Fresh Meat season 3: Faye Marsay introduces new fresher Candice
The White Queen actress joins Jack Whitehall, Zawe Ashton, Joe Thomas, Kimberley Nixon, Greg McHugh and Charlotte Ritchie for the new series of the Channel 4 comedy
Your daughter, who has been home-schooled all her life, is heading off to university, but before she leaves you take pains to keep her safe by putting her in a house share with trusty second years. Their fresher term is a (sort of) distant memory, they have work to be concentrating on, they've left their drunken immaturity of first year behind, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong – especially if your housemates are Vod, JP, Kingsley, Oregon, Howard and Josie...
That's the predicament faced by new girl Candice when Fresh Meat returns tonight on Channel 4. She takes Josie's vacant room in 28 Hartnell Avenue – renamed Pussy Haven – but she's not exactly the Fresh Meat JP was hoping for...
A fondness for knitted jumpers and the Christian Union puts paid to his plans, but poor Candice soon gets a rude awakening courtesy of hellraising Vod. We paid a visit to the set of Fresh Meat during filming and had a chat with The White Queen's Faye Marsay, who told us all about her own student days and her nervy start to her time on Fresh Meat series three...
So, this is quite a contrast to your role on The White Queen? (Faye played King Richard III's wife, Anne, in the BBC series earlier this year)
Tell me about it. I'm used to crying for weeks on end. What's this all about?
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Were you a fan before you joined the show?
Yes, I was which made it really intimidating when I first came in. It was really weird.
So, what can you tell us about Candice?
She’s been home-schooled so when she comes to uni she’s not experienced anything these guys have. She’s never had a TV growing up, her mum’s made all her clothes for her, she’s never kissed a boy, she’s never done any of that growing up stuff.
So when she gets to uni she’s just trying to figure out where she fits in and the Christian Union is much tamer than what she gets around the house so she finds it more comfortable to be around people who are less high energy and doing all this smoking and drugging and sexing so she ends up joining the CU. She’s a funny one – she’s trying to find out who she is and where she is and where she fits in in that mad house.
Who does she hang out with?
Oregon – she’s sort of Oregon’s little apprentice, a mini me. She’s on the same course as Oregon, studying English, and is really into it and her and Oregon have quite a weird relationship – Oregon is very much the teacher and Candice is the student but that gets blurred at times.
She studies English... does that mean she soon ends up in the grasp of Professor Shales?
She finds him the coolest man on the planet – she finds him like God. And Oregon obviously is like “No.”
Has he got his eye on her as the next Oregon?
I think he likes her because of her intellectual abilities as opposed to anything else so it’s not about that.
Your own student days aren't that far behind you...
Next week I’ll have been out of drama school a year so it’s insane. It still doesn’t feel real at all – it’s really bizarre.
Did you live in a similar place to the Fresh Meat house?
Drama school was more like twelve hours every day – work, work, work, lines, lines, lines – but I did go to uni in Newcastle and this house is how we lived – even the little details like sticky dust that gets on the bathside and on a sink.
What’s your best memory?
We had a beach party once. We had sandpits and water pits you could slide down and be the human bowling ball – all in a car park and palm trees that we’d got from Homebase. And we covered this car park in all this beach stuff and it was February – it was the best party I’ve ever been to in my life, it was so cool.
Series three of Fresh Meat begins tonight at 10pm on Channel 4
Read about what's new in Fresh Meat series three
