Megan Prescott – or Katie Fitch from Channel 4’s Skins, as some may remember her – is bringing her thought-provoking and deeply personal new show Really Good Exposure to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year. The show tackles society’s attitudes towards sex work and feminism through the lens of Molly Thomas, a fictional former child star whose life closely mirrors Megan’s own.
So Megan, tell us about Really Good Exposure? Why is it important for you to put this story out there on stage?
For almost a decade now I have wanted to write something that highlights just how insidious some of the messaging millennial women received as kids was. As a millennial myself, I was brought up on Disney films, diet culture, and socially accepted sexual harassment. As a teenager, I watched the popstars I’d grown up idolising being harassed, insulted, and pitted against each other by the media on a daily basis. The early noughties was peak ‘child star to train wreck’ headline era and women in the public eye were treated pretty horrifically by the press if they deviated even slightly from whatever box they were expected to fit neatly into. It took me until my late twenties to truly understand just how bad some of the messaging we received as 90s kids was, and how deeply ingrained some of those messages still are today.
Really Good Exposure aims to highlight just how prevalent those millennial messages still are, despite how far we think we’ve come and I felt like the story had to take its first form as a piece of theatre. I think a lot of people will relate to the themes in the show, even though I’m using the pretty niche microcosm of acting and sex work to tell the story. There are elements of the show that I’m sure most women will have experienced at some point in their lives, regardless of whether they have worked in the acting or sex industry or not. You get something so visceral from watching live theatre that you just don’t get through watching something on screen – especially if the show touches on some very personal experiences you may have been through.
I want people watching the show to feel seen, but also activated to band together, learn more about women’s worker rights, and to feel inspired to have the courage to demand respect in a world that constantly tells women they don’t deserve it. I think theatre is the perfect way to get people activated and that’s why I’m so happy to be able to take Really Good Exposure to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a piece of theatre.
How different is Megan Prescott to Katie Fitch?
Katie Fitch is fictional, she’s 17, and you can shut her up when you turn off your tv. Megan Prescott is, annoyingly, a real-life person, she’s 33 and she keeps banging on about the issues that are disproportionately affecting women in society no matter how many devices you switch off.
I used to get asked all the time in interviews if my dress sense was similar to Katie and I always used to say no, but over the past ten years, and since working as a stripper and Only Fans creator, I’ve noticed my style leaning more and more towards the Katie wardrobe – maybe she had it right all along with the bright colours and animal print!
Do you have any advice/words of wisdom for the younger generation regarding sex work and OnlyFans?
My advice to the younger generation would be this: You have the right to work in whatever industry feels best for you at that time in your life and you have the right to feel safe at work, regardless of what industry you’re in. If you are treated differently because of what you choose to do for work, what you wear or what you look like you have the right to challenge this.
100% of harassment and assault cases would not have occurred if the predator was not involved. We need to stop teaching women that they should adjust their behaviour, their outfits, their jobs and their lifestyles to avoid predators. Instead, we need to refocus that energy on holding predators accountable for their behaviour.
How are you feeling ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe, and performing this show at the biggest arts festival in the world?
I’m incredibly excited to take Really Good Exposure to the Fringe! Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities in the world anyway, but the fact that it also hosts such an amazing festival where you can see so many different types of performance in a month is just really exciting to me.
It is a little bit scary to think that I’ll be getting up on stage every night and getting completely nude, but the nudity is really important to the scene and I really wanted to commit to the character. In all honesty, I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of when it comes to nudity, and a lot of art contains nude women, so to me this is just another form of artwork that involves nakedness.
What has surprised you most during your career?
My career has been… multifaceted, to say the least. But I think what surprised me most is that, contrary to what I was taught when I was younger, having had a diverse range of life experiences is actually a good thing. We’re often taught that to be ‘good’ at something, you have to have been focused on just that one thing your whole life – but I’ve found that having had experience in all different industries has actually really helped me with my creative work.
When I started acting, it was very much looked down upon to be anything other than classically trained as an actor, who was earning their living exclusively with their acting work. But that always felt like such an exclusionary point of view to me. I didn’t even want my agency to know I had a side job working in a pub because I was scared they would say I wasn’t focused enough on acting… but I had to pay my bills!
I didn’t even go to university, let alone drama school and I thought for a long time that this would always hold me back in acting. I’ve been really pleased to see that in the past few years, people are starting to value life experience a bit more and talking about how hard it is to make a living in the creative industries. Not to devalue the official training routes, but these can often be inaccessible for most people for a number of reasons, most frequently, the financial barriers that the official training routes have to them.
I had over a decade of my acting career not going where I wanted it to. I wasn’t earning anywhere near enough to get by with acting alone and I had to do all sorts of side-jobs to try to pay my rent whilst pursuing a creative career. Eventually, it got to the point that I was too drained from those side jobs to do the creative work at all. It’s the catch-22 of trying to make it in the creative freelance industry and it needs to change if we don’t just want to see the same things being made over and over again.
The only silver lining of having to hustle for all those years was that I gained the type of life experience that you just don’t get in a classroom. Yes I might not have a degree or any expensive acting training, but I’ve worked with a huge variety of people and have had such a wide range of weird (and sometimes not so wonderful) experiences; almost every time I’m acting, writing or directing, I catch myself using memories of people/places/things I experienced during those years of struggling to find the heart of the scene/character and I am so grateful that I can come from an authentic place in those instances.
I’m pleasantly surprised that the industry seems to be valuing a wider range of life experiences nowadays and I hope this continues so that people from a wider variety of backgrounds get the same opportunities in the creative freelance industries. I am, after all, still extremely privileged. It would be nice to see people from less privileged backgrounds having more accessible routes into the creative industries.
Really Good Exposure will be performed at 5.20pm in Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Button) from 1st – 25th August (Not 7th, 13th or 20th)
Booking link: https://underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/event/really-good-exposure