Oh, Ophelia!

Minx was shooting its season-two finale when HBO Max dropped the comedy.

"Oh my God, all of this is going to go to waste," Ophelia Lovibond recalls thinking. "But, also, I thought, I can't see a world where another streaming platform doesn't want this."

She was correct. Starz picked up the series, set in the halcyon days of the women's movement, and began airing it in July.

The show's second season brings profound change for Lovibond's character, Joyce, a Vassar grad and firebrand feminist. Her ambition is to publish a magazine, The Matriarchy Awakens. She finally succeeds, except it's called Minx and showcases naked men. Still, its mission of gender equality remains pure. The magazine becomes an international phenomenon. Relishing newfound fame and money, Joyce ditches three-piece suits for sexier outfits.

A lifelong feminist herself, Lovibond notes, "There has been progress, but it's slow. We are still having the same conversations from fifty years ago." Noting that recently a U.K. woman was imprisoned for taking an abortion pill later than allowed, she says, "There's more to do."

Growing up in London in a single-mom home, she had few activities — until her brother encouraged her to join him in a children's theater company.

"As soon as I stepped in the door — it sounds like hyperbole — but there was the sense of I'm going to be an actress," Lovibond recalls.

At twelve, she landed her first TV gig, The Wilsons, and then made her film debut in Oliver Twist at seventeen.

Lovibond loved acting but yearned for college. She studied literature at the University of Sussex and still devours books. She's also enthusiastic about those 1970s threads she wears on Minx, and she pauses mid-Zoom to rifle through a closet in her North London home to show off a dress from the series.

Minx's fate beyond its twisty season-two finale is unknown, but Lovibond remains hopeful.

"I'm biased," she says, "but I feel like there's so much story left to plumb."

The interviews for this story were completed before the start of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #8, 2023, under the same title.