Elizabeth Day: Being an extra on The Party adaptation was a highlight of my life

Journalist and podcaster Elizabeth Day has said being an extra in the TV adaptation of her novel The Party was one of the “highlights of my life”.

The Party is an upcoming five-part ITV series based on Day’s 2017 thriller of the same name starring Luke Evans as Martin Gilmour, a journalist shaped by his lifelong friendship with wealthy politician Ben Fitzmaurice (Tom Cullen).

Day, who is an executive producer on the series, said her only request was to be an extra on set – an experience she said was “incredibly surreal”.

Elizabeth Day wrote The Party a decade ago (James Manning/PA)

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Speaking to the Press Association, Day said: “Walking on set into a world that had once only existed in my imagination, that was now brought to life by this cast and crew of talented and dedicated individuals, was one of the highlights of my life.

“It was incredibly surreal.

“It was also amazing and I did make the cut. I am in the opening scene. In the opening scene, I was like, ‘Wow, they really went there’.

Day said she has “really enjoyed the process” of turning her book into a series and that she was really “unprecious” about the way the story was adapted for the screen.

She said: “I’m very aware that television is a different form and that to fill five one-hour slots of TV, there will need to be new plot lines and new characters and a development of themes that I had written about, and I’m excited by that.

“I’m really unprecious about it. I was like, ‘please do whatever you want’ because I’m thrilled to see what other creatives do with this initial spark.”

The author said she has Evans to thank for turning the book into a series after the actor read it during the pandemic and pitching it to World Productions studios.

Elizabeth Day said she was happy for her book to be adapted for TV, and was ‘unprecious’ about how script-writers developed it (Doug Peters/PA)

PA Wire

Day added that she “could not be happier” with the cast, which also stars Sarah Solemani, who adapted it for TV and whom Day described as “so fantastically talented”.

Day said: “They are an amazing and talented bunch of people, and it’s thrilling to see it on screen. It really is.

“I found the whole process incredibly fun.

“Being an executive producer, I see my role as being a cheerleader for this new creative iteration of a book that I wrote almost a decade ago, and I’m one of the authors who, having written the book, I’m so happy to hand it over to a group of people who know what they’re doing.”

She went on to say how she had to keep “pinching” herself to believe that Evans “actually exists because he seems too perfect a human”.

Day also hosts podcast How To Fail, where she speaks to celebrity guests about the moments that did not go to plan and how failures have shaped them.

She told PA the two “failures” she is most grateful for in her own life are divorce and infertility.

“Divorce ultimately set me free, in many ways, to live the life that was really me, rather than the life that I thought should be me,” she said.

“Infertility was an incredibly hard thing to go through, but on the other side of it, I feel such peace and fulfilment and purpose because I realise I think that my purpose is not necessarily to be a mother in the conventional sense, but to speak to all of those women and men who were unable to get the baby that they so longed for.”