentino; Bee My Love earrings, £8,510, Chaumet
‘It started with me and my friends in primary school forcing our teachers to watch the dance routines we made up,’ she says. ‘I’ve always enjoyed feeling like I can make someone feel something: making people laugh, or moving them in certain ways. Drama and dance were my favourite subjects. In year nine I remember really wanting to go to The Brit School [alma mater of Adele, Amy Winehouse and Cush Jumbo, among many others] because in my head that was the only way you’d be able to make it.’
Instead, she went to drama classes, fitting them around her regular lessons, before a chance encounter in 2013 launched her towards a pop career. ‘One day I was stopped on the street and asked if I could sing, and that’s how all that happened.’
‘All that’ refers to the two years Plummer spent as a member of Neon Jungle, a girl group whose album Welcome to the Jungle reached number eight in the charts, a whirlwind period during which Plummer travelled the world to experience the glitz of pop stardom.
‘Looking back, it’s hard to believe it happened,’ she says. ‘I’m still quite young but it feels like I’ve lived a few lives. I believe in myself more as an actor than a singer. I needed the rest of the girls with me to have a career in the music industry. I’m OK at singing, but I’m very average.’
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Buttoned dress, £10,373,Balmain; White, gold and diamond earrings,£10,200, Bucherer
A standout moment of the ‘short but very sweet’ music career was performing at the 2014 Victoria’s Secret Show with Taylor Swift, who was already a superstar. ‘I don’t think our first single had charted yet and we were there sharing a stage with Taylor Swift.’ As chance would have it, both were singing a song called Trouble. ‘We had a joke about swapping songs, but we didn’t,’ Plummer says. ‘She was so friendly. Everything people tell you about her – for the five seconds I met her – is completely true.’
When Neon Jungle came to an end, Plummer’s next career plans were quickly derailed. ‘As soon as we broke up I knew I wanted to go back to acting, until I got pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but I don’t know if I’d be here having this conversation with you if I hadn’t got pregnant,’ she adds. ‘I know it’s a cliché but everything I do is for my daughter.’
Plummer gave birth to Noa just before she turned 24. Having told her agent she would take a year out, Plummer supported herself during the early months of motherhood by nannying, taking Noa along with her, auditioning where she could and dealing with the inevitable rejections. ‘There were times when the noes felt really heavy,’ she says. ‘I thought to myself, should I go to school again and become a midwife or a teacher? But I thrive off uncertainty, as much as I moan about it. Especially when you’re in a place where you need to work. But I thought the right job would come eventually, and it did.’
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That role was in EastEnders as Chantelle Atkins. ‘I remember before [being cast], I thought, maybe I can’t do this anymore, maybe I don’t have that “thing” anymore, maybe I’m not as good as I thought.’ Instead, in 2019, she was thrust into Britain’s most popular soap, as rigorous a training as any actor could hope for. A year later, Chantelle was killed off in a grisly domestic abuse storyline. ‘When I found out that Chantelle was going to be murdered, I cried,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to leave. I liked the set-up and the familiarity and the security of it.’ She was nominated for – and won – several awards for her performance.
‘Finishing EastEnders is almost like leaving school,’ she says now. ‘You’re back in the big wide world and have to start swimming.’ Months after leaving the soap she appeared in the Covid-affected 2020 edition of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, filmed – in conditions not completely dissimilar to the plot of The Decameron – in a Welsh castle, rather than in the Australian outback. ‘I had thought everyone would stay in a hotel at night, but it’s exactly what you see: you really are starving and cold,’ she says.
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An opportunity to show her range came the following year with The Girl Before, a dark thriller about a woman who falls for an architect, only to discover that his austere modern house has a sinister past. Plummer was nominated for a best supporting actress Bafta: proof, if any were needed, that she was no dilettante.
‘Because of being in the girl group, I didn’t want people to think I was a singer dipping their toe in other industries,’ she says. ‘After the pandemic I had an audition and someone asked me how I got into the industry and it really threw me, because I was ashamed that I didn’t go to drama school. It was that thought of not being taken seriously because of the other things I had done in the past.’
There is no risk of that now. Haunted Tuscan flat or not, with The Decameron, Plummer can put to bed any lingering worries about her abilities. She can do light as well as dark, laughs as well as tears.
‘I have worked really hard,’ she says. ‘The hardest part is not quitting. It isn’t learning the lines or figuring out your character and doing background work. It’s just perseverance. That’s the only difference between actors that might be in one thing and others that end up next to Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not always been smooth. There have been some scary times, but I feel I’m in a great place.’
The Decameron airs on Netflix next month