English actress Charly Clive.

Photographer: Emily Soto

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Charly Clive isn’t quite saying goodbye to those London comedy gigs just yet.

“There’s no world in which Rooster, even though it’s like the biggest job I’ve had, guarantees anything for me,” the 33-year-old muses to The Hollywood Reporter. “But there is absolute stability in some grotty basement or attic above a pub and 40 people on a Wednesday night coming to have a laugh. Comedy is always going to be a sticking point,” she adds, “because everything else is so by chance.”

We’re catching up over smoothies in Clive’s native London, where she’s lived since 2016, after around five years spent at the whim of New York City’s vibrant comedy scene. It might surprise some audiences to know the magnificently charming Clive — currently starring as Katie Russo, daughter of Steve Carell‘s Greg, whose yo-yo relationship with her (kind of) husband Phil Dunster provides the HBO series with some irresistible chemistry — is a Brit.

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Well, half a Brit. That impeccable U.S. accent is partly owing to her Mexican-American mother, a fact she believes has aided her seamless transition into an endearing East Coast college professor. It’s also been helped by a childhood spent worshipping American comedians — “Steve Martin is my North Star, but my compass is Steve Carell,” she’d later tell me — and fooling the conductors at her local Oxfordshire train station. “When I was a teenager, I would put on an American accent constantly to get out of buying a train ticket,” says Clive. She effortlessly slides into a twang not unlike Russo’s: “‘I’m so sorry. Oh my god, I literally don’t know how to do that!'” That knack for accents has come in very handy for lots of schemes, she adds.

The schemes that have brought her to the front and center of HBO are teeming with vim and variation. Toward the end of her stint in New York (she’d moved to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and, thanks to that U.S. passport, was able to stay in the city), Clive fell unwell. She was diagnosed with a benign tumor on her pituitary gland and had to move back to England. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s it for me,'” she says. “‘I guess I’m just a girl that got sick, and that’s sort of the most defining thing about me now.'”

When her best friend, Ellen Robertson — who you might recognize from recent Netflix hit Vladimir — suggested she make a comedy show out of her diagnosis, off they went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a routine called Britney in tow, named after Clive’s tumor, which in turn was named after pop icon Britney Spears. “My career started from there, and so did hers,” Clive says. They’d gig at comedy clubs around London and still do so once or twice a week if they’re both in the city.

Then came what Clive thought was to be her big break: Pure, a 2019 Channel 4 series in which she starred as 24-year-old OCD sufferer Marnie, who is plagued by some pretty disturbing, intrusive sexual thoughts. The role came after a long period of consecutive rejections. “My feedback was always like, ‘We’ve got five other people that look like you,'” Clive recalls. “I get it, I’ve got brown hair, but I also felt like I can do some cool stuff, actually, if someone would give me a chance. But I don’t feel like in those five-minute [or] half an hour meetings, anyone really gives you — particularly as a woman — a chance to be funny.”

While nanny-ing at the time for a family in Brooklyn, she was championed by a casting director she’d love THR to shout-out, Jane Ripley, and landed the lead part. But even with the witty, bold analysis of mental health and sexuality that Clive expertly executed in Pure — and another flawless accent, this time Scottish — it wasn’t picked up for a second season. “It was Channel 4 being complete cowards,” she says, reflecting on that call six years ago. “I think the reason was something quite bullshitty, like, ‘There’s just not really the space for it. We can’t deliver drama or comedy,’ and ‘Women’s mental health feels a bit difficult right now’ or something. It was something really, really crappy.” People still reach out to Clive to tell her how much the show helped them through their own OCD battles.

For the actress-writer-comedienne, it was a bit of a shock to the system. “I think people warn you a lot

Charly Clive on 'Rooster,' Steve Carell and Newfound Fame