The satirical series The Franchise follows the film crew of a Marvel-like comic book movie during the production’s chaotic shoot alongside the studio’s big-budget tentpole. Featuring a talented ensemble cast, spouting rapid-fire comic dialogue, Lolly Adefope is a delight as Dag, the acerbic third assistant director who delivers droll commentary on how the superhero sausage gets made. Dag has arrived mid-filming to back up the beleaguered second assistant director, Dan (Himesh Patel), as he wrangles a pumped-up and insecure star (Billy Magnussen), his snarky theater veteran costar (Richard E. Grant), and the film’s supposedly visionary director (Daniel Brühl), who’s already 12 days behind schedule.
In stereotypical millennial style, Dag is ambitious (“Would now be a good time to talk about career progressions?” she asks just days into her new job), outspoken (“What if this isn’t a dream factory? What if it’s an abattoir?”), and brimming with self-confidence on a set filled with anxious people working in service to an unseen studio boss, whose dictums are passed on via a pliant and overworked assistant (Isaac Powell).
“God, this is so rewarding,” Dag quips to the script supervisor (Jessica Hynes), after being tasked with smelling the boom operator to see if he’s drunk, high, or both, and keeping the newly arrived studio executive away from scrapped live Kyoto-imported cherry trees, whose cost, Dan laments, could fund a children’s hospital. “Yeah, but what price dreams?” she asks.
“She has no fear, no filter,” Adefope says on a mid-October morning at Dabble restaurant in New York. “She definitely says what she thinks [and] the first thing that comes into her mind in moments where other people are holding back to save face, or because they’re not brave enough to speak the truth.”
Dressed in a white crewneck sweatshirt, black pants, and a green Andersson Bell baseball cap, Adefope shows few signs of having arrived from Barcelona with her journalist-author boyfriend (whose name she doesn’t want to disclose) the night before. She laughs easily when reminded of some of Dag’s more ridiculous pronouncements, such as telling the film’s star that he’s like a “sexless—in a good way, because it’s non-threatening—potato,” when he asks her what she thinks of him.
Adefope, 34, is admittedly not a super fan of superhero movies, ticking off the ones she’s liked: Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, Robert Pattinson’s Batman, and X-Men, when she was younger. “I haven’t really seen any of the new Marvel films,” she admits.
Her portrayal of the self-assured assistant was partly inspired by the young Americans she encountered early on while playing Aidy Bryant’s ride-or-die Fran on Shrill and God’s assistant in the Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi-starring show Miracle Workers. “I was completely out of my depth [because] I had never worked on a big TV show before,” she recalls of those experiences. “I would meet these production assistants, who were in their early twenties and had so much energy, so much confidence. They knew everything about how sets work, and I knew maybe one percent. It’s quite fun to inhabit someone who doesn’t care that they are seen as low down on the food chain and believes in themselves so much that hopefully, it will take them to the top.”
The South London-born actress’s career rise began after studying English at university rather than drama because her Nigerian parents—her mother is in computer science, and her dad worked as a surgeon—“didn’t want me to risk it all too early [to focus] on something too niche, and then I might get bored of it, and have nowhere to go,” she explains. But she quickly tired of office work, quit to perform a self-penned solo show at the performing arts festival Edinburgh Fringe in 2015, and has never looked back.
One of her favorite roles has been Kitty, the spirit of a Georgian noblewoman, whom she conjured for the original BBC version of Ghosts. “She is just so joyful. It’s so fun to play such an uplifting and endlessly positive character,” she says. Another milestone was acting with Steve Coogan in the U.K. reboot, This Time With Alan Partridge. “When you grow up watching an iconic character, you think of it as something that exists historically. So for them to bring it back, and for me to be involved, was definitely a highlight.”
Adefope has also appeared in films—most recently, Wicked Little Letters and 2023’s Saltburn—which Dag name-drops in The Franchise. “I might just catapult it straight to the top. Saltburn it—dancing around the studio with my wang out,” the third assistant declares after contributing an idea to the fictional film. Adefope says she can’t take credit for the scripted meta line, though the cast did frequently improvise. Keeping a straight face during all that ad-libing wasn’t always easy. “Basically anything Jess [Hynes] does makes me laugh. And Nick [Kroll, who plays an actor playing the ‘Gurgler’ superhero] improvised so much. Everything he said was so funny.”
Skewering the genre doesn’t mean Adefope isn’t game for acting in a big franchise. “I feel like all of us in the cast have been well-trained now in how to cope with them,” she says, noting the scale of the production depicted mirrors what she experienced while filming for a day on the Mission Impossible: Fallout set with Tom Cruise.
Adefope’s ambitions also extend beyond acting. She’s working to improve her DJ skills with the new mixer her older brother got her for her birthday. “I just love music. If I wasn’t an actor, I would be involved [with it] in some way,” she says. “I’m good at choosing the songs, but I want to be good at mixing. That’s my current hobby.”
She doesn’t miss a beat when asked about her biggest splurge since all of her success: a “really smart” pair of Bottega Veneta Mary Janes. “I am not great at wearing heels, but I [often] have to wear them. So this was a justifiable, very expensive purchase that I can wear and not have my feet in agony.”
As for what’s next career-wise, Adefope hopes there will be more of The Franchise, and wants to write another live show. “I haven’t done an Edinburgh show since 2016,” she says. “I’d love to do a rom-com. I’m kind of open to anything.” When it’s suggested she could write her own rom-com, she says, “Yeah, maybe. Or if someone wanted to write one for me that would be great.” Manifesting like a superhero.
