Why Grace Campbell is Gen Z’s favourite brat stand-up

Grace Campbell arrives, braless in a tight white vest and a cloud of apologies. “Sorry I’m late; I overslept. Sorry, I probably smell; I haven’t showered.” For the record, she doesn’t smell and her moderate 15-minute lateness is perfectly excusable, given that she was up until the small hours finishing the script for her Edinburgh Festival Fringe show. And truthfully, I’d have been a bit disappointed had she rocked up any other way, since Campbell’s comedy is chaotic, ribald, messy, edgy and unfiltered.
Wholly unlike, that is, the place where we are meeting today, a genteel café in leafy Hampstead, north London, opposite the heath and patronised by well-heeled locals in pricey linen and their glossy dogs. But this is Campbell’s lifelong stamping ground and where she still lives minutes from her parents, the former Labour spin doctor turned political podcaster Alastair Campbell and the journalist and education specialist Fiona Millar, who once served as Cherie Blair’s adviser.
“When I started working in showbusiness, it was all about my dad. Everything that anyone wrote about me, every review I ever had, everything would come back to my dad. Which is fine; that’s just how life goes,” she says.
A Nineties nepo baby she may be, but Campbell is industrious. It’s Monday morning, she’s just back from a turn at Latitude Festival in Suffolk and the next day will leave for Edinburgh, where not only will she perform her comedy show, Grace Campbell Is on Heat, but also premiere her first short film, Don’t Hate Me, which she wrote, directed and stars in. (“A really silly film about the ego and a comedian who gets rejected. It’s about me and it’s about male validation, and she is called Grace but I’m not that insane…”) She has a new podcast just out, Late to the Party, in which she swaps party tales with guests including fellow comedian Katherine Ryan, “and I’m writing a TV show at the moment. Well, slowly planning it, anyway.”
So, are we calling her a polymath?
Campbell laughs. “I don’t really know what that means. I sort of feel like I only have one talent — talking about myself. I’m just doing it in lots of mediums.”
Having recently turned 30, Campbell is a shade too old to be a true Gen Zer, but that demographic’s well-documented tendency towards self-revelation — or “word vomit”, as she calls it — is very much her MO.
“What you see is what you get, so everything I write is open and honest and disarming,” she says. “It’s not even a talent, really; it’s just a personality trait.
“I told everyone I was having an abortion,” she continues, including her entire film crew, the man who runs her corner shop “and the cab driver who drove us there”.
In October last year, Campbell had an abortion, her pregnancy the result of “my desire to please a stranger in the moment” (he didn’t wear a condom), which she then wrote about for a newspaper article, published in June.
“The doctor showed me the foetus on the screen, gave me a pill, told me some basic facts, but he didn’t prepare me for what was about to come,” she wrote. “That I wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror, or at pictures of myself, for months… That I would feel a pervasive sense of guilt… And that then I would feel shame — shame that feeling guilty was in some way a dishonour to the women who fought for my right to be able to have this choice.”
She had also not been warned that she would bleed heavily for more than six weeks afterwards. She was still bleeding profusely when she had to fly to the US to perform a series of stand-up shows.
“I was on my own in New York, wearing a nappy, writing a list in my notepad of all of the places that I’d cried publicly and it was just everywhere,” she says. “In every CVS [pharmacy] I would stop and write it down, because I had to document how bad it was.
“So, I wrote the piece I wish had existed when I was really depressed in January and February,” she says. “It can hopefully be a tool for people who might need it when they’re feeling so isolated.”
The raw and exposing article was not Campbell’s first rodeo. In 2022, she wrote about being raped in the stairwell of a Las Vegas hotel. Some people take decades to process such incidents, or deal with them privately in therapy. That is not the Grace Campbell way (bar the therapy, actually, of which she’s done a lot).
• Just because a woman like Grace Campbell talks about sex doesn’t mean she’s asking for it
In February, four months “and a lot of iron supplements” after the abortion, “I did the only thing I thought might make it better: talk about it on stage,” she says. “It’s not been this cathartic, therapeutic process, because I’m still reeling. But it’s almost like an exorcism.
“It is also funny,” she’s keen to stress of the Edinburgh show it has become. “Abortion is really hard to talk about, and very conflicting. And people don’t know if they’re allowed to laugh. So what I’m trying to do is show that in the moments I’m letting you laugh, you laugh.”
Yet the show, she says, “is not vulgar in the way that I have been in the past. My abortion matured me in a way that I could have never prepared for, and I think the show is a reflection of that.
“There are a few bits about sex, but really not in the same way as before. There’s no part of this show that my mum or dad would have to go, like, urgh, during [she shuts her eyes and clamps her hands over her ears], whereas my last show, my dad would have to be, like, urgh. So that’s hopefully a good sign.”
While closely related, onstage Grace is “a different persona, a character, an elevated version of me”, she says. In person, she does seem calmer, less chaotic and brash, more thoughtful and self-aware. And if one were to find her perhaps a smidge name-droppy — Jameela Jamil is one of her best friends; Dua Lipa was in the year below at school; Tracey Emin helped her through the emotional fallout post-abortion — it’s probably understandable. Such A-list access is all she’s ever known.
“My dad started working for Tony Blair when I was three weeks old. It’s not like I had a life that was normal and then it changed. So I’ve never found it weird.”
On her phone there’s a picture of herself 24 hours after turning three, toddling along Downing Street on the day New Labour swept to victory. She’s in a pink hat, clutching a Union Jack and a sippy cup.
She grew up alongside the children of other political power players. “Tessa Jowell’s daughter, Jessie, is like my big sister. And the Kinnocks — Steve [son of Neil and Glenys] Kinnock’s kids were my best friends. But the thing is, you’re a child. You have no reference for who anyone is. These are just your parents’ friends and you’re just on holiday.”
She once accompanied Vladimir Putin’s children on the London Eye. “We were all with Cherie and I do remember that, because I was so scared of heights.”
And it wasn’t just politicians who gathered round their Gospel Oak dinner table. “Alex Ferguson and Mick Hucknall were there a lot,” she says.
The youngest of three, with two brothers, Campbell was always a performer, she says. “My dad said I came out like, ‘Hey,’ waving at everyone. ‘Hello, look at me.’ So I think I was just born this way. I think I just loved attention.” Her brothers, by contrast, “work in sport and PR”.
At Parliament Hill School, Campbell and her cohort were “middle-class kids at a state school”. Out of hours, there were “lots of drugs being taken”. She was, she says, “aware of the fact that my behaviour could have repercussions for the Labour government. And so I would be careful.”
But it didn’t stop her?
“No. I was growing up in London. Come on, let’s be realistic.” She laughs.
Her parents sound liberal in all the best ways. “They never tried to mould me into anything. They just left me to sort of form,” she says. “They wanted me to do well at school and I did, and they wanted me to go to university, so I did. But then I wanted to go to Jamaica on my gap year because I was obsessed with reggae and wanted to be a reggae tour manager. They let me go to Jamaica on my own for four months. They were very trusting.”
She studied briefly in Paris, hated it and came back to London to study film practice at the London College of Communication. She’d wanted to write scripts, but a friend she met in television told her, “ ‘You have really good comic timing.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ And then I went to watch stand-up and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I could do this.’ ” (If Campbell’s confidence could be bottled and sold, she would make a killing.)
“And then I became addicted to it. I have such an all-or-nothing personality,” she says. “I started gigging, like, five times a week and doing these awful open-mike nights where there were two people and a broom in the room. Then Covid happened and I began to do a lot of stuff online, and that is when I started to build my audience.”
Much of her online output can be excruciating. Is there anything that makes Campbell uncomfortable?
“Compliments,” she says. “I have a weird relationship with praise. I want it, but I want it only when I want it, and sometimes it makes me really uncomfortable because I’m not in the mood for it.” Similarly, she says, “I sometimes cannot make eye contact with people. It really depends on the mood I’m in. Because eye contact is really intense for me. I feel like when I look into people’s eyes, I’m reading so much in them. It’s sometimes too much information.” Her therapist has had to ask her not to wear sunglasses to their sessions, she says.
“And I have loads of boundaries,” she claims. “I’m really sensitive to past boyfriends, and when I break up with someone I’m never going to shit-talk them… There are sacred parts of old relationships that I’ll never talk about because that’s between me and them.”
She is single right now. “I have to heal before I can get into another relationship. I’ve been through so much heartbreak in the past eight years that I’m quite happy on my own,” she says.
She also thinks that she “aggravates some men” and that they often “like the idea of me, but can’t handle the reality”.
I wonder whether she’s ever felt the urge to tone herself down for anyone. “I just don’t think I can,” she says with a sigh. “I’ve definitely wanted to and sometimes I think, ‘Oh, probably if I was a bit more portable, like, I can take her anywhere. She’s not going to get into an argument with anyone or whatever,’ then a relationship would have turned out better.”
But she says, “I also just think I am not for everyone and I don’t need to be. I’m a very specific taste, but I know that there are loads of people who appreciate that.”
We discuss the notion of “brat”, the hip cultural term of the summer meaning messy and rebellious (“People constantly say I am brat; people reply to everything I do and say that I’m brat”), which brings us to the woman who coined it, singer Charli XCX (“I’d love to get her on my podcast. She’d be great”). That leads us to Kamala Harris, who’s been called brat (“It’s nice having a candidate who is pro-choice, out and out, and puts it in her manifesto”), to Sir Keir Starmer (“I think he’s doing an all right job”) and his deputy (“I f***ing love Angela Rayner. I want her on my podcast”).
All of which takes us to the success of Campbell Sr’s second act, The Rest Is Politics, his podcast with Rory Stewart.
“It’s given him such a new energy, which is great, and he seems to be enjoying it so much,” his daughter says.
“I think the success of that podcast is down to the fact that they have this really random chemistry. It shows people that you don’t have to argue all the time to get to the end of a conversation. I think that’s kind of become this weird metaphor for how people should deal with conflicts in politics and relationships.
“I never thought my dad would be the face of non-confrontational political debate,” she says, chuckling. “Me and my friends laugh about it a lot. All my friends grew up with my dad and it’s so random that now he’s doing the O2 arena.”
That is also, of course, treading slightly on her territory. “Well, I did say that to him,” she says. “My goal is that by the age of 35 I’ll do the O2. So, I’ve got five years. Maybe five to seven years.”
I seriously doubt she’ll need half that long. Grace Campbell Is on Heat is at the Edinburgh Fringe until August 13 (edfringe.com), followed by a UK tour in the autumn.Late to the Party is available on all podcast platforms (disgracecampbell.com)