Bring Sally Phillips to Your Next Event

Thinking of booking Sally Phillips to your next event? You’re in luck, because she’s starring in a brand new children’s film called Ferdinand, in which she voices a dancing Austrian Lipizzaner Pony. It’s a role which differs in every way from her other big role recently – playing the Finnish Prime Minister on the American comedy series Veep – but Sally says that the latter role may have helped her casting in the former.

“I had a year and a half of only playing European characters. I think there was a terrible misunderstanding that I might be mitteleuropean. “The accents do tend to bleed into each other after a while, especially when you’re leaping around, that’s the challenge of doing an animation. A lot of your brain’s taken up with ‘what might I sound like if I was a horse doing a pirouette?’ and then the accent went Finnish, or Swedish or Danish or whatever.” Sally was keen to do the film because of her strong personal connection to the book on which the film was based – one of her father’s childhood favourites. She said: “My grandfather fought in the First World War and was injured by a shell—brilliantly, because it mean he was sent back from the front line where everybody else went down, and then wasn’t fit to fight in the Second World War.

“I was brought up abroad, my dad worked for British Airways and we moved from country to country and then ended up in Beirut in 1976, just as the war was starting. All the families were sent home but my dad was kept behind to get the rest of the expats out.

“We went to live with my grandparents in North London for six months and I remember being quite anxious, because I was six years old and we’d seen the soldiers lining up on the beach. I was back in the UK and the only kids’ book in the house was Ferdinand. This period when I was just starting to read books on my own, this was the only kids’ book to read, so I read it over and over and over again, and was thinking of my dad out in a war zone with sandbags in the office.”

This outing is just the latest in a long line for Phillips, who has also been a team captain on comedy favourite 8 Out of 10 Cats, written the romcom The Decoy Bride and became famous on Smack the Pony. She’s a bubbly and entertaining comic who is sure to have any audience rolling in the aisles, making her a great choice if you’re looking for entertainment ideas. If you’d like to book Sally Phillps, get in touch with our talent agents today.

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