She was Saturday Night Live’s oldest hire, then faced a torrent of abuse after her role in the Ghostbusters reboot. She talks about the deaths of her mum, dad and brother – and why she’s given up dating menIt’s early evening in a photography studio in west London, and the American comedian Leslie Jones is capering about, dressed in a full-length gold lamé ballgown and smoking. “Make me look skinny,” she says to the photographer’s departing back.“I’m 6ft tall – I can’t cut my feet off,” she says, later. “I can’t stop being a scary motherfucker. This is who I am – let me work with who I am.” Yet, she is the opposite of scary. Statuesque, no question, but whatever she’s doing, whether peering into a bag of fish and chips as if it’s alive, or telling her assistant to read The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s trust-the-universe novel, for the 100th time, there is always somebody laughing. She brings an air of deliberate chaos, which you just have to surrender to, wherever the conversation leads, until you find yourself nodding along with the most crackpot conclusion. (The birthrate is low because men spend too much time in hot tubs, and their sperm has become lazy and complacent? “It’s funny, but it’s true. Go look that shit up – I’m not saying something that’s not factual. I hope.”) Continue reading...