“I’ve been doing it since I was little”: Tamsin Greig says this life “hack” saved her during the menopause

When it comes to the menopause, we’ll take all the advice we can get – and one person who has kindly shared some pearls of wisdom with us recently is Tamsin Greig. She’s the star of the BBC’s barrier-breaking drama, Riot Women, about five menopausal women who form a punk band – and it turns out, Tamsin has some pretty handy tips for those experiencing the menopause themselves, including a hack that’s proved essential to her.

In an exclusive interview, GH’s November cover star shared her thoughts on the menopause, how debilitating it can be – and what’s been crucial to helping her through it. “Sally [Wainwright, creator of Riot Women] has shown us how the individual menopause journey is utterly unique for each woman,” Tamsin explained. “There are so many elements of grief wound into the menopause journey. Yes, my parents died, my male best friend died, but there’s something other in the menopause, where you’re grieving the old self. It’s the concrete and the ineffable.”

While she admitted that HRT wasn’t a lifesaver for her, she revealed that it did help with sleep – and how important napping is to her. “Without sleep, I do go a little bit woozy and overwhelmed and frightened. It helped me find my afternoon snooze,” she said. Has she always napped? “I learned it as a child,” she added. “I found things too much. It’s like unplugging an electronic device from the wall, plugging it in again and it resets. Sometimes, as a child, I used to go to sleep, then surface, but not want to come back into the room, so I’d just keep my eyes closed. I was present but absent.”

Tamsin’s upcoming drama Riot Women is part of the ongoing conversation about menopause that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago – and she reflected on the fact that we have a lot to thank Sally Wainwright for. “You generally can’t put more than one woman of a certain age in a show,” she pointed out. “You can perhaps have one person with dementia. You certainly can’t have five leads who are women of a certain age, going through a similar experience, and two mothers with dementia… but Sally does. And here we are – what are you going to do?”

For Tamsin, breaking down barriers on screen – both in front of and behind the camera – is something she's been championing for as long as she can remember. She shared how, several years ago, she would breastfeed her daughter on the set of Love Soup and Green Wing, which she was working on simultaneously. “I had it contractually set up that I would take a break from set at 11am and 3pm to breastfeed Roxie," she explained. "Sometimes the men on set would grunt, ‘I don’t know how you’re doing this…’ My answer would be, ‘Well, I’m a working mum and it’s great to have women in the industry… Isn’t it?’”

Tamsin added that, over the years, she hasn’t been treated badly as a woman on set, just differently. “Male actors are engaged with in a different way. It’s part of our coding,” she mused. “A kind of subconscious bias.” When she filmed Episodes in Hollywood with Stephen Mangan and Matt LeBlanc, she revealed that co-star Kathleen Rose Perkins “became my rock. We really needed each other to know we weren’t alone in a male- heavy environment, but also to have each other’s backs. To see when stuff was happening and say to each other, ‘I see that.’ She was a witness. Otherwise, I might think I was making it up."

When asked to elaborate, she responded: “It was never him [LeBlanc]. F**king hell, it’s so hard talking about Episodes. The last interview I did, they just wanted to know about Matthew Perry, who I never met. I feel panicky right now even talking about Friends because it’s none of my business. I’ll keep it simple: I loved working with Matt LeBlanc. Which is true! I do love him.'"

Riot Women airs on BBC One and BBC iPlayer this October. Read the full interview in Good Housekeeping UK’s November issue, on sale from Thursday 25th September.