Do I have to bare all?’

Ruth Jones talks about life after Gavin & Stacey, celebrity dilemmas – and how she lost four and a half stone.

Ruth Jones is standing in a burnt out (apocalypse-chic) attic looking like a creamy-skinned, voluptuous siren from the 1950s – think, Jane Russell. She’s had hours of hair and make-up and is wearing a crimson silk sheath, which further cinches her newly whittled-down curves. She breaks off from posing as a smouldering sex-pot to say a friendly “Hello”, which bodes well for a warm, funny and free-ranging encounter.

But when we reconvene, downstairs in the open-plan dining room of a stylist’s house in Notting Hill, west London, it doesn’t work out quite that way. The talented Bridgend-born actress and writer, co-creator and co-star with James Corden of Gavin & Stacey, could certainly never be accused of being one of those celebrities who gives the impression of revealing all, while actually giving nothing away. What’s unusual is that although she’s frustrating to interview – erecting steel boundaries around all fronts other than work – Jones still comes across as a rather lovely, unspoilt person.

We start off in an amiable fashion, made easier because I’ve seen the first two episodes of Stella, the new comedy drama set in the working-class Welsh Valleys, which Jones has written and stars in. She plays Stella, a 40-ish (Jones is 45) twice divorced mum of three: Luke, the eldest who’s in prison, 16-year-old Emma and Ben, 12.

The series was first envisaged by Sky1 as a British Roseanne, but Jones and her husband, Stella co-creator and business partner, David Peet, decided that format wouldn’ t play to her strengths as a writer. “It was originally planned as six half-hours in front of a studio audience,” she says, “but I didn’t feel comfortable with that because it’s more my style to write single-camera comedy drama – so now it’s expanded into ten one-hour episodes.

“There’s an overall arc to the series, which is seeded in the first episode and comes to some sort of fruition by the tenth. What we wanted to create as well was a journey that’s seasonal – it starts in the depths of winter, so you see the landscape changing and blossoming in the same way that Stella starts to get a bit more confidence and come out of herself.”

The opening scene of Stella has the eponymous heroine visiting her son in prison and it took me a while to recognise the actress as Ruth Jones – partly because she’s lost so much weight (four stone during filming, another half to date), and her hair is long and blonde with dark roots.

But more than the physical transformation – as Stella, she looks rather like Sinead Cusack – it’s her aura, which is almost gentle and subdued. Having played characters (from Myfanwy, the barmaid in “the only gay in the village” sketches in Little Britain to Gavin & Stacey’s bolshie Nessa) who are invariably described as “larger than life”, Jones seems quieter, as well as smaller, than life.

When I point this out, she says: “That’s very true… I’m usually loud and gregarious. But I didwant to strike a different note, energetically – if that’s the right word – because I wanted her to be primarily a mum, just keeping things together day to day. That’s why she wears a lovely array of rugby shirts and it’s all very practical with her hair in a ponytail. The point was we wanted to create a character who was not all that bothered about how she looked.”

Without giving too much of the plot away, one of Stella’s friends, a funeral director, is forever nipping off to have kinky sex. What gave her that idea? “I just like the idea of keeping on surprising, I suppose. There’s something about sex and death that goes hand in hand. It’s like [one of the characters] says, ‘Some say that death do make you horny’ – and it’s true. Well, from what I heard, it’s that thing – death makes you want to prolong life – so that’s why people go off to have sex after funerals and stuff like that. It’s apparently a very primal urge.”

What about the horse that gets brought in for a shower? “I do know someone with a friend who’s a doctor who went on a house call and there was a horse in the front room.” What? “So, you know it really happened, weirdly. It was amazing how many people commented when we were filming, ‘Oh yes, I know someone who had a horse in their house.’” Well, either Jones is a brilliantly convincing wind-up merchant (which wouldn’t surprise me) or they really do do things differently in Wales.

Her PA had warned me before the interview that her boss was very private and that she doesn’t like to be asked about her family or personal life. Fair enough, but once we move away from Stella, almost any question gets short shrift. On her weight loss: “I’ll give you a really brief summary because I think it’s boring.” On her return from holiday in India, two years ago, she decided to diet “very systematically and mathematically, giving myself between 1,200 and 1,500 calories a day”.

Her impetus for losing weight was on health grounds: “When you reach a certain age, you have to take responsibility and you have to start putting preventative measures into place rather than thinking in terms of a cure.” Did you get fed up with it? “No, I didn’t really. It was very straightforward.” Are you someone who enjoys food? “Not really.” Did you get a trainer or takeup exercise? “It’s literally what I said.” So you haven’t become a born-again runner? A mirthless laugh: “That would be an hilarious sight.”

Three years ago she and her husband David Peet (originally from Yorkshire, “he says, ‘wrasseberry’ instead of ‘rasberry’”) set up Tidy Productions – “tidy” being Welsh slang for “nice”. An independent production company, it works out of Cardiff, where the couple live. Until the company really takes off, Jones has committed tomaking all the projects involving herself – including Stella – under Tidy’s umbrella.

She has lived in London twice – in Hornsey and Hammersmith – when she was working at the Royal Shakespeare Company (understudying in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties) and at the National Theatre (Under Milk Wood). But she loves living in Cardiff. “My parents and my brothers and sisters are down the road and I think it’s a great city – it’s the right size, it’s easy to get about and I just love the Cardiff sense of humour and the people. Maybe it’s the familiarity, but I’m just very, very happy there.”

What’s her explanation for the phenomenal success of Gavin & Stacey? “I think it was just that people could recognise things in it and they related to it and it was about two fairly – well, I would like to say, straightforward families but they’re not really straightforward. Essentially, there’s lots of love in the two families and I think people just warmed to that, really.”

She’d like to see Gavin & Stacey: The Musical: “I think the characters are big enough to work in a musical setting and James Corden and I both like a bit of a song.” Jones doesn’t think her voice is good enough for her to star in it, although “it would be hilarious. If there’s a way of doing a comedy song where you don’t actually have to sing, I might get away with it.”

Like Corden, Jones has been asked to write her autobiography but unlike her co-star, whose revealing book May I Have Your Attention, Please? (drink, delusions and one-night stands) has recently been published, Jones declined: “Well, I have been asked to write a book about my life but I find that quite a bizarre idea. I’m not old enough [Corden is 33], and if you were going to write anything interesting about your life, you’d have to implicate other people and I think that’s very tricky to do…”

Jones, herself, was of course “implicated” in her friend’s autobiography – I read that when he played one of his little pranks (sending a text to her to say that he had lost his hand in an accident), Jones and her husband knelt and began praying for Corden in their Cardiff home. If this were true, judging from her response when I ask her whether she is religious (“I think that’s a bit personal”), she can’t have been too happy about this passage in the book.

Both she and her husband are “potential godparents”, as she puts it, to Corden and his fiancée Julia Carey’s baby son, Max, “ ‘Potential’ as it hasn’t happened yet. He said I was godparent elect – we’ll have to behave ourselves and apparently we’ll have to renounce the devil before we can actually become godparents.” I ask her whether she’s a godparent to any other children, and she says: “That’s quite personal.” Did she go to church a lot as a child, growing up in Porthcawl? “Er… I have been to church… yes.” Are her parents (her father was a legal executive; her mother a GP turned child psychiatrist) political and, indeed, is she? “Oh gosh, you’re going down religion, politics, the lot – aren’t you! I don’t want to talk about that. What about your interest in Stella?”

Well, I say, I do feel we’ve covered Stella quite a bit and I’m interested in her outlook on life and her world view. “I think Steve Coogan put this quite well, actually… The celebrity aspect, and let’s be honest doing an interview is part of that, is a by-product of the work you do. So you have to promote the work and I appreciate that is part of my job, but do I have to bare all?

“I feel I put my world view into my characters – no, that’s not necessarily true. I put different world views that I find interesting into my characters. My scripts are where I put what I want to say. That’s what I make public and that’s what I think and hope people like… although it isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, either.”

With ten million in the UK watching the Gavin & Stacey Christmas Day episode in 2009, that’s a lot of cups of tea, and I’m sure that many of those will want to add a final “r” to the title of Jones’s new show.

Radio Times