Greg Wise - ‘Therapy Saved My Life. And My Marriage.’

You might know Greg Wise as swoonsome Willoughby in the 1995 Sense and Sensibility TV adaptation (where he met his future wife, Dame Emma Thompson, on set); or from his roles in Cranford, The Outcast, The Crown or The Buccaneers. But Wise’s career spans far beyond the world of film and TV. A passionate advocate for talking openly about grief, particularly among men, Greg is an ambassador for Marie Curie, Carers Trust and the Good Grief Trust, and a patron of End of Life Doula UK. His new book, Grief Talking, uses his own personal stories of loss to provide the reader with an emotional and practical map to exploring the most difficult human landscapes. In this conversation, we discuss the depths of trauma and grief, how you have to be able to take rejection as an actor, his and Emma’s experience of IVF, and the unconventional way they built their family. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 Introduction 03:07 Why He Wrote Grief Talking 05:05 Masculinity And Mourning 06:20 Trauma Versus Grief 08:03 End Of Life Doula Work 14:12 Rejection In Acting 24:40 IVF And Secondary Infertility 28:26 IVF Strain on Couples 29:17 Failure Language in Fertility 30:20 Dehumanising Medical Labels 32:22 IVF as Grief and Absence 33:48 Rebuilding Family and Therapy 35:11 Unexpected Family with Tindy 40:22 Gaia Acting and Resilience 41:42 Strictly, Risk and Clare Tribute 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: Men and women grieve in different ways: men are thinking grievers. Women (more generally speaking) are emotional grievers. Trauma needs to be looked at before the grief is handled. If you can’t take rejection, you shouldn’t be an actor. 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Greg’s book, Grief Talking, is available to pre-order now and is out on 5th November: www.panmacmillan.com/authors/greg-wise/grief-talking/9781035058297 Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Mo Gawdat (2022) - swap.fm/l/xg1simb4t2cTTqO3ZBE9 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Greg answer listener questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://lnk.to/7i0moR Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: askhowtofail.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  To feel that there is a prescriptive grief journey and we're failing is just cruel. It is the only advice I would give to anybody wanting to be an actor. If you can't take rejection, you can't do this job. Paul Bettany, back in the day when we were all starting out, was known as Paul Better Than Me. Of course, he got all the jobs and no one else could do. Therapy saved my life. It saved our marriage.

• 0:26Elizabeth Day?

  Hello, this is Elizabeth Day from How to Fail here. This is the podcast that firmly believes failure isn't the end of our story. It's just the beginning. Before we get involved in today's episode, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.

• 0:46Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 1:31Elizabeth Day?

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• 2:15Elizabeth Day?

  years, Shopify gives you the tools and support to get started with confidence and make the most of the busy shopping season. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial. That's Shopify.co.uk/fail. Go to Shopify.co.uk/fail today to hear your first...

• 2:40Elizabeth Day?

  If we are to believe in nominative determinism, the idea that what you are called shapes who you become, then the actor, producer and author Greg Wise has definitely grown into his last name. His new book, Grief Talking, uses his own personal stories of loss, the death of his university friend, his parents and of his beloved sister Claire, to provide the reader with an emotional and practical map to exploring one of the most difficult human landscapes. But it was a different kind of emotional exploration that initially brought Wise to public attention. Born in Newcastle and raised partly in Northumberland, Wise was the son of two architects.

• 3:23Elizabeth Day?

  He initially followed suit, studying architecture at university before switching to drama at what was then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. His first role after graduating was in a West End musical. In 1995, he played Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, adapted for screen by one of its stars, Emma Thompson. The meeting was fortuitous, not only a career breakthrough for Wise, but also a personal one. He and Thompson have now been together for almost 30 years. Further roles followed in film and TV, Cranford, The Outcast and Natalie, The Crown and The Buccaneers. Today, he combines his acting with writing and talking about death and our need to make

• 4:08Elizabeth Day?

  it a part of our openly discussed lives, as well as his charitable roles as ambassador for Marie Curie, the Carers Trust and the Good Grief Trust. He's also a patron for End of Life Doula UK and passionate about encouraging men in particular to find a vocabulary and a healthy expression for the pain of grief. As he writes in his new book, "I will continually be sternum-thumped by each new grief as I navigate my course through my life. That is the price to be paid for the gift of living of loving." Greg Wise, welcome to How to Fail.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Thank you very much. Nominative determinism.

• 4:50Elizabeth Day?

  There you are. Mr Wise.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Mr Wise. Well, always at school, it was always, "That wasn't very wise, was it?"

• 4:58Elizabeth Day?

  How irritating.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Yes, it was tricky.

• 5:00Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  It was tricky.

• 5:02Elizabeth Day?

  Tell me why you wanted to write this book.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  I was full-time carer for my sister for the last three months of her life.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  And a book was published that had come from a blog that she'd started when she was first diagnosed with cancer, that I then took over when she became too ill to write. And it was just the end of a day, thoughts about the day as a defence for me, more than anything, to not have to field emails and phone calls and deal with other people's anxiety. It became an exquisite moment of my day, which sometimes had just been dull because Claire was on very heavy opioids all the time and was asleep for most of the day, or had been quite traumatic.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  And I would just write my thoughts and send them into the ether.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  And after she died, I was approached by a publisher saying, if I'd wanted to ever thought of making this into a book. And I said, yes, absolutely, but it has to not be edited. The grumpiest piece of writing, the most frustrated I ever was with my sister in my writing was the night before she died.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  And I didn't feel that I should be given the chance to go back into the writing and make myself look lovely. And in the interim, in the eight years since that was first published, I've met a lot of extraordinary people in the end of life world, in the death world, in the grief world. And I've learned from them and I've learned from sitting with my thoughts and my grief.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  I'm not a therapist, I'm not a counsellor. I tell my grief stories. This is what happened. This is how I responded. This is what I've learned. That's all. And the thing I'm proudest of with this is I don't give a single piece of advice.

• 6:59Elizabeth Day?

  You talk about the rucksack of masculinity given to you at birth. Unpack that, if you will.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  My generation and the generations above were very much brought up with the big boys don't cry, you have to be capable, you have to be the provider, the protector. Men and women grieve in very different ways. Men generally are what I call thinking grievers. We are cerebral. It is a challenge.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Women mainly are emotional grievers. They need to express, they seek support. And I realised that an awful lot of what I had read over the years, the grief books I had read over the years, were not addressed to me as a man.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  And I thought, I might be able to unpack a bit of this and just tell my stories from when I was in my immortal phase of life in my twenties, when my closest friend was drowned,

• 8:10Speaker 00

  up until a death four years ago.

• 8:14Elizabeth Day?

  You mention your closest friend there, Simon. An extraordinarily traumatic death.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:22Elizabeth Day?

  And your book also explores the difference between trauma and grief.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:28Elizabeth Day?

  I'd love to hear a little bit more about those differences.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Grief is, according to the posh people, adaptive.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  So over time, if you're able to sit with it,

• 8:45Speaker 00

  you train yourself not to expect your mum to be behind the door when you open the door to her house. And over time, that happens. You adapt to the present landscape that you find yourself in. Trauma sticks you in the moment, in the moment of the happening. A traumatic occurrence, a crash, a car crash, a tsunami, an avalanche, a death, a sudden death, an unexpected death. The trauma needs to be looked at before the grief can start to become adaptive,

• 9:27Speaker 00

  because you get stuck in the moment, in the time of the terrible happening. And you can't escape from that. And as far as I'm aware from talking to people that know stuff, you've got to address the trauma. You've got to unlock yourself from being stuck in that moment before you can start to adapt to the new landscape that you find yourself without this person in it.

• 9:57Elizabeth Day?

  I'm fascinated by your work as an end of life doula and what that entails. And I also noticed in your book, which I have to say, just personally speaking, was so resonant and necessary as a piece of work. And thank you for putting it into the world. But you don't meditate on what might happen after a physical death that much.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:19Elizabeth Day?

  I suppose it's two questions really. I wonder whether you've had thoughts about that or whether it's more helpful not to have thoughts about that. And whether thoughts about an after physical life are part of being an end of life doula or whether they're deliberately left off the table.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  A person's afterlife resides in the body of the people who are still here.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  I think. So my sister is still very much present. My shape, my brokenness is shaped by all the people I've loved who have died, by the accidents that I've had, by everything. And we carry them with us. I have no idea about anything that might happen after we die. For me, we are here and then it ends. For me, being a non-religious person, I think an awful lot of the idea of heaven has been used to keep people in their place. Yes, life is brutal and it's horrible, but you will spend an eternity eating strawberries with the angels.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  So get on with it, dig the trench and shut up. But my closest friend, one of my closest friends is a vicar. And I love listening to his ideas, his faith. He has the faith. And if there is a heaven, that would be lovely.

• 11:45Elizabeth Day?

  And as an end of life doula, what do you do? What happens?

• 11:50Speaker 00

  It's non-medical. You can do whatever is required of you. Buy baked beans at the shops, help tidy the space.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Have conversations, have conversations with family members. Maybe get family members where there's been a rift together. It's to try as much as you are able and as much as the person that you are there for is able to make their end of life how they wanted it to be.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And it's one of the things that we need to get better at as a society to talk about end of life. How present you want to be, how medicated you want to be. If the thing that you're most fearful of is pain. Pain medication unfortunately brings along with it the fact that you're no longer in the room. If it's a heavy opioid that you have to be on. Are there moments that you want to be present for your child's wedding, your grandchild's first communion, whatever it might be?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  And it's how to be as graceful and as present as you can in this, what has been called life's last great adventure.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  And we, I think as a society, are so phobic about death and dying and blinkered to the fact that we're all going to die.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  And not to get political, but we have to sort out adult social care. We have to sort out that. We will all require it.

• 13:43Elizabeth Day?

  There's a beautiful passage in Grief Talking where you ask your wife, Emma, how she thinks grief has changed you.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:54Elizabeth Day?

  How do you think grief has changed you?

• 13:57Speaker 00

  I know that having sat in pain and having listened to it and opened myself to it and learned from it and having sought help from people, that I am more loving, more compassionate, more empathic. I am grateful. I have proper joy from having sat in the pain. I'm evangelical that this work is a world game changer. Unless we are able to see our own pain, we can't see anyone else's.

• 14:43Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you, Greg. My final tiny question before we move on to your failures is that if anyone is listening to this right now and they are in the throes of grief, something has just happened and they feel the tumult and the pain and the fear of it. What would you like to say to that person?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Good luck. Please sit with it. Please listen to it. Please don't judge it. Don't belittle it. Don't allow it to be judged or belittled by others. Be where you are. Feel the pain. There is no roadmap. It is chaos. One of the things that I wanted to do very early in the book was to say, the Kubler Ross of it all is nonsense.

• 15:31Elizabeth Day?

  This is the five stages.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  The five stages. Were she sitting here with us, she would say, it is nonsense. I wrote the book about terminally ill people in hospital, dying people, not about the people grieving for the dying people. It is not about grief. To feel that there is a prescriptive grief journey and we're failing

• 15:55Speaker 00

  is just cruel. It really is. It's hard enough as it is without feeling that you're failing. You are not failing if you're sitting with it.

• 16:06Elizabeth Day?

  Your first failure is failure to get probably 95% of the jobs that you've auditioned.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:13Elizabeth Day?

  How on earth does one deal with that level of rejection?

• 16:19Speaker 00

  It is the only advice I would give to anybody wanting to be an actor. If you can't take rejection, you can't do this job. Doesn't matter if you can't act. There's a lot of people who've had really good careers who can't act. But if you can't take rejection, you can't do this. I originally trained as an architect. Both sides of my family are fine artists, sculptors. They produce something which is out with them. They produce a piece of work that is judged, that is critiqued. Our problem as an actor is we are the piece of work that is judged and critiqued.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  So one of the things that I realised very early on is I have to separate myself as Greg from myself as the actor. They're not critiquing me as a person. They just don't think I'm right for the role. And that's quite hard.

• 17:16Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  It can make you really grumpy not to get a job.

• 17:21Elizabeth Day?

  Talk me through some of your worst rejections or the ones that stick in the mind for whatever reason.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  For probably the first, at least the first two years, I would get down to the last two for a job and it would always go to Clive Owen. God bless him, who I know is a really lovely man I've never met. And it was, it was, it was actually pissingly funny. Of course, the agent would say, oh, you're down to the last two. I said, Clive's gonna get it. Clive will get it. And that's fine. We all have our, I won't call him the nemesis, but you know, the one that looks like us but is just better than us. Paul Bettany, back in the day when we were all starting out, was known as Paul Better Than Me. Of course, he got all the jobs and no one else could.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  But again, what's, what I even early on realised that if I was asked to do something and I didn't want to do it, I'd get back to them and say, my mate would be fantastic in that role. You know, we all have to try and look out for each other.

• 18:25Elizabeth Day?

  And do you think you've sorted it now? Like you are able to see yourself, Greg Wise, as distinct from the actor that they're.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Oh, I think I did it early on.

• 18:34Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  And I always said to myself, even early, early on, you are allowed a day to be grumpy and then get over yourself and get on with it. Also, I have tried my hardest since I started really not to work too much.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  I was a very frustrating article for my first agent when I'd just come out of drama school.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Because I'd do a job and then go off travelling. Even then, I think I realised there's no such thing as a career. That's madness. It is a series of choices. And as we know, a film's just come out, $260 million worth of film.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  It's collapsed in the box office.

• 19:22Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  So if anyone says, this would be a good career move, you go.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  If I want, if, if I feel at this moment in time, this is the right job for me to do, I'd love to do it.

• 19:34Elizabeth Day?

  What did your parents think about you being an actor?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  I started at Edinburgh College of Art doing architecture, which I loved. But I dropped into the student theatre there very quickly and realised, I never wanted to be an architect, I wanted to do the degree. But I dropped into the student theatre heavily. And halfway through the first year of my architecture degree, I went to my dad and said, I want to drop out and just pursue acting. And he said, look, do whatever you want. Get a degree. Just get your degree. He said, go off, you can be a plumber, if you want to be a plumber, but just get your degree. Very good advice. And I got my degree and went straight to drama school after that.

• 20:22Elizabeth Day?

  Are you sick of talking about John Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  No!

• 20:27Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, good!

• 20:28Speaker 00

  No!

• 20:29Elizabeth Day?

  So glad, because it really would be remiss of me not to ask you. I am classic Greg Wise's Willoughby generation. Best Austin adaptation ever, in my humble opinion. You are an extraordinary Willoughby.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:45Elizabeth Day?

  Did you just know that role was yours? From, did it feel, was there a soul connection to it?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Uh, I had four auditions.

• 20:54Elizabeth Day?

  How did the auditions go?

• 20:55Speaker 00

  And a screen test. Willoughby turns up in one of the scenes with some flowers he's picked from a meadow for Mary Ann. And that's balanced by Brandon turning up with his hothouse flowers and...

• 21:10Speaker 00

  So I think the second or the third audition, they were wanting me to do that scene. And I got to the place where I was meant to be auditioning and thought, fuck, I've not got anything with me. And there was a shitty London corporation bush outside this place. And I just ripped some leaves off it, shoved them into my bag. Say, I'll, I'll, I'll use that in the audition. Went in and there was M. And I met M for the first time. And M was playing the part of Mary Ann, which Kate Winslet played in my audition.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  So I'm there being Willoughby and I suddenly out of my bag whipped this greenery and she said, that was the moment I knew you were the guy for the part.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And then I did tests with, with Winslet. And then went off to a mate's house in the country. And this was 1995, very early days of mobile phones. And I had my big Motorola brick that you had to pull the aerial out and open up and...

• 22:21Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, the flip one.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And that battery was the size of a car. And I was somewhere in the depths of some, somewhere and my phone went and I couldn't get a signal, couldn't get a signal. So stood on the top of this little mound to hear from my agent that I'd been offered the part. And I slowly sunk into this mound and realised that I was standing on a pile of shit.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Manure.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  She said, you've got to get back, you've, Ang wants to see you this evening in London. So I said, okay, fine. So I jumped in the car, zoomed to wherever Ang, Ang Lee, who directed it, was. And I turned up to meet Ang, covered in shit.

• 23:03Elizabeth Day?

  At one with the natural world.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  At one with the natural world, completely.

• 23:07Elizabeth Day?

  Going to ask you an odd question now.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Very good.

• 23:09Elizabeth Day?

  But I feel you probably haven't been asked it before because men don't. Did you know how handsome you were?

• 23:16Speaker 00

  I have always had a problem.

• 23:19Elizabeth Day?

  Knowing that?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  With that.

• 23:20Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Uh, which is why mostly, no, in fact, I think I've never played the hero.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  I've always played the darker side. I'm playing a psychopath at the moment.

• 23:36Elizabeth Day?

  In this podcast recording?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  In this podcast recording, yeah. Can, can you tell? Uh, now I'm just about to finish a, a series for Netflix. I equate it with, if I were not what is described as beautiful, if, say, my ears were all skew and my nose was this and that, and no one would come up to you and go, oh gosh, you're ugly, aren't you? But they come up and say, gosh, you're, you're good looking.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  It's an accident of birth, that's all it is. I am the way I look from my Transylvanian grandfather, my Croatian grandmother, my French mum, my north of England dad's family. That's it. However, as an actor, you can use that.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  So coming back to Willoughby, I said to the costume designer when we were starting to look at how he should look, I said, I want his first entrance to be a superhero. I want him to look like fucking Batman. I want a cape. Because he's a dream. He's Mary Ann's dream, made flesh. And of course, no one is like that. He has feet of clay.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  And that's what I've always been interested in with an audience. You use their preconception of how you look and your manner and your charm. And you go, yeah, but you're wrong.

• 25:11Elizabeth Day?

  Smart.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  And that, and that I really enjoy.

• 25:14Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. A final question on this is about the witchy friend.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Witchy friend.

• 25:18Elizabeth Day?

  You have to tell the story.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was sleeping on my sister's sofa bed at the time that I'd been asked to do the job and, and getting ready to go off filming. And, and my lovely friend Heather, who I used to sing in bands with in Edinburgh, um, a beautiful singer, is also a witch. And we were on the phone and she said, um, you're gonna meet your, your future wife on this job.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  And, okay.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Winslet. She's gorgeous, but she doesn't, she doesn't do it for me. Oh, well, there we are. You're wrong. She was right.

• 26:01Elizabeth Day?

  And you did try, you dated Winslet, as we call her.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  I didn't date Winslet.

• 26:05Elizabeth Day?

  You went to Glastonbury with Winslet.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd go with a mate.

• 26:07Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  We went up the tour, we had a lovely day, it was one of our days off from filming and I had my little red Astra with me and we went off for a drive. I never dated Winslet, no.

• 26:18Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  I love her, but not in that way. And Dame Mrs Wise and I have been together 31 years now.

• 26:25Elizabeth Day?

  Congratulations.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 26:28Elizabeth Day?

  That brings us on to your second failure. And I want to say personally how grateful I am that you are going to talk about this. It's your failure to get pregnant.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:40Elizabeth Day?

  So I'm also someone who failed to get pregnant and in fact have children. And so I understand a lot of what you are describing here in terms of the IVF and that whole process. You had, you and Emma had had your first daughter via IVF, Gaia.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:56Elizabeth Day?

  So this was secondary infertility.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:59Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us about this experience.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  We, we'd been together for

• 27:06Speaker 00

  three, four years.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Decided we wanted to start a family, realised that we couldn't, did the tests.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Went to New York to do the IVF. Saw a four-celled, large collection there. I think three, three were put back in.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  And just, I think almost exactly on her 40th birthday, we found that she was pregnant. And this four-celled thing became our daughter.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  And in Gaia's second year of life, we tried again and failed and tried again and failed. It's brutal anyway, IVF.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  And it brings so much baggage with it. It's the most authentic feeling of failure ever. Because this is why we're here. We are here to procreate. And you're not a man if you can't. And you're not a woman if you can't. And we're brought up with the fables that all boys grow up to be fathers and all girls grow up to be mothers. And it took us a very long time to dig ourselves out of that hole. And we didn't get help with it. And at the same time, we had our gorgeous daughter.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  So the pull of that, the exquisite love we felt for her and then the jarring pain that we wouldn't be able to provide her with a sibling and for us to have another child. And it took a long time to dig ourselves out of that hole.

• 29:11Elizabeth Day?

  Were you able to find each other in that? Were you able to talk to each other?

• 29:15Speaker 00

  No.

• 29:15Elizabeth Day?

  No.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  No. No, we were dislocated.

• 29:20Elizabeth Day?

  It's very difficult. I obviously have only experienced it from the female perspective. But I do always think it must be there's a peculiar kind of challenge when you're the man because it's the mother who carries. And so was there part of you that felt you weren't permitted to have sadness?

• 29:42Speaker 00

  It's more than that within the process because it's all about the woman, the process. It's all about filling them with the various hormones to stimulate the various things. The harvesting, I mean, as you know, it's a brutal process. And where I was in myself at the time, the savior figure, I couldn't save M. There was nothing I could do. Dispassionately, it wasn't my gig. She was undertaking all of this. All I could do was to support

• 30:26Speaker 00

  and try and soothe her rather than myself. So you get into this terrible spiral, this cycle. Luckily, we found our way through. But I know couples who were unable to remain couples after failed IVF.

• 30:49Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I went through a divorce. Married again now to a lovely person. But I completely understand the weight and the pressure of that. And as you rightly put it, the dislocation. My experience of IVF was also that at that time, and we're going back a few years and we're talking here about 20 something years ago for you and Emma.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Twenty six, twenty, twenty five years ago.

• 31:17Elizabeth Day?

  The language then was the language of failure. So I was constantly told I was failing to respond to the drugs. A friend of mine was told that she had an inhospitable womb. Someone else was told she had an incompetent cervix.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Oh, isn't that lovely?

• 31:31Elizabeth Day?

  Isn't that nice?

• 31:32Speaker 00

  And obviously, these were all told by men.

• 31:35Elizabeth Day?

  Exactly. And it's so interesting going back to my mindset then. I did not think to question any of that until my wonderful friend Fran said, maybe you're not failing to respond to the drugs. Maybe the drugs are failing you. And I reflected on it and you're completely right. Every single consultant I was under the care of, bar one, who I went in search for, was a man. So yes, it's men telling you this. And they might be the most empathetic, wonderful individuals. A lot of them weren't, but they might be. And they still won't have physical understanding of what you're going through.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Of course not.

• 32:08Elizabeth Day?

  You use this word in your book, which I think is so apt, dehumanizing. Tell us why you chose that word.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Because IVF is about creating a human. The process is utterly dehumanizing. Because you have an incompetent whatever. Also geriatric.

• 32:29Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, geriatric pregnancy, that's old one.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Here we are. M was 40 with whatever dried up eggs or whatever, you know, they would say. The weight of injection that completely transforms one's system. Because it's hormones. And the madness of all of that at the same time as having to stay resolutely calm and available. The scans and the decisions and the appointments. And then one of the reasons we went to New York

• 33:10Speaker 00

  was because we were under a wonderful woman, doctor. But the harvesting, the medicalization of something. And then the stress and the anxiety of the weight, whether it has worked, whether it is going to be successful. And if it is successful, whether you're able to carry full term. It's just horrible. And most people make a baby

• 33:52Speaker 00

  and enjoy making the baby, hopefully.

• 33:56Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, and the cruelty is that it so often happens at a time when your contemporaries are popping out babies with seeming ease. Can you remember how many cycles you had?

• 34:06Speaker 00

  You know what, I can't.

• 34:07Elizabeth Day?

  You probably blanked it out. You write about this in the book because you categorize it as a form of grief. I'm so grateful to you for doing that. It's a complicated and nuanced grief, isn't it?

• 34:20Speaker 00

  But all grief is complicated and nuanced.

• 34:22Elizabeth Day?

  True, true, true. And all grief is about absence. But this is a peculiar kind of absence.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Again, one of the things I really wanted to do was say grief isn't just about bereavement. You can grieve the loss of a potential shape of life. You can grieve the life you are living. You can grieve the relationship you never had. You can grieve the relationship you're in. Grief is all, it's wide spectrum stuff. And within IVF, it's dripping with grief. It really is. Because it's so much about the projected idea

• 35:11Speaker 00

  of a shape that has been desired, that is just crunching into dust in front of you and dissipating. And that's really hard. And that takes a long time to navigate.

• 35:36Elizabeth Day?

  How did you and Emma get through it?

• 35:40Speaker 00

  It took a while. It was Gaia. Here we are, we are a family. We do have a child that we love. We are this shape. I think also we bring with us the idea of what a family should look like by the family that we came from. So we both came from families of two siblings. That's a family, that's what it looks like. Mum, dad, two kids. We've only got one. We're not a family. We failed. And it takes a time, it takes a while. And of course, with a little person, your heart is so open.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  The dripping love you feel for this little tiny thing helped heal.

• 36:32Elizabeth Day?

  And you went into therapy for the first time.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  And I went into therapy.

• 36:36Elizabeth Day?

  I'm saying that because you put it as part of your failure. That wasn't me being like. And you really needed.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  My God, we were mad. Therapy saved my life. It saved our marriage, without a doubt. Without a doubt. I would not be sitting here without therapy.

• 36:54Speaker 02

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• 37:23Speaker 03

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• 37:34Elizabeth Day?

  Don't you see how destroyed I am as a person?

• 37:38Speaker 03

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• 37:43Speaker 04

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• 37:46Speaker 03

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• 37:53Elizabeth Day?

  You did go on to have a second child.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  We did, we did, we did. Bizarrely, because the universe is wild.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  And not planned, happenstance.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Em, for years, used to throw a party for the refugee council around Christmas time for the recently arrived.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And met a young lad who'd just arrived from Rwanda.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Who was being fostered with a family not too far from ours. Was having a difficult time with his foster mother. He'd only been in Britain, I think,

• 38:38Speaker 00

  two, three months. At that point, he was just about to be 16.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  He'd been a child soldier. He'd been kidnapped by the Inter Hamway when he was 12.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  He'd been imprisoned by his country's government for having been in the Inter Hamway.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  He was fantastically traumatised. And for whatever reason, we said, look, come on, come and have a Sunday lunch. We talked to his foster mum, said, is it all right for him to spend the weekends with us?

• 39:15Speaker 00

  And gradually, gradually, gradually, Tindi Ewa became part of the family.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  And gradually, gradually, gradually, we became his family in his eyes, and his parent figures, and Gaia, his sister. And Gaia was three

• 39:36Speaker 00

  when he turned up. So she's never really known life without her big African brother.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  And we helped him do his GCSEs and his A-levels. And he spent all his free time with us and spent his holidays with us up at our cottage in Scotland. And we took him down to university and he was all set on doing politics and international relations at Exeter. And then the Home Office tried to deport him and we had to go to court. And we fought them on the fact that his family was now here. And he would be killed if he went back. And we won.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  He's 40 this year.

• 40:27Elizabeth Day?

  He's clearly an extraordinary person.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  He is, he is.

• 40:32Elizabeth Day?

  And I wonder, he clearly has given you so much as you have him and taught you so much. What has Tindi taught you specifically about resilience?

• 40:45Speaker 00

  I don't know if Tindi's taught me about resilience. Tindi's has taught me an awful lot of things. From the resilience that he has shown,

• 40:57Speaker 00

  that I think an awful lot of people who find themselves having survived exquisite trauma.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  And especially people who have been

• 41:15Speaker 00

  given leave to remain in a safe space, in a safe country. Depending on the person, but I think I see this a lot. Okay, I've been given a chance, the possibilities are endless. I have to, I have to put the work in now. I'm from a refugee family. My grandmother had to escape. She was Jewish.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Pre-war. And the way that Tindi was brought up by his mother, because his father died a slow death of AIDS, from AIDS, when he was

• 41:52Speaker 00

  just starting to become an adolescent. And his mum said, right, you have to be resourceful now, you kids. Dad's not around.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  You, you have to put the work in now. So that, that tremendous work ethic, but also the fact that there is,

• 42:15Speaker 00

  he has found himself in a place where there are opportunities.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  If you seize them, if you run with them, if you, if you do the graft. And it's been, it's been incredible seeing the work ethic and the determination. He's also a bloody steamroller, don't get in his way. And that is something that is so

• 42:42Speaker 00

  required from us who are born here. To be, to be told, there is opportunity if you put the work in. I don't want to talk about the American dream because that's bullshit, but

• 42:58Speaker 00

  you, you can further yourself.

• 43:00Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. It's a great antidote to bitterness and resentment.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:04Elizabeth Day?

  Doing the thing and feeling grateful.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:09Elizabeth Day?

  Gaia's an actor now.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:11Elizabeth Day?

  How are you feeling about that?

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Well, you know what? I, I'd always hoped she'd go off and do something proper.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Look, her mum and dad are actors. My mum and dad were architects. I studied architecture. I still hope she'll go and do something proper, but that's about my relationship with acting. My dear lady wife would say, acting is proper. No, she's, she's, she's doing very well. She's playing a regular in All Creatures Great and Small, which is universally, worldwide adored. She's just played a little role in the thing I'm doing for Netflix as well, which is great. She, she's, yeah, she's starting out.

• 43:51Elizabeth Day?

  And do you think she's got the rejection?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Oh God, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, where we are now, unfortunately, all the kids, all the, all the young actors, it's just doing self-tape after self-tape after self-tape in their bedroom to their phone. You know, back in my day, at least you got into a room with a director and a casting director and you could, you could meet them and be directed by them and gauge if you want to spend three months of your life with, with these people. Now it's all just you alone in your bedroom with your, with your phone. So she, she is well versed in rejection, which is great. She is, she has that resilience, thankfully.

• 44:30Elizabeth Day?

  Your final failure is that you are actually constantly open to it. As you put it to me, you only want to do things now that I don't know if I can do them.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:40Elizabeth Day?

  So that you exist on the edge of possibility.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:43Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us about Strictly Come Dancing, Greg. Don't know why I put it in here, but.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  That was what Strictly was all about. I think probably one of the things that has come most clearly from, especially Claire's death, but, but all the other deaths around,

• 45:04Speaker 00

  is try and be as fully here as it's possible to be. Try and explore. Try not to imagine yourself on your deathbed having regrets.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  I'm constantly now only wanting to do things that I don't know I can do.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  I was asked to do Strictly. I'd never watched it. I can't dance. I was, I think, 57 at the time. And I thought, no, come on, do it, do it. Get into the rigor. See what your body is capable of to start with. See what your emotional

• 45:53Speaker 00

  side is capable of dealing with performance live in front of six, seven million people? And crashing and burning live in front of six, seven million people? And that's, that's what it's all about now. I didn't know I could do it. I did it for, I did four, four weeks on it. I didn't know I could write a book. I've written a book. I get bored very easily. So I want to do things that, that are a little bit mad or would appear not to be what I should be doing.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  And I think what happens a lot of the time, that, that, and the reason I think that people maybe get slightly depressed and.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  And have the crisis is is that they bring the walls in a bit close and say, no, come on, let's just see, let's just see, let's just keep pushing and see when we actually do fall off the cliff. It's it's further than you think.

• 46:54Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm. Strictly was also partly because Claire loved it.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:59Elizabeth Day?

  Claire loved a disco dance. And there's something so beautiful about you going on that show, talking about Claire, exploring painful terrain.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:13Elizabeth Day?

  And then.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Doing a mad disco dance.

• 47:15Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, donning sequins and a spray tan. Yes.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And not not doing a sad waltz.

• 47:22Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  But doing a stupid disco dance. Yeah, because we have to.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yes, it was. It was absolutely very much for Claire. She would have loved it. She would have biffed the naughty judge who kept giving me two out of 10, but that's by the by. And we have to celebrate the joy that these people were here.

• 47:46Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think you would go as far as to say that you enjoyed the failure of Strictly? I mean, I'm not saying because it wasn't really a failure in many respects. I mean, you left the show.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 47:57Elizabeth Day?

  But did you enjoy what you were experiencing as, I'm not particularly good at this, but there's something so playful about it that.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Oh, I loved I loved the rigor of Strictly. I loved the I loved the Mondays. They were called three three T shirt Mondays because you sweat so much as you're learning the new dance. I loved being in the room. I could have done without the Saturday nights of it all.

• 48:18Elizabeth Day?

  Right.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  That's what most people are there for, obviously, which is the same with me as an actor. I love the acting. I don't necessarily want to do all the premieres and all of that side of things. The the the the kicking off the programme is is quite traumatic, got to say.

• 48:39Elizabeth Day?

  I honestly.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  You just.

• 48:41Elizabeth Day?

  I just don't know how you do it.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  You know, you're you're the little sabutoe figure and they just go and you get you just get you get lobbed into the undergrowth. Em actually came to see all of them because I think she was more nervous than I was. So she'd be up in the booth watching it. And and she and I were just in the car on the way back going, what just happened? I got kicked off. What just happened? Yeah, what just happened? God, that was a bit mad, wasn't it? And it is, it is, it's brutal. But that's that's the show. That's part of it all. You know, it's that gladiatorial combat of it. Someone someone has to end up with the the is it a trireme or is that a ship? What's the?

• 49:21Elizabeth Day?

  What's a trireme?

• 49:21Speaker 00

  What's the gladiator's three pronged fork?

• 49:23Elizabeth Day?

  Is it a trident?

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Trident.

• 49:25Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 49:26Elizabeth Day?

  What's a trireme?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Trireme is a is a is a ship that has three hulls.

• 49:30Elizabeth Day?

  Huh. Well, I've learnt something.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  There we go. We've we see.

• 49:32Elizabeth Day?

  I've learnt a lot today.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  We learn something every day. Isn't that lovely? Yeah, the trident, you know, someone has to be has to have the the the trident sticking out their chest at the end of the contest.

• 49:42Elizabeth Day?

  You have been very honest there about not particularly enjoying the promo of projects. This book, Grief Talking, requires a very different kind of.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:54Elizabeth Day?

  Promotion.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:55Elizabeth Day?

  Where you are sharing some of the most difficult moments of your life and people are doing the same back to you.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:05Elizabeth Day?

  How are you protecting yourself?

• 50:08Speaker 00

  I'm doing therapy about it. It is an unbelievable privilege to hear people's stories. So I'm gonna have to work out a way of being able to bear witness, to honour someone and hold help them hold the space with their grief, but not eat it.

• 50:34Elizabeth Day?

  I wish you luck with it.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 50:36Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so grateful to you for doing it.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 50:41Elizabeth Day?

  And I would like to end talking about Claire.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 50:45Elizabeth Day?

  You do a terrific job of describing her in the book, and I wish I'd met her.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:50Elizabeth Day?

  She sounds like the quintessential fun aunt.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:54Elizabeth Day?

  And I wonder what she would be saying to you if she was sitting here right now.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Actually, it was Em who was clear about that, that that my sister was inquisitive and she was very clever. And she had a profound insight and view of the world and would be so intrigued with her little brother having done this work.

• 51:34Elizabeth Day?

  Greg Wise, Little Brother. Thank you so much for coming on How to Fail.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 51:42Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.