Nina Conti is the country’s most beloved ventriloquist , and her new film about a woman falling in love from within a monkey suit is her most personal work yet. If you’re not familiar with her work, the 50-year-old rocketed to comedy stardom with the help of Monkey, her undiplomatic, swearing, male puppet who she’s shared the stage with for 20 years now. ‘Monkey is more me than I am,’ Nina tells Metro.
co.uk while chatting about her directorial debut in Sunlight and her – gulp – fully-improvised Edinburgh Fringe show. Gesturing out of shot on Zoom, Nina explains how there are four monkey puppets behind her printer, wedged in by lamps to stop them from toppling to their death.
‘There’s a functional element to it, and then there’s a deeply personal connection there as well,’ she says. ‘I do fully know I control the monkey, but I also think the monkey at some point took its own wings.’ Ventriloquism wasn’t always on the cards for Nina, who worked as an actor when strong-minded theatre maverick Ken Campbell convinced her to give it a go as part of his grand plan to bring the art form back.
‘What I don’t always remember, and rarely mention, is that I tried ventriloquism for a bit and thought: “That’s bloody awful. I’m never going to do that,”‘ Nina admits. But then in the quiet of her own home, Nina returned to it, filming herself on a little video camera.
‘It suddenly spoke back to me and was a lightbulb moment,’ she remembers. ‘I wa.