The Big Picture

Anjana Vasan and Sarah Kameela Impey bring authenticity and musical passion to their roles in
We Are Lady Parts.

Guest stars like Meera Syal and Malala Yousafzai add immense flavor to Season 2 of the series.
The genuine chemistry and bond between the cast members elevates the show, reflecting real female friendships with humor.

We Are Lady Parts is back to take over the world, and Anjana Vasan and Sarah Kameela Impey are helping it succeed. The Channel 4 and Peacock co-production returns for another encore this week, following the titular band as they come off a long stint of touring, only to find that they’ve got a number of road blocks, including but not limited to album recording costs and bands attempting to steal their thunder. Creator Nida Manzoor sends the band into yet another pitch-perfect frenzy, and it’s all anchored by a killer new soundtrack and the performances of its two stellar leads.

Vasan leads the series as the mousy but secretly badass Amina, a biochemist by day and Lady Parts’ guitarist by night. But it’s not simply a part — she released her own album, Strange Country Jukebox, right as We Are Lady Parts first premiered in 2021. She’s as bubbly and bright as Amina is on-screen, and it makes sense when she tells me that she brought a little bit of her own musical tastes to her character’s stage presence.

Impey, on the other hand, plays the grumpy and down on her luck Saira, the band’s lead vocalist and primary driving force — and she does so with such talent and passion that I was genuinely thrown by how bright and pleasant she is in person. Her first instinct is to prop up her fellow cast members not present on our Zoom call — including Juliette Motamed and Faith Omole — citing their real-life endeavors as musicians and how much they’ve all bonded as a unit.

It’s easy to see why We Are Lady Parts is such a successful series, and why I would one-hundred percent buy a Lady Parts vinyl if it ever hit the market: you can’t fake that kind of chemistry, that’s obvious even through two separate Zoom windows. Vasan and Impey are as funny in their real lives as they are in front of a camera, and together with Manzoor, they’ve made something legendary.

We Are Lady Parts A look at the highs and lows of the band members that make up a Muslim female punk band, Lady Parts, as seen through the eyes of Amina Hussein, a geeky PhD student who is recruited to be their unlikely lead guitarist.Release Date June 3, 2021 Cast Anjana Vasan , Sarah Kameela Impey , Faith Omole , Lucie Shorthouse Main Genre Comedy Seasons 2

Check out the video above or keep reading for our full conversation, including their thoughts on Season 2, working with Meera Syal and Malala Yousafzai, and how Wicked Little Letters influenced the way Vasan approached Amina in the second season.

COLLIDER: I am so excited to meet you guys. I adore this show so much. It was such a boon for me over the pandemic, and coming back to this new season has been such a joy amidst everything that’s been happening in the world. I just wanted to let you guys know that this show means a lot to me as somebody who loves music and uses it as a way to communicate with other people.

SARAH KAMEELA IMPEY: It was exactly the same for us. Just know that. It was such a joy to return and get to be together again and get to make this show again with all its beauty and heart and love and craziness. Yeah, it means the same.

Obviously music is an integral part of this show, and especially for your characters. For Saira and Sister Squire, and for Amina, it’s country singers like Don McLean. I know both of you are musical outside of this show, so are there any singers, groups, songs that mean something as personal to you as those singers are for them?

ANJANA VASAN: I mean, so many. But also, what I love is I think Amina and I share some very similar musical interests. Dolly Parton is a big one, a lot of songwriters, like Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, and Pete Seeger. All of them. Some of them I wanted to make sure they were on Amina’s wall because I wanted a little bit of my heroes up there as well. So, Pete Seeger is one of them, and Joan Baez. I want Amina to play the guitar really high up because that’s how she played her acoustic guitar. It’s still how she plays a punk guitar because I don’t want her to feel like she suddenly just became this cool person who can, like, rock out. She has to punk out in Amina’s way, and it’s a very sort of folky, nerdy, guitar-high-up kind of way. So that’s maybe where I put in my own personal love of music into her as well. Sarah, what about you? I’m so curious to know yours.

IMPEY: I’ve always had a really eclectic taste, but definitely I was introduced to so many new people playing Saira, like X-Ray Spex became, like, my obsession. But I have to say, through the show, it’s actually the actors who are musicians as well. Anjana, I play her vinyl all the time, Juliette [Motamed’s] gigs, I’m at every one of her gigs, listening to Faith [Omole] sing. It’s just so incredible the actual musicians that these sensational women are. So yeah, they’re my new heroes and idols.

You mentioned X-Ray Spex. I chose not to put that vinyl up here today, but I am obsessed with Poly Styrene. But in terms of other punk music, coming into this show, was there anything you were introduced to or Nida Manzoor maybe guided you towards and said, “Okay, well, this is the sound that we’re going for, so look at these bands, these women?”

IMPEY: It wasn’t that specific. Actually, we talked around examples, but it was more about finding our unique qualities as this new band from our kind of experiences growing up and our circumstances. And it’s so nice, I feel like, going into the second series, because the influence that Amina has had on the writing style and musical element is beautiful and so different from the first.

VASAN: Yeah. Like “Malala Made Me Do It.” They wouldn’t write a song like that if Amina hadn’t been part of the band. And I think Nida was very careful about making sure that we didn’t end up sort of doing too much mimicry or copying of other bands. She wanted it to feel like a band that existed in its own universe, as well. That was also very important for her in terms of the aesthetic and the style.

Season 2’s Guest Stars Are Intimidating & Immense

This show does feel very DIY in the sense that a lot of punk bands are. But I wanted to go back to “Malala Made Me Do It” because I think that’s maybe my favorite scene this season, because it’s, I don’t want to say goofy, but it’s so tender-hearted and so honest, and I just have to know what working with Malala was like. When you know you get the PR in and they say, “Oh, she’s gonna be in the season,” you expect something, and then she’s just sitting on a horse. It’s so perfect for this show.

IMPEY: It became a proper day. It was on the schedule, we knew it was coming up, and just the energy around that day was so special, knowing that this icon was coming in and getting to actually be on set with her and then realizing, like everyone else, she is a human being who is nervous doing something different and excited to meet new people and just talk about really usual subjects. It was incredible. Our producer put on a suit, and he didn’t put on a suit for any of us. [Laughs]

VASAN: There were people who came in in full makeup, curled their hair. Everyone was so excited, and rightly so. But she was so calm and so up for anything and was very chill, and I think she was just taking it all in and wanting to do it well and just, like, be present. That scene, at first, was just us standing in front of the horse, but then it was like we decided we should be dancing. [Laughs] So it’s all just improvising some random, goofy… We don’t know how to do country and western dancing, but we tried to come up with it on the spot, and I think she was just watching us like we were so stupid and silly. I think she found us very amusing. I felt her chuckling on that horse while we were running around being a bit stupid, but I think she had a nice time.

Good, I’m glad. You also had another big guest star this season. Sarah, you got to work quite closely with Meera Syal, who I love personally. What was that experience like?

IMPEY: I love her so much and have watched her since I was small, so I was having a real, like, idol moment. Like, in that scene I really don’t have to act because she is Saira’s idol as well as mine. But it was amazing to hear of her experiences. Having never been on a set that was kind of as diverse and supporting and open and female-led, she was saying that energy was just, like, incomparable. But like the goofy things that you have with everyone, in between takes we would just be singing, and I just had an out-of-body experience where you have to check yourself and go, “This is actually happening. Wow. Just stop, pinpoint this moment.” So yeah, she is incredible.

Impey Gets to Challenge Herself and Saira This Season

You also get what I would say is sort of the most intense scene of this season towards the end in the recording studio. I don’t wanna spoil anything, but you do get thrown about quite a bit, and that’s obviously much different from anything else that Saira has experienced up to this point, so what was that process like getting tossed around a recording studio, for lack of a better word?

IMPEY: It was actually a really great day. I know it’s a really deep and meaningful subject, but I think there’s something within the words becoming something physical that make them so much more apparent with their effect. And to see it in the script and see, like, a stunt team are coming in and you’re gonna be on wires, and I was really ill that week, as well, but Saira was meant to be at kind of her darkest moment. So again, the universe provided, and I wasn’t feeling great, but there was so much support and encouragement. It was a whole day, and it just meant that we really got to pinpoint the real moments. The switches and bleeding from a scene into something that’s quite fantastical was just really wonderful.

This show does sort of push the boundaries of suspension of disbelief with moments like that or with Bisma and the television remote. For both of you, does that make it more difficult to sort of stay grounded in the character? Anjana, I know you have the voiceover to sort of help keep things tied down for Amina, but when it comes to those more fantastical moments, is it more difficult to keep things grounded or do you find that just an excuse to have fun and let loose for a little bit amidst the stress of making a television show?

VASAN: I think it helps that it feels like it always comes in a place where it’s an emotional extension of something you’re already feeling. So, yes, it probably feels very heightened but I think somehow, in the world of the show, it doesn’t. For example, with Amina, she wears her heart on her sleeve, you know exactly what she’s thinking. If anything, she can’t really hide her emotions very well. So, it feels actually very natural to go into her kind of flights of fancy moments. It’s almost like where in a musical you don’t have any more lines, so you start singing, and then in this one, it feels like where the lines kind of stop… So with Bisma it’s that amazing moment of, like, “I can’t, I can’t,” and then the remote control pauses everything. It’s like a perfect example of it just feeling so much like a comma rather than a full stop and then something happening. I guess that’s just Nida’s brilliant brain of making it not feel too like, “Oh, now we’re doing a fantasy moment so it’s a different thing.” It really does feel like the same quality, same emotion that you’re already feeling in the scene.

IMPEY: Do you know, the only thing about those bits that makes us come out of character is because they’re so funny, watching Anj have to do when she’s coming out of the smoke and you’re just carrying on like the scene is just casual. It’s just so hard, so much corpsing, so much laughing, retakes over and over again.

VASAN: The day that I had to be hit on the head with a banana, it’s only like a second, but after a while I was like, “Guys, I really need you to keep it together now,” because take after take it was just Lucy corpsing and then Juliette went, and then Sarah’s ever professional, but even she was trying to go, and then Faith was just losing, and I was like, “I can’t. There’s only so many times I can be hit by this banana.” [Laughs] Like, “Please, we’ve got to have at least one take!”

‘We Are Lady Parts’ Reflects Real Female Friendship

I will say, those little moments are really what make this show for me because watching it, especially in the second season now that the band knows each other really well, it reminds me so much of myself and my friends, and that’s something that you don’t get a whole ton of on television is those really honest female friendships. It’s really funny in that way that you can only be funny with people you really know really well.

VASAN: And I think even the goofy stuff, the silly stuff, it’s not easy to do if you don’t know people very well. It’s actually quite vulnerable being that funny and silly, and I think that for you to feel like you can go out there and try something funny and something a bit out there comedy-wise, you have to trust your other actors and not feel like, “Oh, I’m making a fool of myself.” And I do feel like anything goes, and we are so supportive, and I just don’t think you can manufacture that kind of chemistry. It’s either there or it isn’t, and thank god we have it, and that we are so obsessed with each other because I just don’t think the show would work otherwise. I think it would feel very acted, and, like like you say, punk is so DIY. If it doesn’t feel organic, I think you can just see it, sense it a mile away, and you don’t buy into it.

Anjana, I wanted to ask you a specific question, because in addition to this season coming out this year, you were also just in Wicked Little Letters with Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman. I don’t know in what order you shot things, but was there anything that you took from the experience of making that movie into this one, or vice versa, depending on when you shot it?

VASAN: I did Wicked Little Letters before Season 2 of We Are Lady Parts. That’s such a really good question. I would say it’s actually so different, even though they’re both comedies, because, in Wicked Little Letters, Gladys is really like the straight man in the whole piece. So if anything, I was having a hard time keeping a straight face because I was turning up and Olivia Colman was being brilliant or Dame Eileen Atkins was being hysterical, and I had to be the straight person and keep it together. And then with We Are Lady Parts, Nida’s often like, “More, Anj, more.” So I’m always doing, like, funny entrances and funny exits. For a while I started to get self-conscious because I was like, “Guys…” because in Season 2 the storylines go so much deeper. Then sometimes I’m convinced everyone’s having a hard time and Amina’s still in the background clowning away, and I’m like, “What is she doing?” [Laughs] So sometimes I get very self-conscious of it, but it really does feel like two ends of the spectrum in terms of comedy. I think more is more with Amina. Nida’s always like, “No, just amp it up.” And I think with Gladys, it’s like the complete opposite.

We Are Lady Parts Season 2 is now streaming on Peacock.