How To Fail With Elizabeth Day
Emily Atack - ‘I’ve forgiven people for unforgivable things’
27 May 2026
Chapter 1: What early experiences shaped Emily Atack's career path?
I just needed to pay the rent. So it was kind of like, I have to get this job. There's no, you know, I can't fail at this.
Chapter 2: How did Emily Atack learn about emotional boundaries?
But Rivals is just allowing me to go in and do my job and do it well. I remember somebody saying to me when I was younger, nobody's coming to save you.
Chapter 3: What impact did growing up in a creative family have on Emily?
And I've never actually told anybody this.
This episode of How To Fail is brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant. Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that firmly believes failure is what makes us human. Before we get into this conversation, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single episode.
Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it?
Chapter 4: What challenges did Emily face after leaving home at 16?
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Chapter 5: How did Emily Atack cope with fame from 'The Inbetweeners'?
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Emily Atack was raised in Bedfordshire, the daughter of an actress and a musician, and also, somewhat surprisingly, the first cousin twice removed of Sir Paul McCartney. She grew up surrounded by people who made their living in show business.
Chapter 6: What role does forgiveness play in Emily's life?
So when she left school at 16, she was confident, she later said, that she wouldn't need a GCSE for what she wanted to do. This, it turned out, was acting. And she was proved right, landing her first audition playing a footballer's girlfriend in the TV show Blue Murder. But it was as Charlotte Hinchcliffe in the smash hit comedy The Inbetweeners that she became famous.
Aitak was 17 when she got the part, which for many years would come to define her, for good and for bad. She found herself on the cover of magazines and ushered into the VIP areas of nightclubs, but also faced an overwhelming level of sexual harassment. Experiences later recounted in her BBC documentary, Asking For It.
In 2018, she was the runner up in I'm a Celebrity and started focusing on comedy with an ITV sketch show and stand up tour. It was a pivotal moment, both professionally and personally. In 2022, she started dating a childhood friend, the nuclear physicist Alistair Garner. The couple are now engaged with a baby boy who is almost two.
Chapter 7: How has motherhood influenced Emily's self-perception?
Motherhood, Atack says, has made her feel, I'm now living for something other than myself. And ATAC is enjoying an on-screen resurgence too, back playing the fabulous Sarah Stratton on Disney Plus' hit drama Rivals, as well as co-hosting a new ITV game show, Nobody's Fool with Danny Dyer.
Described as a strategic reality quiz, Nobody's Fool is designed to test the contestants' intelligence, or rather, who they think is the smartest out of all of them. Although she was meant to stay impartial, Aitak says she found it hard not to root for the contestants. I got emotional at the very end, she said. I do find that hard, the boundaries. Emily Yatak, welcome to How to Fail.
I'm not meant to be crying yet. Oh, you're so lovely.
Chapter 8: How does Emily Atack view her body image and self-worth?
That's such a lovely introduction. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Bang on every single detail.
That's a real relief because... That never happens.
There's always something that people kind of, you know, get wrong. That's amazing. Thank you. No, thank you for being here.
And you've had such an extraordinary career and you're still so young because you started so young. Yeah. And congratulations on everything that's been happening for you lately. I wanted to end on that quote about boundaries because it's something I struggle with too.
Talk to me about boundaries, Emily. I mean, what a way to kick it off. Amazing. Boundaries are something that I've learned definitely later on. in my early 30s, I would say. Boundaries are something that I didn't grow up with. And that was a kind of a beautiful thing and a terrible thing all at the same time.
And I've learned, I think maybe now that we are, that mental health is more of a discussion in life, you know, people are having therapy a lot more and being honest about that. And therapy for me has always been a massive thing. And boundaries is the first thing that I learned about in therapy. So part of who I am will always be that I forget the boundaries.
But it's something I really, really try to every day practice, having my own boundaries and not worrying about upsetting people when you create those boundaries.
I mean, I know we're going to unpack some of this more deeply in your failures, but I also think it's so interesting because your lack of boundaries is possibly what also makes you so relatable and loved because you are phenomenally gorgeous, which can actually be quite intimidating and it can create this distance. But maybe it must be quite sort of difficult.
It must have been difficult to travel that line. And especially when you're doing something like Nobody's Fool, which is such a brilliant premise.
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