There's a moment in the first episode of Fleabag where Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character turns directly to the camera, raises an eyebrow, and lets the audience in on a private joke. It's a small gesture—barely a second long—but it tells you everything about why Waller-Bridge became one of the most influential voices in contemporary television.
She didn't arrive with a loud announcement or a massive marketing push. She arrived with a one-woman show in a damp Edinburgh venue, playing a character audiences didn't even have a name for. And somehow, that messy, funny, deeply uncomfortable monologue became the foundation of a career that would change how stories about women get told on screen.
From Edinburgh Stage to Global Sensation
Fleabag began its life in 2013 as a play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Waller-Bridge herself at the Underbelly venue. The show won a Fringe First Award and caught the attention of producers who saw something unusual in its raw, confessional energy.
When the television adaptation premiered on BBC Three in 2016, it was a six-episode series with a modest budget and no particular expectations. Waller-Bridge wrote every episode, produced the show through her company Two Brothers Pictures (founded with her brother-in-law Harry Williams and his brother Jack), and starred as the lead character—a woman navigating grief, guilt, and desire with a sharp tongue and a devastating habit of undermining her own happiness.
The first season was well-received, but it was the second season, released in 2019, that exploded into a cultural event. Andrew Scott joined the cast as a Catholic priest, and the dynamic between his character and Fleabag became one of the most talked-about relationships in recent television. The show swept the Emmy Awards that year—Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing, all for Waller-Bridge. She became only the second person in history to win three Emmys in a single ceremony for the same show.
The Voice Behind Killing Eve
Before Fleabag's second season even aired, Waller-Bridge had already demonstrated her range by creating Killing Eve, a spy thriller based on Luke Jennings's Villanelle novellas. The show centered on the obsessive cat-and-mouse relationship between MI5 officer Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer).
Waller-Bridge served as head writer and showrunner for the first season, then stepped back to an executive producer role. What she left behind was a template: a show that treated violence with dark humor, featured complex women who weren't defined by their relationships to men, and refused to follow the predictable rhythms of the espionage genre. Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer both won Golden Globes for their performances, and the show became a critical and commercial hit across multiple seasons.
Her involvement in Killing Eve also illustrated something important about Waller-Bridge's approach—she wasn't interested in controlling everything forever. She set the tone, established the world, and trusted others to carry it forward. That kind of creative generosity is rarer in television than people might think.
A Detour Through James Bond
In 2019, reports surfaced that Waller-Bridge had been brought in to polish the script for No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth James Bond film and Daniel Craig's final outing as 007. She wasn't the primary screenwriter—that credit belonged to Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Cary Joji Fukunaga—but her contributions were significant enough to merit a co-writing credit.
Her task, as widely reported, was to sharpen the dialogue, add humor, and bring more dimension to the female characters. It was a fitting assignment. Bond films have always struggled with how they portray women, and Waller-Bridge had spent years creating female characters who felt fully human rather than decorative. Whether her specific contributions can be isolated from the finished film is debatable, but her involvement signaled something about her status—she had become the writer Hollywood called when a project needed more wit, more honesty, and more life.
What Makes Her Writing Work
Trying to pin down exactly why Waller-Bridge's writing resonates is a bit like explaining why a particular joke is funny. You can analyze the structure, but the magic lives somewhere in the delivery.
Still, a few things stand out.
The fourth wall isn't a gimmick. In Fleabag, the direct-to-camera address isn't just a comedic device—it's a confession booth. The audience becomes the character's only real confidant, which makes the moment when she decides to stop talking to us (and why) genuinely heartbreaking. Waller-Bridge understood that breaking the fourth wall creates intimacy, not just laughs.
Her characters are contradictions. Fleabag is selfish and generous, destructive and loving, hilarious and devastated—sometimes all in the same scene. Villanelle is a murderer who is also, somehow, the most charismatic person in any room. Waller-Bridge doesn't resolve these contradictions; she lets them sit uncomfortably, which is how real people actually work.
She finds comedy in pain. This isn't a new idea—plenty of great writers have mined suffering for laughs—but Waller-Bridge does it without diminishing either the humor or the pain. A scene about a miscarriage can be genuinely funny. A scene about a guinea pig can be genuinely devastating. She trusts the audience to hold both feelings at once.
The humor is specific. Her jokes don't feel like they could belong to anyone. They have the texture of lived experience, awkward pauses, and the kind of observations you'd only make if you'd actually been in that particular situation. This is why her dialogue feels different from most television comedy—it sounds like someone thinking, not someone writing.
Building an Empire (Quietly)
Waller-Bridge's production company has grown substantially since Fleabag put her on the map. She signed a reported overall deal with Amazon Studios worth around $20 million per year, giving the streaming platform first look at her future projects. She's also developed projects through her company with various collaborators.
Not every announced project has materialized. A rumored Mr. & Mrs. Smith series for Amazon went through several iterations, with Waller-Bridge eventually departing the project. This is normal in television development—most ideas don't make it to screen—but it's worth noting because the scale of her deals invites high expectations, and not every venture will replicate the Fleabag lightning strike.
She has also been selective about acting roles, choosing projects carefully rather than capitalizing on her fame with a flurry of appearances. Her choices suggest someone thinking about a long career rather than a bright flash.
The Influence She Left Behind
You can draw a direct line from Fleabag to a wave of television shows featuring complicated, flawed, darkly funny female protagonists who speak to the camera or otherwise break conventional narrative rules. Shows like I May Destroy You, The Great, and even elements of Ted Lasso carry traces of the permission Waller-Bridge gave writers to be simultaneously hilarious and devastating.
More broadly, she demonstrated that a piece of work could begin as a one-person fringe show and become a global phenomenon without sacrificing its original voice. That's an encouraging story for any writer working in small venues right now, wondering whether anyone will ever care about the strange, personal thing they've made.
What Comes Next
The honest answer is that nobody outside Waller-Bridge's inner circle knows exactly what she'll do next. She has been developing new projects, and her Amazon deal ensures they'll have significant resources behind them. But she's also shown a willingness to take her time, to wait for the right idea rather than forcing output to meet demand.
That patience might be her most underrated quality. In an industry that rewards prolific output and constant visibility, Waller-Bridge has been remarkably comfortable stepping back, saying no, and waiting until something feels right. When she does return—whether as a writer, performer, or producer—it will likely be worth the wait.
The woman who stood on an Edinburgh stage talking to a small audience about a character no one could name created something that millions of people now carry around in their heads. That's not a bad legacy for someone still in her thirties. And it's almost certainly just the beginning.