“I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one,” said sharpshooting frontierswoman Jane Canary (AKA Calamity Jane) back in 1890. “Great line, from a ballsy woman, huh?” grins musical star Carrie Hope Fletcher, who’s playing Calam’ in a lively, touring stage version of the classic 1953 musical film, which tells the tale of a woman who acts and dresses like the male cowboys around her.
While the real Canary drank like a fish (she once drove a horse and buggy 90 miles past her destination because she was so soused, and died after a boozy bender at the age of 51), in the film version, the Christian, Republican Doris Day recast her as a teetotaller only swigging sarsaparilla.
Calamity Jane the stage musical, written in 1961, added extra songs and the new version dials down the Wild West “heroism” involved in shooting native Americans. But Fletcher chuckles at how it “makes more of the way Calam’ told tall tales. She saw all the men bragging around her and she knew that to outdo them she’d have to tell wilder stories than they did…”
Opening the door to her Southend dressing room in Mickey Mouse print dungarees, minutes after a two-hour matinee, Fletcher apologises for the mess in her dressing room. “I’m like a goldfish,” she grins, “you know the way they grow to the size of their bowls? That’s how I am backstage.”
Best known for her starring roles in Les Miserables, Heathers and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s short-lived Cinderella – and bestselling YA and adult novels (such as Into the Spotlight and When the Curtain Falls) – Fletcher is also the younger sister of McFly star Tom Fletcher. She’s seven years younger than her brother, and it’s often been assumed that 32-year-old Fletcher “tagged along” into the industry after her brother scored the lead in Oliver! (aged just 10) back in 1995, and she followed him to the Sylvia Young Theatre School.
After more than a decade of being “the internet big sister” to fans of her YouTube channel, though, Fletcher is able to shrug off her press casting as the eternal younger sibling. “That idea of me trailing after Tom will always be the narrative. I AM his little sister.” She tosses up her palms. “I’ve made peace with the fact I’ll never be able to prove that if I had been born first – or if Tom had become an accountant – I would still be doing this. What am I meant to do? NOT do the thing I love because he did it first?”
Born in 1992 and raised in South Harrow, Fletcher says that both she and Tom are “doing the jobs our parents would probably have loved to have done, given the chance”. She began her career young – taking child roles on the West End in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins. In her mid teens she and Tom decided to write a musical, and showed some of the songs to McFly’s label Universal – who liked them so much they arranged a meeting with Steven Spielberg, with an idea of making it into a film. He liked it, but years of development workshops ultimately led to nothing.
After her Hollywood near-miss she started a YouTube Channel “kind of by accident” in 2011, which she says “was initially me singing songs from musicals, or other covers, until other vloggers started to suggest I did some talking too”. She admits she had no idea what she would talk about until she was cast as Eponine in Les Mis a year after Tom Hooper’s 2012 film of the musical was released.
“When I was given that role I thought: ‘This is a great thing to vlog about.’ If Michael Ball had been making videos about being in the show when I was a massive child fan then I would have been all over that.”
But it took time for the West End to get on board with what Fletcher was doing. “The first year of me being in Les Mis, the producers were like: ‘You can’t film anything backstage, nothing in the wings, only in your dressing room.’” She laughed at their insistence that she didn’t give away any of the plot’s secrets. “I was like: ‘Secrets? This show has been running for 30 years! There are no spoilers left!’”
But then John Caird – one of the show’s original directors – dropped by and asked Fletcher about her vlogging. “He asked how many viewers I had. At the time that was around 250,000” – the figure would later double. “He just looked at me: ‘A quarter of a million? That is bigger than the population of some small countries!’” Two days later, Fletcher was called into the company office and told she could film wherever and whatever she wanted.
Fletcher connected with a huge and mostly loveable audience of West End wannabes. Her open-hearted confessions about being a young woman led to her first book All I Know Now: Wonderings and Reflections on Growing Up Gracefully (2015). But looking back, “I wish I had built my boundaries better before putting myself online. I wish I had gone through therapy first. You get exposed to anyone and everyone. So if you are a person who is prone to oversharing you’re probably also quite porous. If you give out you’ll also take on whatever comes back, or doesn’t. So I had no ability to filter out the negative. I’d think: ‘Oh, this person says I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t wear that.’”
Are there any specific comments that still stick in her mind? She shudders: “Loads. Loads. So many.” She winces over a tendency to reply to critics all the time. “I mean – you should have a right to defend yourself. But you make it a thousand times worse, you sink so much time and energy and you’re giving them what they want. You’re giving them your attention. I still haven’t learned my lesson. If somebody comes at me at the end of a bad day I’m still like” – she mimes rolling up her sleeves – “RIGHT!”
While Fletcher has found that “99 per cent of people who come online to talk about musical theatre are lovely, there’s one per cent who are terrifying.” Back when she was in Les Mis, she ended up with a stalker who sent death threats. Alarmingly, the police initially did nothing to protect her. “They said: ‘If you put yourself out there then what do you expect?’”
But surely every teenager with a mobile phone is putting themselves out there now? Should they all be told the price of that is stalkers? “Exactly!” She frowns. “I asked them: ‘At what point do you step in and do something?’ They said: ‘If there’s physical harm.’” She shakes her head. “It’s mad. I don’t … I just don’t understand.” She notes that we can see a pattern of escalating violence “in every Netflix thriller, every true crime podcast. We hear: ‘She went to the police 18 times and then she was murdered. She wasn’t taken seriously. Nothing was done.’ You think: ‘Why are we not learning from any of this?’”
Fletcher’s stalker began by sending mock-up posters of the star (using a bikini clad holiday snap she had posted on Instagram) ostensibly advertising her services as a sex worker. The posters included the real phone number of her agent. “These letters were arriving every day, every week in the post, sent to all the principal cast members in Les Mis,” she says. “It got to the point where we weren’t allowed to open our own post any more. The police said there were no prints. There was no name – it was a needle in a haystack.”
When the police gave up, Fletcher and her friends “turned super sleuth and tracked him down”. She explains that during the pandemic, posters began arriving at the home of her best friend and others in her circle. “We compiled a WhatsApp group of the people receiving the letters, which were very sexual and paedophilic. Very aggressive and angry. Between us, we worked out it was somebody two of us had blocked on Twitter. After we blocked him he had tweeted that we would ‘rue the day’ – he took out this massive vendetta against us.” Fletcher’s stalker was sent to prison. But she tells me “he’s out now, so I am always looking over my shoulder.”
There’s balm in Fletcher’s home life, though. She tells me her relationship with her husband (and fellow actor) Joel Montague has been game changing. Although their romance sounds like a whirlwind (first date in May 2022, engaged that October, married the following February and now they have an 11-month-old daughter, Mabel) she says it’s actually a “very quiet and peaceful” relationship.
“Before I met Joel I had the idea that love had to be loud and chaotic,” she says. Like Calam and Bill? Always fighting and making up? “Yeah!” she says. “In the novels and films I grew up loving, it seemed love was always dramatic. But then when I came to play those out in real life I realised: ‘I feel anxious all of the time.’ I was exhausted and I hated every second of it. Then Joel was just so calm and sturdy and solid. There were no guessing games. He was: ‘This is how I feel – where do you stand?’ I’d never had that before. I was like: ‘What the hell is this? It’s wonderful!’” She laughs: “When I read Pride and Prejudice now and I’m like: ‘Piss off Mr Darcy! Bingley’s the man you want!’”
At which point I must challenge the old-school gender values of the Calamity Jane/ Wild Bill romance. Because he only appears to fall for her after she sloughs her buckskin gear and he sees her in a frock. Fletcher winces, but rallies. “True,” she shrugs and smirks. “But when he finally kisses her, she’s back in her trousers again!”
‘Calamity Jane’ is touring the UK until 27 September (calamityjanemusical.com)
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