There was a time round the mid 2000s when Keeley Hazell was an everyday on the newspaper’s now-extinct Page 3 carousel of topless girls. She was even voted the second sexiest girl in the world by FHM journal. Now, almost twenty years on, she’s a comedian, actor and author who’s appeared in Ted Lasso (although not in the half she needed – extra on that later), written for the present too, and has a brand new Edinburgh Festival Fringe present, Everyone’s Seen My Tits, based mostly on her memoir of the identical identify.
“The nerdy theatre kid in me is just very, very happy,” she tells me. “There’s something about telling my story to an audience that I really find quite powerful.”
It is a heck of a narrative. Hazell grew up in Grove Park in southeast London, the place, she writes, “people sold drugs, got into fights, drank themselves silly, and went to jail”. Her dad was a window fitter and her mum labored as a dinner woman. It was a childhood scarred by domestic abuse – her dad would hit her with a picket metre stick, the steel a part of the vacuum cleaner, or a belt. If her mum didn’t have dinner prepared, her dad would seize her by the neck and choke her.
“The violence was absolutely horrific,” Hazell says, “but also incredibly normalised.” Hazell’s mother and father cut up when she was 13, which was when she first had remedy. “I’ve been in therapy for most of my life,” she says, and talking to her, that’s fairly evident: she comes throughout as somebody who has spent many hours professionally revisiting her previous.
Hazell spent her teenage years skipping faculty, stealing from outlets, getting drunk and setting fireplace to issues. “I liked watching things burn,” she explains. “There’s something just really joyful about destruction – and also the look of the flames was enchanting.” When she was 13, Hazelle and her associates robbed a pervert taxi driver by stealing his pockets whereas he masturbated in entrance of them. “It was the first penis I had seen,” she says. “It was quite sad because it really felt like all men wanted was sex, and it was really devastating to have that message confirmed in that way.”
The childhood Hazell describes is one the place the most ladies like her might dream of was a job at JD Sports – but that was extra as a consequence of class than potential. “I was incredibly nerdy and really loved learning,” Hazell says. “If I’d had teachers who were able to understand me, and if there had been more stability and less violence at home, that could have been incredibly transformative. I was really curious and opinionated and ambitious – so maybe I could have gone to Oxford.”
Instead, she left school at 16 and began working at a hair salon, the place she earned minimal wage shampooing. This was the place a buyer instructed she enter the Daily Star‘s “beach babe” competitors, and one other good friend instructed she enter The Sun‘s search for a brand new Page 3 mannequin. I ask her the way it felt to pose topless for the first time. “It was like a wave of numbness, embarrassment and shame,” she remembers. “It was not something I wanted to do, but the alternative was to work in a hair salon and never leave this area.”
Hazell ended up profitable The Sun‘s competitors, and that changed her life eternally. “You couldn’t open a men’s magazine or The Sun newspaper without seeing me semi-naked,” she writes in her memoir. “My boobs had gone national.”
Her 2007 calendar bought 30,000 copies in its few first days, she was on the cowl of FHM, Loaded and Maxim magazines all inside the identical 12 months, and she or he was repeatedly voted one among the sexiest girls in the world. The success left Hazell, who was barely in her early twenties, feeling disorientated. “There was a disconnect between the image and who I was,” she says. “Zoo and Nuts magazines felt like trash magazines, so I didn’t feel empowered by being in them – I felt ashamed.”
Still, the cash was good. Hazell began shopping for property and investing in the stock market. “I was thinking about the long game,” she says, “so as soon as I started making money, I started to think, ‘How can I make my money make money?’” Hazell was not the just one in her world looking for methods to earn cash from her success. An ex-boyfriend, whom she calls Theo in her ebook, bought a intercourse tape to The Sport newspaper.
Hazell’s boyfriends don’t come out effectively in her memoir. She describes them variously as violent and jealous and sometimes concerned in drug dealing. “For pretty much everybody that’s in the book, I gave them an opportunity to read it,” she says, “but with the two ex-boyfriends, I’m not in contact with either of them. With Theo, I would have hoped he could read it and maybe see things now as an adult and understand how his actions caused trauma – but I don’t think that that’s happened, sadly.”
Hazell describes the affect of the intercourse tape as “wiping the chessboard away” – all her plans for how she imagined her profession progressing ruined. She fled to Los Angeles and enrolled in performing lessons in the hope of building an performing profession. She secured a number of minor roles in Like Crazy and Horrible Bosses, and had a movie script optioned, but regardless of spending 10 years in LA, did not get any breakout roles. Given that she was barely working, how did she afford to reside in LA for 10 years? “I had property and investments,” she explains. “Plus I made a lot of money as a commercial actress – I’d be in an Emirates commercial for two minutes and make 70 grand from it.”
One night, Hazell was mendacity on her mattress doomscrolling on social media and feeling like she had screwed up her life, when a message popped up from the actor and writer Jason Sudeikis – with whom she had labored on Horrible Bosses – asking to fulfill. They had dinner and Sudeikis advised her he had written a component for her in a brand new TV present a couple of soccer workforce. The present was referred to as Ted Lasso, and her character was a former glamour mannequin who turns into a pointy, formidable advertising and marketing government – a personality drawn immediately from her personal life, proper all the way down to sharing her identify.
Hazell understandably believed that Keeley was a role she was born to play, and that profitable the role would go on to alter her life. In the finish, it went to Juno Temple. Hazell was supplied the smaller role of Bex as a substitute. Ted Lasso would go on to grow to be an enormous crucial and industrial success, and Juno Temple has been nominated for three Emmys. It have to be unimaginably galling to see another person be praised taking part in a personality that’s not solely based mostly on you but even has your identify. “It’s a complete mindfuck,” she says, “especially as the show rendered immense amounts of success for the actress that plays Keeley – it changed her life. It needs a lot of therapy and I’ve had a lot for it.”
Still, Hazell each acts in Ted Lasso and can be a workers author on the collection. She admits to being massively formidable and would ideally like her personal tv present. Where does the ambition come from? “For me it was a survival mechanism that came out of my circumstances,” she says, “but it’s also about wanting to be a person that I am proud to be, because for so much of my youth, doing modelling did not make me proud.”
I ask her to image the teenage Keeley, shampooing prospects in that hair salon. If the 40-year-old Keeley overheard somebody urging her teenage self to use for that Page 3 contest, would she do it? “Probably not,” she says. “There’s been a lot of good stuff, but being true to what you feel and believe is more important. Integrity is incredibly important.”
She’s not but certain if Everyone’s Seen My Tits could have a life after Edinburgh – “It depends on how well it goes and how I feel at the end of the run” – but she is proud that the present lastly permits her to reclaim her story and her identify. “This is the version of me that I’m choosing to put forward, and not somebody else’s idea of me,” she says. “I’m finally playing myself.”
Keeley Hazell: Everyone’s Seen My Tits is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, till 29 August