The Female Black Mirror: ROAR Star Meera Syal Discusses the Unique Take on The Female Experience in Exclusive Interview
ROAR is coming for every aspect of the female experience.
The newest show to come to Apple TV+, ROAR, is a non-negotiable sensation, sharing femanist fables in one of the most powerful modern anthology series of today. Each episode follows the life of a different woman, navigating a different challenge confronted by modern women, within the confines of her own story.
ROAR comes at these issues, not with the careful eye of Hollywood, but with the fangs-beared roar-raising hunger of a conglomerate demanding to be heard. The show tenaciously devours tired tropes of television shows past, and throws them on their head– leaving the viewer feeling engaged, enraged, and seen.
In one of the episodes, The Woman Who Returned Her Husband, Meera Syal plays Anu: a middle aged woman bored in her married realtionship who, upon finding the recepit, returns her husband to the store. The episode reinvigerates tired tropes surrounding love and marriage, leaving the viewer with questions to answers they thought they had and answers to questions they never knew they had. We were lucky enough to sit down in an exclusive interview and ask Meera Syal some of these questions.
First things first, kind of a fun question. ROAR is such an animalistic sound. It's powerful. It's natural. What animal do you think best describes your personal ferocity?
My personal ferocity (laughing). I like to think of myself as a wild panther. My children tell me I'm an interfering old hen, so I'm not sure which one I am. I think my vision of myself is very different to what my kids think I am. Everyone wants to be a panther, don't they? I mean, or something exotic like that, but I think, it's probably much more hen. I think Hen is probably nearer the truth. I cluck about the house, apparently.
So, jumping into talking about your episode, I thought something that was super interesting about your episode was that it it focuses on a relationship farther down the line than a lot of the other ones do. How do you think it speaks to feminism and to independence within the confines in the way maybe the other episodes don't?
That is a really good point. And, and I think that is the beauty of this episode in the script is that it looks at the generation of women for whom feminism wasn't always an option. Where the options were much more reduced, where they had to knuckle down, and put up and shut up. And you see that actually in the scene where Anu's with all her friends and says, "Well, I've got the receipt, and now I'm taking him back." And their reactions of horror tell you everything you need to know about that generation of women.
It doesn't mean they didn't want to fight and they didn't want independence, but their options were so much more less. And then of course for Anu that comes into very sharp focus because what kicks this whole thing off of her is seeing her daughter– her beautiful, talented, brilliant daughter, who's going off into the world and following her dreams. And it makes her realize, "Oh my God, I'm 60, and I never did that." So I think, you know, feminism is just as relevant a message for any generation. In a way I think we have to pay tribute to the women that came before us and kicked down all those doors, because it was so much harder for them to rebel.
Is there anything looking at your own children that you mentioned before that you see them doing that your generation would not have done? Not even necessarily big scale feminism, It can be like Bitcoin that you're like, "We never would've done that."
Well, you know, I can't get over the whole life lived online and, you know, the mobile phone, because I, when I tell my children when I grew up, we had one telephone in the house that sat in the hallway and you had to use permission to use it and that's how you contacted your friends, and they said, "Well how did you arrange to meet them?" I said, "Well, you'd say, 'I will meet you next Saturday under the big clock in the square.' And, 'well, what if they weren't there?' 'Well, then they weren't there or you had to find them.'" I mean, it's completely different way of, you know, it's little things like that that make you realize: My goodness! You know?
I think the thing I don't envy is that, the accessibility of social media is fantastic, but you are never alone. You can't make your mistakes in private. You always know what everybody else is doing. You always get FOMO in a way that my generation never did. We had absolutely no idea what parties were on andd if we hadn't been invited or not. It was blisful ignorance. So I think it's a double edged sword. I envy some of their freedoms, but I also think, for young women particularly, there is a huge amount of unwanted pressure and scrutiny that comes with social media. I think that's a really big difference
Something that I thought was really striking about your episode is that it's not that Anu doesn't love her husband. She just gets incredibly bored and wants change and excitement and adventure, and I thought that was really powerful. Have you had a time in your life where you felt just a lot of boredom and you made a massive change?
Wow. Well, I wouldn't say boredom. Exactly. I think one thing my life has definitely not been boring. Isn't there a Chinese curse? "Now you live in interesting times." My life has been very interesting. But oh yeah. I mean, I've certainly had quite a few occasions where, like Anu, I've had to rebel, and I've had to say, "There are certain things that you expect me to do in the name of tradition, and I don't think this is traditional. I think it's oppressive. And there is a difference between culture and oppression. And I'm gonna tell you that this is not cultural. This is oppressive." And you know, that's when I decided from little things like, "I'm not gonna be a doctor, I'm going to go do English and drama at university," to the person I married.
I mean, there have been lots of rebellions along the way. And I think I've been very lucky because what I did have, which a lot of my friends didn't have, is very loving, understanding parents who, even went,whatever I was doing scared them, they didn't stop me. They were wise enough to let me make my own mistakes.
So, I totally get Anu's story, and I know that position of being part of a more traditional community, where as a woman, if you step outside, you are questioned and you are scrutinized and sometimes you're vilified. But I think the desire of freedom and self exploration is for some people too strong, and it comes down to your happiness or society's happiness. And in the end you have to choose yours.
Speaking of you choosing happiness, you really haven't led a boring life at all. You wear a lot of hats. You're comedian writer, playwright, singer, journalist, you've done so much. If you had to choose one of those things within your life to be like, "that's it, and I can't touch any of the others again," what would it be?
I wanted to be a Marine biologist actually (laughs). I think it might be too late now. It might be just too late for that.
It's hard to choose one. Gosh, that's really impossible. I think the thing that gives me just the most joy probably is singing weirdly, but I'm not a good enough singer to be a professional, but I think it is absolutely the most pure or purely joyful the human being can do is to make music and sing. And you realize that when you watch kids sing and they sing from their soul and they don't care if they're out of tune and they don't care, who's watching, they just sing. So, um, for joy, I think I'd do that. Realistically probably if I had to choose one, it will be acting just because it's the nearest to being a kid that you can be. It's play, but it's play with other people and you create something beautiful. So it's pretty cool to, to have that as your real life job. I feel very lucky.
Even speaking of acting both theatrically and in television– something I'm fascinated by in ROAR is how many playwrights are involved in this process, and I think it's so powerfully apparent in every episode. How has that impacted what you feel ROAR has become?
Oh, I think the fact that it's an all female team is, is really, is absolutely essential to why this serious feels so special because everything is done through the female gaze, and that is a rare thing in this profession where, you know, your creatives, your producers, your directors, your writers, and your, your lead performers are all women. And you just have this incredible shorthand actually, you have this understanding.
For example, when I have mentioned to female friends, I said, well, what's this about? And I say, one sentence, "It's about a woman who found her husband because she found the receipt," and everybody just laughs and laughs and laughs and you go, "oh, you got it. I don't have to say anything more. You've got that." And only women will get that. And I think that familiarity, that deep sort of sense of I-really-know-where-this-is-coming-from, infuses this entire series because it's all run by women and it's a rare thing. And I think it shows in the work.
In seeing the scripts or seeing the other episodes, did you feel that boundaries were getting pushed more freely in this show? Was there more of a sense of risk I?
Well, unfortunately I haven't seen any of the episodes except for mine. I'm gonna have the pleasure of watching all of them the same as everybody else when they drop on April 15th. Um, but I know this in is the episode. Yeah, I do feel it is pushing boundaries. I think one of the really clever things is that it's so many different genres within one series, you know, psychological horror and rom-com and murder mystery and dystopian surrealism.
I mean, it's all there, but actually they're all just facets of the same female experience. I think that's, what's quite unique about it. And I think it's a thing that will keep people coming back, I guess, in the way that Black Mirror did, because you just create a world where you kind of know what you're gonna get, but you don't know how you're gonna get it. And I think the fact that it's all about a female experience is it's– it's has real USP I suppose.
ROAR is currently streaming on Apple TV+.
