"The London Times"
January 25, 2009
The comic world of Isla Fisher
The actress and fiancée of Sacha Baron Cohen becomes a comedy star in
her own right in Confessions of a Shopaholic
By John Harlow

When she was a young girl, climbing trees in the wilds of Australia to
escape a feral pack of brothers who called her Slug Face and worse,
Isla Fisher dreamt that one day she would live in a big house in the
Hollywood Hills. Only she thought she would be the maid. Proving that
in Los Angeles dreams do come true, just rarely in the form expected,
Isla recently had to face the drama of being mistress of her own glass-
and-steel Hollywood Hills domain as the stars came calling for her
western-themed barbecue.

There is Jennifer Aniston, lurking around the grill without absorbing
a single calorie (how does she do that?); Ben Stiller and Dustin
Hoffman playing the fool with neighbourhood kids; Ellen DeGeneres and
her spouse, Portia de Rossi, fondly demonstrating once again why Hugh
Grant spluttered into sniggers when asked by a hapless interviewer if
he was wooing Rossi; and Courteney Cox and David Arquette bemoaning
property prices.

And there is Fisher, one half of Hollywood’s latest power couple,
dressed down in a red check shirt and faded jeans, introducing guests
to the star of the show, baby Olive, just one year old. And the daddy,
Sacha Baron Cohen, in a cowboy hat and red bandanna, a marked shift
from his other favoured Hollywood party gear, a fully teated cow
construction (“It was the only costume left in the shop in extra-
long,” according to a still-amused Isla), or the overexposed and
overexposing Borat bathing suit, which is “away in the wash somewhere,
I think . . . I hope”.

It’s not as if LA is truly home to Fisher. Born in Oman to Scottish
parents working for the United Nations and raised in Western
Australia, she always feels somewhere between London and Oz. But she
has learnt to grasp the moments. And this was a rare moment indeed,
with Baron Cohen snatching a breath between the guerilla-style filming
of his latest movie about an outrageously camp fashion fanatic called
Bruno, and Fisher having wrapped filming in New York of her even more
colourfully dressed comedy, Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Now, a few weeks later, nestling into a big sofa at the Four Seasons
Hotel in Beverly Hills promoting Confessions, her first big comedy
since she broke through as a flame-haired nymphet in Wedding Crashers,
Fisher is starting to feel a little more comfortable in the city of
second-hand angels. “There are photographers outside the house, but I
can pull a baseball cap over my hair and slip out without being
noticed. It’s not so easy when I am with Him — the size difference is
absurd. My secret — and that of most actors in LA, the 98% of them you
don’t see in the magazines every week — is sticking with a small group
of friends who I trust, keeping it low-key and not behaving like I do
in movies.”

It’s fair to say her performance as Becky Bloomwood in Confessions is
standout comedy. It’s a knowing, sexy, sassy addressing of what all
girls know they have in them somewhere, in however great or small a
measure: a potentially disastrous relationship between their wardrobe,
their credit card and the shops. Oh, and it has the funniest
dancefloor turn since John Travolta and Uma Thurman’s two-fingered
salute in Pulp Fiction.

“These days I am very much a girlie girl,” says Fisher, 32. “I used to
be a tomboy, always outdoors. I grew up with a lot of brothers, so
this is all different for me. Now I have a great group of girlfriends
and no men in the gang. Don’t know why — I guess they don’t fit into
the girlie dinners and teas and going out in a posse.”

So what does Isla’s posse, like, do? She is studying Judaism, better
to understand her man’s bloodline, and declares she wants to become a
mohel, a Jewish man who circumcises babies, and use her religious
status to scare the wits out of boys. “So I go out with the girls and
the knife, and when I am in interviews, I shall just sit there and
sharpen it . . .” She starts howling at the absurdity of her
escalating comic vision. “We lurk inside my house waiting for the UPS
guy, and we all leap on him and . . . no, no, joking.”

This is a rare flash of the unguarded Isla, the 5ft 2in fireball who
exploded from Methodist Ladies’ College, Perth, to play Shannon Reed
in the Oz soap Home and Away. This is the caffeinated tabloid queen
who once told reporters how she used a hapless young thing to lose her
virginity only to dump him the next day, how she wanted to burn down
the house of one ex and strangle the pet of another, and who fessed up
to a fantasy about Mr Bean. “It was always said with a wink, but that
wink never came across. So I have had to shut myself up, because I
have more to protect now. Some subjects are off limits, I’m afraid,”
she says, and for a moment seems genuinely embarrassed.

Most obviously these subjects include Baron Cohen, whom she namechecks
only once, as she recalls how they turned tail from a cinema that was
showing Slumdog Millionaire. “They only had two seats apart and, as it
was our seventh anniversary, it didn’t feel right to sit away from
each other, so we just walked around in the New York snow.”

It was a rare night away from her infant, glimpsed during the
interview through frequent BlackBerry checks with the babysitter, but
never named. “It can be tough because motherhood is one of my most
favourite things ever,” she says. One senses the tension because she
is a gregarious, full-throated laugher, a woman who loves to
entertain, maybe even needs to please people around her. There was
certainly a hunger that drove her to trade Home and Away for acting
school in Paris (where she qualified as a clown) and took her to
Hollywood.

Today, the redhead describes herself as a comic actor, but she never
had the confidence to commit to full-time laughter-making before she
hooked up with Baron Cohen. They reportedly met at a party in Sydney,
and he proposed over milk and cookies in the garden of the Chateau
Marmont hotel in LA in 2004. And since then her star has been in the
ascendant, from Wedding Crashers and on to Confessions, the film
version of the first book in Sophie Kinsella’s globe-spanning series.

On the surface, Confessions is just another post-Sex and the City
“hooray for girliewood” chick flick — the story of a young woman
falling in greedy and debt-ridden thrall to the shop windows of New
York — but it has more bite and magic than that, thanks, in large
measure, to Fisher’s performance: part naive, girlie spendaholic, part
smart and funny prankster, complete with a mean line in slapstick. It
is also a film about shopping that somehow manages not to feel off-
key. “This film was shot in a different world of boom times, but the
warning about credit-card abuse makes it feel appropriate for now,”
she says. “I shop rarely and poorly, being a working mum, but I learnt
about the different styles of shopping — the compulsive, the trophy-
hunter. There are people out there who dream of shopping, literally.”

The film was costumed by Patrica Field, fresh from Sex and the City.
“I went for the big [Sarah Jessica Parker] flower, obviously, but had
to settle for tottering around on the highest heels I could manage,”
says Fisher. “We did every designer from Todd Oldham and vintage Gucci
to Prada and Vivienne Westwood — God, I love her.” Her character’s
candy-coloured mixture of pink cupcake dresses matched with dalmatian-
spotty shawls has become a hot web topic, with opinions ranging from
“wondrous” to “why did she skin a Muppet?” But Fisher isn’t worried.
“It’s supposed to be over the top — a mixture of high fashion and high
street. There is a science and a fashion language here I did not
appreciate before.”

Her own taste runs more to J Brand jeans, Alice + Olivia cashmere and
— a hangover from her clowning days — Repetto shoes from Paris, and
the slimming magic of Spanx. “I swear that my waist is now skinnier
than before I was pregnant — how do they do that? Certainly it’s
nothing to do with me working out. Jerry Bruckheimer [Shopaholic’s
mega-successful producer] hired a personal trainer to help me get rid
of the 60lb I put on during pregnancy. He said I was lucky I was
blessed with good genes because I had a really bad attitude towards
exercise — like stopping when it hurt or got boring and having a cup
of tea and a slice of cake. Apparently you are not supposed to do that
in Hollywood.”

Good news: this funny girl shows no sign of stopping when it comes to
breaking the rules.

Confessions of a Shopaholic is released nationwide on February 20

Copyright 2009 "The London Times"

Jaime