Anna Leong Brophy is a writer, actor, and comedian. She is perhaps best know to Fringe audiences as half of sketch duo EGG, with Emily Lloyd-Saini. On screen, she has played warrior Tamar Kir-Bataar as part of the main cast of Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, and she appeared as Bryony in series 2 of Channel 4’s Back, alongside David Mitchell and Robert Webb.  Her theatre credits include Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Holland Park), Henry VI Part One (Royal Shakespeare Company), Pitcairn (Chichester Festival Theatre/Shakespeare’s Globe), and In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) (Orange Tree Theatre). 

In August, Anna brings her debut solo show, ‘Born Sexy Yesterday’ to the Edinburgh Fringe. We spoke to Anna about the show, the tropes that inspired it, and her not-entirely-serious plan for world domination.

Can you tell us about ‘Born Sexy Yesterday’?

It’s a show about the roles women get to play, and ‘Ageing Backwards’, the disappearance of female elders, basically, but it’s all told from the perspective of a very naive, sexy, newborn alien who’s trying to find her way in the world.

When did you become aware of the ‘born sexy yesterday‘ trope? As a genre fan, does it colour your enjoyment of those types of media, and why do you think it’s so prevalent in sci-fi, in particular?

I first became aware of it when I used to do a podcast with my double act sketch partner, Emily Lloyd-Saini, and we used to do a podcast called Still Legit. We’d watch movies and just ask, are they still legit, right? We watched movies we loved, and one of them was [The] Fifth Element, which is a film that I just always have loved, and she was the one who brought up ‘born sexy yesterday’. I hadn’t heard of it as a trope, and I noticed, after we recorded the episode… I said to her, ‘I’m really sorry, maybe we should re-record that. I felt like I was getting quite defensive when you were bringing up that trope, and it was quite interesting.’

So I then went and looked into it. I was like, ‘Shit, this is exactly the trope, and I’ve completely fallen for it!’ As a woman I really have internalised the idea that I should be strong, sexy, but fragile, and naive at the same time. I really embodied it, so that was when I first encountered it, and then, of course, once you start seeing something, you can’t stop seeing it. My other half is a Star Trek fan. We started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I was like, ‘Holy cow, I cannot move for this this trope!’ And it was intriguing to me that it wasn’t such a well-known trope as something like ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl‘, but in a lot of ways it’s more prevalent, so really captured my imagination in terms of whether or not it colours my enjoyment, you know? It changes the way that I feel about… it’s definitely changed the way I feel about The Fifth Element.

It’s the preeminent example of it, I think.

Yeah, especially when I started looking into, oh my god, [The Fifth Element director] Luc Besson. It’s just so indicative of so many things that once you lift the lid, you start peeling back these layers, and you go, ‘Oh my goodness!’ Because I hadn’t realised how much of that concept… of a powerful, but naive young girl meets a mediocre man, but he knows everything; and it’s how empowering that is for men, and how destabilising that is for women. So, anyway, I can bang on about that for hours.

Is awareness of those tropes useful when it comes to your own writing, besides this show that deals with it overtly? Does your knowledge of it mean you be actively subversive?

I think so. The more you know, the more you can kind of bake into the cake. I don’t like to lecture people, you know? You don’t want to make a show a TED Talk, because people don’t want to hear that, but you want to just gently bring these little questions to the surface. ‘My God, I have seen that so many times! ‘Oh, yeah, that is one of those [tropes]!’ ‘Well, I never thought of that film like that!’ you know? And let people answer them for themselves, so the more you know, the more you’re able to secretly crawl into their brains and rewire them, in a pleasant way.

For those who might be unfamiliar with you and your previous work, how would you describe your comedy and your approach to performance?

I would say that my taste skews surreal and unexpected. I have ADHD, and so I find that a lot of the time with standard or stand-up comedy, or things that are very straight down the line, I’ve already got there, so I like things that kind of come out of the blue for me. So I hope that that’s what I do. I like things that are a little bit weird, a bit silly, a bit funny, and I tend towards the character and the clown space because I have a theatrical background. I’m an actor, so I like to bring that in.

What are your hopes for the show? What would be a successful August for you?

World domination, why not? This is my debut solo show, but I was in a double act for 10 years. You know, I’ve been part of the comedy world for a long time. I’d like to really feel like I establish my voice as a solo act. And I just really would like to have a great Fringe, like on the ground. I’d love to have packed houses of people who really connect with what I’m performing, and who get something out of it; that would be amazing. Obviously, it’d be also amazing to get incredible reviews and win awards and stuff, but that is my second stage of world domination!

Obviously, you’ve been to the Fringe before, as part of EGG. What for you are the best and the worst things about the Fringe?

I mean, the best and the worst things are the same thing, you know? It’s like freshers’ week for a month, and that’s amazing. And all your friends are there, and they’re just in the next bar, and you get to see so many incredible shows from these people that you’ve known and seen… grown up with; and people you’ve never seen before, like at a music festival, you know, discovering things!

But then at the same time, those are the things that can make you feel really insecure and forget that everyone’s doing their own thing, and on their own path. It’s the thing that keeps you up until four in the morning, because you bumped into a friend that you haven’t seen for ages, and it’s the thing that means you’ve accidentally seen too many shows and drank too many pints instead of working. I think I’m old enough and ugly enough now to kind of be able to dodge some of the pitfalls, but it is the best month of the year, for sure, in my humble opinion.

Are you somebody that tinkers with the show throughout the month, or once, or do you ever feel like it’s locked in?

Well, I don’t know who said, you know, ‘A work of art is never completed, only abandoned’, but that is how I feel. I think my time with EGG really taught me a lot about… ‘Just put it down now,’ because we used to come off stage and Emily would be like, ‘Great show!’ and I’d be like, ‘Okay, so we need to pick up the cues on that scene,’ and I would start giving notes, and I would be running the note taker in the back of my mind throughout the show. And you do just have to let go of the reins.

It’ll be funny because if you then tour it again, or you pick it up again down the line, or it goes to Soho, whatever… loads of fresh ideas will come in, but it’s too torturous to keep changing. There’ll definitely be… in the first few previews, there’ll be things that you find work in the space or don’t work. Or fun things; I like to always leave like a little element of improv in the show, for little sections, so there’ll be things that get found, so nothing’s ever completely drilled down, nailed to the ground. But yeah, I’m a bit more able to accept where the show has gotten to come the fifth of August.

And besides ‘Born Sexy Yesterday’, can we expect to see you performing elsewhere during August? At guest spots or compilation shows, etc.

Try not seeing me. I’m going to be everywhere! If you want me to be in your [show] as a guest slot, I will be there! I haven’t been up for the full month since I think 2018, because the last run I did was a two-week run, so I’m really looking forward to that part of the Fringe, you know? Popping up in other people’s shows, doing things that you aren’t necessarily set to do; quizzing, posting, getting gunged, whatever’s going on, you know? I’ll be around for sure.

And are there any other show or shows or performers that you would recommend that might not otherwise get the attention they deserve?

Well, I have been pretty much head down. I’m not gonna lie, so maybe I’m not going to be able to name the most niche performances. I would exhort your readers to embrace the spirit of the Fringe, go see some non-white, non-male performers, go to Summerhall. But I suppose what I can do is suggest some other halves of female double acts who are going up solo this year. Freya Parker and Jo Griffin; they’re both former members of Lola and Jo and Lazy Susan, they’re also going solo, and I will be living with them, so it does feel like we’ve formed an unofficial support group for disbanded double acts! So yeah, I’ll give them a shout out for sure.

Circling back to films and literature, do you think there are any examples that are very good in not falling into the tropes of ‘born sexy yesterday’, or the ‘Mary Sue‘, or the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’?

I think Miranda July is absolutely amazing. Her books and her movies, and like everything she does is just so… She doesn’t even see the lines on the paving stones, and that is an amazing skill. When I read All Fours, I was completely blown away by how free and outside of the tropes that main character was. But there are loads, and I also think it’s really interesting to watch things like foreign films, a lot of the time they give a totally different perspective, even if it’s just a shift on what we think is the fairy tale or whatever it is , I find very thought-provoking. So, I find Korean films very ambiguous, you know? Shouldn’t there be a good guy and a bad man and a good girl? And they don’t really play that way.

Lady Vengeance seems like the obvious example.

Perfect example. So yeah, you’ve got to squirrel them out. But just actually having the foresight, just knowing that these tropes exist… I wasn’t really aware of the concept of ‘fridging‘, which is women getting killed off early in a story in order to provide ammunition to send a man off onto a great journey. And now I’m like, ‘God damn, it’s in everything!’ It’s in Dumbo, it’s in Bambi! It’s not just in, like DC or Marvel or anything like that, so it’s great to just put your X-ray specs on, and you see through the tropes, kind of. It’s a good power!

‘Born Sexy Yesterday‘ is at Below at Pleasance Courtyard from Wed 5 to Sun 30 Aug 2026