Daisy May Cooper is being haunted.Her first ghost sighting was two years ago – a disembodied pair of child’s legs, running around the bedroom of her new-build house.Then there was an invisible presence, tugging her duvet off her.She’s been hearing voices, too – a Spanish woman, and an ethereal voice in a hospital room offering words of comfort.“It’s like a veil has been lifted,” she says.

You sound crackers, I say.Not something I’d usually voice in an interview – but there’s an infectious, gossipy ease to being in Cooper’s company.“I do! Completely,” she sighs.Then she opens the door of the glass room we’re in, and shouts down the spiral stairs to the photo studio below for her partner to bring his phone up.She wants me to hear something.

One of Cooper’s many talents is surprise,The writer-performer shot to fame with This Country, the mockumentary about rural poverty in the Cotswolds,She showed Bukowskian range as the lead in BBC/HBO show Rain Dogs, and wrote the twisting female-friendship thriller Am I Being Unreasonable? Her new book, Hexy Bitch, is a twist again,Her riotous account of her occult experiences includes joining a coven that turned out to be a swingers’ club, regressing to a past life, and attempting to have sex with a ghost,The book is funny and often outrageous, yet serious of intent.

Having been through extreme experiences in the past few years, she’s grappling with what death means.The “something” she wants me to hear is a recording of one of the voices she heard.Cooper was severely ill with viral meningitis after the birth of her daughter Pip in 2018.She was alone in a private hospital room, she explains before pressing play.I hear her voice, speaking tentatively into the phone.

“If there’s anybody in here … can you speak into the microphone?” The only response is the background hiss of hospital silence.Then, from somewhere else in the room – the tiny sound of a girl’s voice, eerily there and not there.“Don’t be afraid,” it cajoles.Although I’m a cynic, the hairs on my arm stand up.Cooper has the phrase tattooed on her wrist.

Whenever she doubts herself, she looks down.The supernatural has fascinated her since childhood.After her aunt Alison died in a car accident at the age of 30, her mother routinely dragged Cooper to see psychics in the back of pubs.The mediums would sing Roy Orbison songs between performances, and hold a raffle afterwards.Cooper was unmoved by these grasping, hammy shows, but understands why her mother went.

“It was her desperation to prove everything wasn’t completely meaningless, that her sister was somewhere,”Her hope is that technology will advance to the point that scientists can prove there are ghosts,There’s a yearning in the push-pull of her belief,In 2019, she lost her childhood friend Michael Sleggs (who played a version of himself in This Country) to heart failure,Sleggs had endured numerous health problems, including a teenage cancer diagnosis.

“He’d been in constant pain his entire life.Even walking caused him pain,” she says.When he was placed in palliative care, “it was horrible, because he was terrified of dying”.Then she received a phone call that changed everything.Sleggs had had a visitation from an angelic presence, she recounts, which sat at the end of his bed and told him: “In seven days you will have a new body at midnight.

” He didn’t know if that meant death or a full recovery – but he told her he wasn’t afraid any more.He died seven days after that, “and his time of death was 11.59”.She can’t know whether angels are real, or if this was a powerful example of bodily self-determination.Either way, she thinks it’s amazing.

“But then I think, why hasn’t he come back, out of everybody?” Doubt clouds her face.There was the presence that tugged firmly on her duvet, on the morning of Sleggs’ favourite local festival.She doesn’t know what to make of that.“If that is you, Slugs, can you please be more specific?” she asks, using his nickname.“Write your name in lipstick on my mirror.

I need to know,”Other famous people have stories, too, says Cooper,Tilda Swinton met someone who practises voodoo, and has warned her not to take it lightly,“She said, ‘This stuff exists, and it’s dangerous, and you can fuck people’s lives up with it,’” Dermot O’Leary’s wife astrally projects “all the time”.

The best story she has heard is that of Martin Kemp.While filming in an old Tudor house, the Spandau Ballet bassist saw a woman dressed in 16th-century maid’s clothes, whom he assumed was an extra.“He asked her: ‘Do you know what time lunch is?’ And she disappeared!” Cooper cackles.“Imagine this ghost being like … oh no, not Martin Kemp.”While ghosts don’t scare her, she is wary of human reactions to her encounters.

“It’s isolating, because people think you’re mad,” she says.It’s taboo to say that you’ve had an encounter with the world beyond our own, she notes.“But it exists.”The line between worlds must have felt even thinner of late.It’s been just two months since her son Benji was born, seven weeks prematurely.

In the middle of filming a second series of Am I Being Unreasonable? in Bristol, Cooper started getting severe contractions, and had to lie down on set,She was taken to hospital, where her waters broke,She was scared – especially when she was given a form to sign indicating that if she died, the family wouldn’t sue the hospital,Cooper was sent for an emergency C-section, during which she haemorrhaged badly,She doesn’t remember much, apart from the surgeons in scrubs, playing Abba.

“I thought, I’m gonna die to Dancing Queen.This can’t be the end.” She didn’t see any lights or angelic figures.She wasn’t able to meet the baby for two days.He was being cared for in the neonatal unit, in a Perspex box hooked up with wires and a monitor.

She describes the “hell” of nurses struggling to administer an IV drip, “trying to find a vein on a baby that small.I was terrified he was going to die.” Walking around the hospital in the grip of fear, she was recognised by other patients, and had to pose for selfies.She credits her ex-husband’s wife for looking after the children, and her partner Anthony Huggins with looking after her.He’s here today, a calming, blue-eyed presence who now works as her assistant.

There’s support for mothers after an experience like that, she says, “but a lot of fathers get PTSD from it.They just feel helpless.”Happily the family are healthy, and numerous.They live in South Cerney, Gloucestershire with five children under one roof (two each from previous relationships, plus Benji).They navigate a whole spectrum of childhood issues, she laughs, from a three-year-old boy to a 14-year-old girl.

Benji has brought the family even closer,“I thought there’d be jealousy, but they do the whole blended thing well,”Cooper and Huggins met on Hinge,She had recently divorced the landscape gardener Will Weston, whom she wed in 2019,Their three-year marriage, which produced two children, had become strained, and its implosion seems to have imbued both with energy – Weston has since remarried, while Cooper has had Benji with Huggins.

They began dating while she was filming Rain Dogs.He had no idea who she was, she reveals with mock outrage.He also told her he worked in advertising, before she discovered his job was putting up billboard posters.During the shoot today, he’d told me the same thing, I say.Cooper storms to the door again and flings it open.

She shouts down to the studio floor.“Why are you still telling people you work in advertising?” She returns to her chair.“That’s catfishing.How dare he.”She had assumed her children would follow in her footsteps, but not so.

She thinks her daughter Pip might become a surgeon, comparing her to Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous, the prim daughter of a narcissistic mother.“We’ll be playing Sylvanian families and my heart sinks, because she introduces all these rules.If we were at school, there’s no way I’d hang out with that nerd.” The teasing runs both ways, Cooper reassures.“She speaks down to me in a loving way.

‘Mum, you’ve got to blend your foundation,’ It’s humiliating,”Cooper grew up in Cirencester, just miles from where she lives today, in very different circumstances,Her parents struggled financially,At their poorest, Cooper couldn’t afford tampons.

She moved between unrewarding jobs – one of which was selling towels at House of Fraser.“I used to steal jeans, perfume.No wonder they’re going into administration.” (She’s behind the curve – it’s been bought by Sports Direct.) Cooper remembers smashing Lindt chocolate Father Christmases on the stockroom floor, to write them off so she could eat them.

“When I was a teenager, there was no point in doing any sort of job if I couldn’t steal.”In her early 20s, a tarot reader told Cooper she would become a famous actor, so she auditioned for and was accepted into Rada.She hated the training.“A lot of these places are run by people who are massively pretentious and bitter that they didn’t make it.” Students were encouraged to instrumentalise their personal trauma in ways that became competitive, she adds, and it struck her as nonsense