In the writer-director’s new series Chloe, a young woman tries to make sense of the death of someone she followed on Instagram by infiltrating her social group. Creating it was ‘kind of gross’
When Alice Seabright watched her new BBC One drama Chloe for the first time, she got a “vulnerability hangover”. That, the film-maker explains, is the feeling you get when you’ve said too much on a drunken night out. “The next day you think: why did I tell them all that stuff about me? I felt like that: too exposed, uncomfortable and kind of gross.”
On the one hand, that kind of reaction is apparently par for the course when it comes to making film and TV. “It’s a known thing that when you watch an assembly [first cut] you want to puke,” Seabright tells me over Zoom from the plush Bristol flat she has been staying in during Chloe’s production. Yet the show left the 32-year-old feeling more unsettled than usual. This was different from rewatching the episodes of Netflix smash Sex Education she directed, or even her back catalogue of quirky, quietly moving short films.
