Claire Foy made her name in a series of superior TV dramas. She talks to Jasper Rees about her new role in ‘Love, Love, Love’ at the Royal Court.

It is and isn’t easy being a photogenic young actress. A certain type of two-dimensional role grows on trees. But finding the kind with extra depth can be more of a challenge. Claire Foy was brought face to face with the way the industry at its most nakedly commercial sees young women when she auditioned for a film in Los Angeles.

“The character was supposed to be ‘the most beautiful girl that Johnny Depp has ever seen’,” she says. “And as I wouldn’t be the most beautiful girl that Johnny Depp has ever seen, I was like, ‘I don’t really know what to do because I’m obviously not right for this part.’ But you go up for it anyway and you don’t get it. I think I’m more suited to playing someone with a chip on their shoulder, probably about not being the most beautiful girl in the world.”

The face is nowadays familiar from a number of superior television dramas. Foy’s face is just unclassical enough to have made her convincing as a series of forthright and even stroppy young misses. She was a forthright heroine in Peter Kosminsky’s The Promise, a spoilt Fascist sympathiser in Upstairs Downstairs, and an assertive proto-feminist in White Heat. (When the casting director of Paula Milne’s drama, which finished last week, was looking for an older version of her, they alighted on Juliet Stevenson.)

Foy’s part of the story in White Heat came to an end after a timespan of 24 years, in 1990, which is where her next job begins. By the time she’s completed her run in Mike Bartlett’s new play Love, Love, Love at the Royal Court, she’ll know more about ageing up than any actress of her generation. Its three acts are set consecutively in the late Sixties, the early Nineties and the present day, and examine the impact of one generation on the next. Foy plays the daughter of two hippies; we first meet her as a 16 year-old in school uniform, and later as an embittered single woman aged 37.

“It’s the Philip Larkin thing: she believes her parents did f— her up. They were children of the Sixties and really went for it. The play is about what the children of those sorts of people might be like, the effect it has if parents are really free-thinking as opposed to really strict. But then, you’re buggered both ways if you’re a parent.”

Foy playing a teenager will not tax the audience’s imagination. Born in the year of the miners’ strike, she looks younger in the flesh than her 28 years. Her early childhood was spent in Lancashire, but her parents moved south to Buckinghamshire when she was seven. She now thinks of herself as neither a northerner nor a southerner. “I did have a northern accent, and when I went to university I knew I wanted to go to the North.”

Her film studies course in Liverpool turned her towards acting. After another year at drama college in Oxford she was soon equipped with an agent, and she landed a part in the BBC drama Doctors. She went on to appear in two of a trilogy of plays for young actors at the National Theatre.

It was a useful platform: a similar project a year earlier launched the careers of Andrea Riseborough (Madonna’s Wallis Simpson), Matt Smith (Doctor Who) and Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man). “We were all really young and going,’Help!’ to each other, ‘We don’t know what to do.’”

She must have been doing something right as she was soon playing the title role in Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit. She had to work round the difficulty of embodying one of Dickens’s wan young heroines. “Dickens did just see her as homely, angelic and giving. It was my job to find the real aspect of that. I looked on her as a sort of a carer whose parent or child is ill. That made her believable in my head.”

She’s been lucky enough ever since to investigate some of the more dramatic crannies of femininity: a troubled lesbian toy girl in The Night Watch, adapted from Sarah Waters’s novel about heartache in the Blitz; a feral tabloid editor, inspired perhaps by Rebekah Brooks in Guy Jenkin’s comedy Hacks; and Upstairs Downstairs’ posh little Brownshirt, based on the Hitler-obsessed Unity Mitford.

“You’ve got to keep challenging yourself,” she says, “and I feel bad if I feel like I’m ever doing something that’s sort of similar. Now it’s about time I played somebody nice again.”

Presumably, like other members of the Upstairs Downstairs cast, she is weary of being asked about the overwhelming shadow of Downton Abbey, the period drama which the nation decided to fall in love with. Did it bother her?

She rolls her eyes. “You can never not come across as sounding like you don’t care. If you go, ‘No, no, not at all,’ people go, ‘That was protesting a bit too much.’ You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The honest answer is we were all just thinking, we’re in this programme, as everyone in Downton Abbey would also be thinking.”

If Upstairs Downstairs does limp back for a third series, Foy won’t be in it again: Lady Persephone topped herself in a dramatic exit from the second series.

There was no part Foy pursued more eagerly than the female lead in The Promise. In Kosminsky’s epic historical drama, she played Erin Matthews, an 18 year-old who becomes obsessed with investigating the story of the British soldiers serving in Palestine in the years before our ignominious exit.

“You get so used to not getting stuff and then watching someone else playing the part and even forgetting you were considered in the first place, but with that I would have taken it incredibly personally. I went to God-knows how many auditions, and when it gets that far down the line I was already playing the part. I’d done so much work for it, and knew everything. I just recognised quite a lot of things about me when I was her age.”

Foy is back in her teens for Love, Love, Love, before projecting forward once more to her late thirties. Will there be something of her in this teenager, too? “Oh there has to be because it’s me playing it. Unfortunately, I’ve only got myself to work with. But I hope I’m not like she is when she’s 37.”

‘Love, Love, Love’ begins previews at the Royal Court (020 7565 5000) on April 27

• TV heaven is…
I hate myself for it, but I love Made in Chelsea. I’d be so starstruck if I met any of them. Though I did chat to some of the cast of The Only Way Is Essex at last year’s BAFTAs. You forget that it’s actually their lives you’re watching, not fiction. I found myself going up to Lydia and telling her that Arg is a wanker.

• TV hell is…
Any sitcom with canned laughter – especially Last Of The Summer Wine.

• My earliest TV memory is…
What felt like hours and hours of my parents watching Have I Got News For You, not understanding why they thought it was so funny.

• My ideal coach potato partner is…
My boyfriend. Though there are certain things I watch secretly because I’m so ashamed, such as Snog Marry Avoid?.

• My TV Crush is…
Dermot O’Leary. Though he reminds me of my brother, so maybe that’s a bit weird.

• My perfect TV dinner is…
Pizza or pasta; wine or Ribena.

• If my life was a TV show it would be…
I’d like it to be Ab Fab. I’d be Edina, rolling around wearing ridiculous clothes and being totally oblivious to making a fool of myself.

Claire Foy stars in epic drama White Heat, on BBC Two this month

from The Guardian / by Emine Saner

Emine Saner meets the flatmates at the centre of White Heat, Paula Milne’s 1960s drama for BBC2

Everything on set is quiet except for a plink-plink-plink sound. “This is a carpet warehouse,” explains Elinor Day, the producer. “The rain comes in, but whenever they fix it, it finds somewhere else to come in.” It is one of those days when it doesn’t feel as if the rain will ever stop.

The actors are hurried from the vast warehouse, where the sets have been built, to their trailers in the car park under huge umbrellas. A great puddle has formed in front of the catering truck and members of the film crew and extras line up to take their turn leaping over it to get to the double decker bus where they eat their lunch behind the steamed-up windows.

The first episode of White Heat was broadcast last week and for all the hyped glossy advertising, anticipatory chatter and decent(ish) reviews much of it was created, unglamorously, last summer on this dreary industrial estate in north London. The six-part drama follows seven characters, who meet in a flatshare as students in the mid-Sixties, through to the present day.

Comparisons to Our Friends in the North, the 1996 series about four friends set over three decades, have already been made, but Paula Milne, the writer, sitting over a polystyrene cup of tea on the catering bus, says she doesn’t mind. “People are inevitably going to say that because of the nature of it, but it was a fantastic series so if it makes people interested in White Heat, that’s great,” she says. “I wanted to write something that referenced my experiences.”

The drama takes in the anti-Vietnam war protests at Grosvenor Square and the emergence of feminism; it tackles sexism, racism and homophobia; witnesses Thatcher and the unions, the Falklands, and the end of the Cold War (the name comes from Harold Wilson’s “white heat of this revolution” speech at the 1963 Labour party conference).

After the first episode, some viewers found the way the issues were noisily referenced a bit much. But they do paint a picture of the decade. “We are in an interesting time, politically,” says Milne. “Many people on the left are unrecognisable to how they were in the seventies and eighties; women have made advances in equality, but there is still a long way to go.”

An older cast, including Lindsay Duncan and Juliet Stevenson, play the characters in the present day, but for the period between 1965 and 1990, the characters are played by the same young actors, including Claire Foy, who plays budding feminist Charlotte, and Sam Claflin as Jack, the rich landlord who brings them all together. MyAnna Buring, who plays art student Lilly, is wearing is wearing a long multi-coloured dress and thick eyelashes as the actors prepare for scenes from the second episode, which airs tonight, and is set in 1967 and 1968. “We don’t film it chronologically, we jump around – we could be filming scenes for several episodes in one day – so pitching it right is a challenge,” she says.

Sitting next to her in her trailer, Lee Ingleby, whose character Alan, a working-class boy from Newcastle is the first of his family to go to university, says: “I’m finding it harder to play younger than I am playing older. The journey that a person goes on from 20 to 30 is huge because you’re finding who you are and where you want to be in the world. You either cringe at the way you were or you miss it.” In later scenes, the flatmates are all made to look older with wigs and make-up – and, in Ingleby’s case, a moustache. “You look in the mirror and go ‘I look like my dad’,” he says with a laugh. “I love my dad, but no.”

For David Gyasi, playing Victor, a law student from Jamaica, the drama prompted conversations with his father, who came to the UK in 1966 from west Africa: “And for that I am really grateful,” he says. “When I first read the script, I only had episode one and two and I thought ‘I don’t want to do this,’ because I found Victor weak. Every time he was confronted with a challenge or racial slur in the first two episodes, he backs down.

“I grew up in the nineties, I have a different perspective – we’re a lot more outspoken, we battle. I had mistaken Victor’s silence for weakness and thought he wasn’t feeling what I was feeling when I was reading it. My dad laughed and said, ‘We felt it. It burned in your belly but the only thing you had at that time was to maintain your dignity and in dignity there is strength.’ ”

The actors are called back to the set to film the new year’s eve party scene at the end of 1967. A dozen extras have appeared, some sitting on the brown floral sofas, and the living room has been decorated with paper chains and lights that project psychedelic swirls on the walls. “It’s really important for us to do things like get the dancing they did then right,” says Jessica Gunning, who plays Orla, the gentle Northern Irish psychology student. “John, the director, got us all a copy of 7 Up [the documentary series which followed 14 British children from 1964 every seven years], which was useful because it showed people in the sixties dancing.”

When they are ready to film, I’m allowed to stand in the kitchen area and watch. Any period drama is a pedant’s dream – I’m delighted to spot a scrap from Melody Maker from 1976, nearly a whole decade in the future, on the pinboard – but I love that simple things such as the old milk bottles can create a depth and history in a better, and quieter, way than things like the Che Guevara posters on the wall of Jack’s room next door.

Paolo, an extra in orange corduroys, is standing next to me. He’s a bit disappointed he wasn’t picked for the scene. “I just wanted to dance, you know, show my skills,” he says. It is smoky, and hot under all the lights. Make-up artists are on standby to blot shiny faces, and members of the crew have to keep an eye on the very modern bottles of water the actors have been drinking from to make sure they are removed before the cameras roll.

More extras are drafted in to fill holes in the crowd, and for what seems like ages the scene (“5-4-3-2-1 Happy New Year!” everyone shouts) is repeated again and again to get different camera angles. Finally, John Alexander, the director, watches the film on a monitor set up just outside the kitchen door. “Good,” he says. “It’s perfect.”

• White Heat returns tonight at 9pm on BBC2

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: The Guardian (2012)

Two stars of the BBC2 drama set between the 60s and the present day discuss coming of age

Paula Milne’s drama White Heat follows seven flatmates across six decades – so did its stars Claire Foy and Lee Ingleby find themselves thinking about their own mortality?

Claire Foy (27) on playing Charlotte – “It’s made me think I’ll have to get some work done!”

Has White Heat made you think about getting older?

It’s made me think that maybe I’ll have to have some work done! To age us, they painted our foreheads and around our eyes with what looked like PVA glue — amazingly realistic but terrifying. I’m sure by the end I had more wrinkles because my skin had been stretched so much. Hopefully, I’ll take a little more care of myself than my character Charlotte does.

What advice would you give your teenage self?

Eventually you’ll have a boyfriend. Stop worrying!

Moving in with six fellow students changes Charlotte’s life for ever. What’s changed you?

I was supposed to go to university when I was 18 and couldn’t because I was poorly. I had a growth in my eye, which meant I had a ginormous, ugly eye for quite a long time. That really put things in perspective and helped me mature. Every chance I’ve had since then I’ve always made the most of. I see my life as Before and After it.

How does your generation differ from Charlotte’s?

It’s not so much my generation that worries me: it’s the younger generation. You worry that they don’t find politics very interesting; that they think being famous or playing Call of Duty on their Xbox is more exciting than being out in the world or reading a book. But back in Charlotte’s day, people were probably saying: “Oh, the younger generation don’t know they’re born” — as I am now.

What do you hope to be doing in a decade?

Holding babies! At least two. Career-wise? [In American drawl] “I’m going to Hollywood, yes siree…” No, I won’t be. I’ll be here. But I’d like to be acting still and I’d love to direct theatre.

Who plays the older Charlotte?

Juliet Stevenson. Can you believe it? I love her. I remember seeing her in The Seagull the weekend before I went to drama school. I sat on the front row, jaw on the floor, thinking, “I want to be able to do what you can do.”

Lee Ingleby (36) on playing Alan – “It wasn’t half as bad as turning 30″

Has the role made you think about ageing?

It’s a bit shocking looking in the mirror and thinking, “Hello Dad”. But it wasn’t half as worrying as turning 30. I didn’t celebrate. I tried to slip it under the radar, hoping nobody would notice. I think even my mam and dad forgot!

What’s changed you?

Moving to London when I was 18. I didn’t have a clue — just as Alan doesn’t. I’m from near Burnley in the North West where everybody looks and sounds the same and suddenly I was in college in west London with people from all walks of life, from different parts of the world. I was walking around with my eyes popping out of my head.

What advice would you give your teenage self?

I lacked a hell of a lot of confidence as a kid. I was so zitty — ridiculously acne-ridden — that I stayed in the shadows. I was fast approaching 20 and I still looked 13. That really threw my confidence. So I’d say, “Have faith. It’ll be all right in the end.”

What do you envy about Alan’s generation?

The lovely thing about the 60s, where we start this story, is that it had taken so long for the country to get back on its feet after the war that it was as if 20 years of change had to be packed in. So everything seemed to explode at once: music, clothes, technology, attitudes… It must have been so exciting to be a part of that.

How does your generation differ?

Certain things are brilliant about the era we live in. The advent of the internet means you can find out anything at the click of a button. But it’s sad that the world is getting smaller, there’s no place to hide and that we’ve lost the art of conversing. It’s too easy to text, too easy to have your face buried in a phone.

White Heat’s Claire Foy and Lee Ingleby on getting old before their time
Two stars of the BBC2 drama set between the 60s and the present day discuss coming of age

Share this episode

White Heat’s Claire Foy and Lee Ingleby on getting old before their time

Written By
Claire Webb
5:03 PM, 08 March 2012

Paula Milne’s drama White Heat follows seven flatmates across six decades – so did its stars Claire Foy and Lee Ingleby find themselves thinking about their own mortality?

Claire Foy (27) on playing Charlotte – “It’s made me think I’ll have to get some work done!”

Has White Heat made you think about getting older?

It’s made me think that maybe I’ll have to have some work done! To age us, they painted our foreheads and around our eyes with what looked like PVA glue — amazingly realistic but terrifying. I’m sure by the end I had more wrinkles because my skin had been stretched so much. Hopefully, I’ll take a little more care of myself than my character Charlotte does.

What advice would you give your teenage self?

Eventually you’ll have a boyfriend. Stop worrying!

Moving in with six fellow students changes Charlotte’s life for ever. What’s changed you?

I was supposed to go to university when I was 18 and couldn’t because I was poorly. I had a growth in my eye, which meant I had a ginormous, ugly eye for quite a long time. That really put things in perspective and helped me mature. Every chance I’ve had since then I’ve always made the most of. I see my life as Before and After it.

How does your generation differ from Charlotte’s?

It’s not so much my generation that worries me: it’s the younger generation. You worry that they don’t find politics very interesting; that they think being famous or playing Call of Duty on their Xbox is more exciting than being out in the world or reading a book. But back in Charlotte’s day, people were probably saying: “Oh, the younger generation don’t know they’re born” — as I am now.

What do you hope to be doing in a decade?

Holding babies! At least two. Career-wise? [In American drawl] “I’m going to Hollywood, yes siree…” No, I won’t be. I’ll be here. But I’d like to be acting still and I’d love to direct theatre.

Who plays the older Charlotte?

Juliet Stevenson. Can you believe it? I love her. I remember seeing her in The Seagull the weekend before I went to drama school. I sat on the front row, jaw on the floor, thinking, “I want to be able to do what you can do.”

Lee Ingleby (36) on playing Alan – “It wasn’t half as bad as turning 30″

Has the role made you think about ageing?

It’s a bit shocking looking in the mirror and thinking, “Hello Dad”. But it wasn’t half as worrying as turning 30. I didn’t celebrate. I tried to slip it under the radar, hoping nobody would notice. I think even my mam and dad forgot!

What’s changed you?

Moving to London when I was 18. I didn’t have a clue — just as Alan doesn’t. I’m from near Burnley in the North West where everybody looks and sounds the same and suddenly I was in college in west London with people from all walks of life, from different parts of the world. I was walking around with my eyes popping out of my head.

What advice would you give your teenage self?

I lacked a hell of a lot of confidence as a kid. I was so zitty — ridiculously acne-ridden — that I stayed in the shadows. I was fast approaching 20 and I still looked 13. That really threw my confidence. So I’d say, “Have faith. It’ll be all right in the end.”

What do you envy about Alan’s generation?

The lovely thing about the 60s, where we start this story, is that it had taken so long for the country to get back on its feet after the war that it was as if 20 years of change had to be packed in. So everything seemed to explode at once: music, clothes, technology, attitudes… It must have been so exciting to be a part of that.

How does your generation differ?

Certain things are brilliant about the era we live in. The advent of the internet means you can find out anything at the click of a button. But it’s sad that the world is getting smaller, there’s no place to hide and that we’ve lost the art of conversing. It’s too easy to text, too easy to have your face buried in a phone.

White Heat starts tonight at 9pm on BBC2

When I first saw the scripts for White Heat I was auditioning for the part of Lilly, but as soon I started reading it was the character of Charlotte that I identified with.

I had worked with the writer Paula Milne before on The Night Watch, in which I played Helen, a blonde, quite vulnerable character – the opposite of redhead, ambitious Charlotte. So I knew I had my work cut out to convince Paula I was the right person for the job!!

Both Charlotte and I grew up in Buckinghamshire and I could really identify with her ambitions and excitement at 18 of going off to university to start her life.

Charlotte is different to me in many ways though. She is very much a product of her time, brought up in the 1950s nuclear family. Her brothers are taught to be ambitious, not her.

She’s desperate to break out and change the world, and she does.

Charlotte is intelligent and is excited by people who don’t want to accept the status quo but who want to challenge authority and make things happen.

Which is one of the reasons why she is so attracted to her housemate Jack. He’s exciting and bold and political, and she understands him better than he does himself.

Jack has a difficult relationship with his parents, so does Charlotte, and she wants to be close to him. Unfortunately Jack doesn’t really feel the same!

It was so interesting to play a character from the age of 18 to 42 because you see how relationships (like Charlotte’s with Jack) can shape the decisions you make in your life, and only with hindsight, how much they affected you.

We had one director (John Alexander) directing all six episodes so it meant we could shoot scenes from episode one (age 18) in the morning, then episode six (age 42) in the afternoon.

That was a huge challenge. Not only because our 1965 and 1989 make-up and hair was so different and complex to change but also because we were shooting across entire decades of people’s lives.

We had to make sure we each knew our character’s journey in the show inside and out.

For me, the most important thing to get to grips with was how Charlotte changes from relatively naive and excited to so politically-driven and independent.

I read quite a lot about women who were involved in the women’s movement at the time and how their politics affected them personally.

I was surprised how little I knew about how much they sacrificed and how determined they were for change.

Music also helped me a lot to pinpoint certain moments in Charlotte’s life and differentiate between the decades. From the Sixties I listened to a lot of the Small Faces and Buffalo Springfield and later moved on to Kate Bush and Kiki Dee.

One of the wonderful things about Paula’s script is the friendship between the seven flatmates and how that changes with time. We were lucky that as a cast we all naturally became friends and had an amazing time shooting together.

We had a week of rehearsals before we started shooting, when we each had time to talk to John (Alexander, director) about the different relationships we had with the other characters over the decades.

We had time to get to know each other and talk about what we were nervous or excited about.

At the end of the week we all went to the local pub near where we were rehearsing in north London (very similar to the one in White Heat!). It felt like we were a proper team.

I think that helps with the dynamic of the characters on screen. Hopefully that means you will care about these characters and where their lives are going to take them.

Claire Foy plays the role of Charlotte in White Heat.

White Heat starts on Thursday, 8 March at 9pm on BBC Two. For further programme times, please visit the episode guide.

LT: Setting aside your own natural bias, who’s your favourite character?

Nico: I think Claire Foy has a very intriguing character in Lady Persie. She’s so evil and vindictive. There’s just so much behind her, and she plays her very well, with so much ease.

David Gyasi who plays Victor in ‘White Heat‘ was interviewed by IndieLondon:

Q. And how was working with your fellow cast members such as Sam Claflin and Claire Foy?
David Gyasi: … Claire Foy is amazing. She quietly goes about her business and she’s lovely. But I really enjoyed working with everyone on this. …

WE’RE not going to be able to avoid Claire Foy this month, which is a very good thing. The 27-year-old English actor, recently chosen by PJ Harvey as her rising star of 2012, is on our screens in two flagship BBC series. In one she is very nasty, and in the other she is very nice. Well, very normal anyway.

The first is Upstairs Downstairs, in which Foy has already appeared as Lady Persie, the bonkers, fascist, Nazi-sympathising bad egg of the “upstairs” lot. The second is Paula Milne’s new drama White Heat, an ambitious saga spanning four decades in Britain that promises to do for its young, hip cast what Our Friends In The North did for Daniel Craig, Christopher Eccleston, Mark Strong and Gina McKee. This time Foy plays Charlotte, a red-haired, hot-blooded, middle-class feminist who pitches up at a north London student house in the 1960s.

“She is relatively normal, which is unusual for me,” says Foy. “A lot of the characters I’ve played are a certain way, at a certain moment. Charlotte is just a middle class girl going through life. She has a similar background to me and is even from the same area of Buckinghamshire. It’s terrifying playing someone who is very close to you. You can’t really do anything to prepare. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I’m really proud of it. I think it’s amazing. And I loved playing her. She is this normal, contradictory girl with the most massive balls.”

This is a typical Foy response: self-deprecating, a bit stunned, and teetering on the brink of hysteria. Interviewing her is a bit like running around after a puppy on its first walk. She is trying to take it all in her stride, she says, it’s just that it’s so exciting. “I don’t think you can keep walking around being in awe of what you’re doing the whole time,” she says, sounding like she’s lecturing herself. “You can’t constantly and forever be going, ‘Oh my god! That’s Nicolas Cage! Amazing!’ You just have to get on and do it.”

So what was it like working with Cage? Foy ended up starring opposite him in last year’s Season Of The Witch, her first foray into Hollywood. “Amazing,” she says. “He walked up to me. It was so bizarre. I’d just had my hair extensions put in and he came over and said, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this movie’.” She laughs at this apparent absurdity. Oh, and she does a mean Cage impression.

It’s all a far cry from Foy’s first major role as Little Dorrit in Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation of the Dickens novel. Foy won the part of one of the sweetest heroines in literature not long after leaving drama school. Davies said of her at the time that he wanted every shot to be “a big close-up of… those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze”. It’s part of Foy’s magnetism: one moment she can look like the quintessential English rose, all pallid skin and round, tearful eyes, and the next she is more odd, difficult and interesting.

“I’m not the most beautiful girl in the world and I’m happy with that,” she says. “It means I don’t go up for those two-dimensional roles where it actually says in the script ‘Someone blonde, leggy, and beautiful walks into the room’. There are a lot of parts like that where basically all that’s required of the woman is to look amazing. I’m not going to be cast in them. I’m thankful for that. I only want to take parts that convince me.”

So far, they have convinced everyone else as well. Vogue put Foy at the top of their annual list of the 40 hottest people for Little Dorrit. Screen International listed her as one to watch. Last year she starred in The Promise, Peter Kosminsky’s drama about a young woman investigating her grandfather’s role in 1940s Palestine. She has also starred in The Night Watch (also written by Paula Milne), opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in Wreckers, and as a vicious tabloid editor in Channel 4’s comedy Hacks. “I soon became a complete bastard after Little Dorrit,” she jokes. “I’m so lucky to have played someone that nice because the majority of parts aren’t like that. It’s a lovely thing because it means people presume I am actually really nice. And then they meet me and realise I’m a horror.”

The generational span of White Heat required Foy to play the same character from 1965 to the present. “I have to play 18 and upwards,” she says. “I do look quite young, which is fortunate, but I am going for older parts now. I don’t think I can get away with playing someone ten years younger any more. Mind you, I’ll go where the work is to be honest.”

Charlotte is one of a group of student housemates drawn together by virtue of being outsiders. There is a gay man, a black man, an Irish Catholic, an artist, and so on. “Charlotte is very politically aware, as the youth then were,” she says. “I had to get my head round the women’s movement and how radical it was for someone like her to go to university at all. I spoke to my mum, who was the first in her family to go to university, and it was such a massive thing. I take all of this for granted. I can go where I want, do what I want. I’m not blocked by my sex.”

Does she consider herself a feminist? “Yes, I think so,” she says. “I stand up for myself. I’m one of those people who like shouting about things. But I’m not particularly well-versed in it.”

Foy was born in Stockport, Greater Manchester, but grew up in Buckinghamshire. Her father was a salesman, and her mother brought up her and her older brother and sister. Her parents divorced when she was eight.

Foy never considered acting as an option, though she was obsessed with films. “I just loved Doris Day and Vivien Leigh,” she says. “I was in all my school plays but all my friends who wanted to be actresses were incredibly tall and beautiful and actually good at it. I wasn’t particularly.” Is she just being modest? “No,” she insists. “But at primary school I was more like that. Pretty bloody attention seeking. Very loud, hyperactive and excitable. I had so much energy. My brother and sister hated me. All I ever wanted to do was perform.”

By the time she was a teenager, she was clearly getting serious about acting, even if she won’t admit to it. She studied drama and film studies at Liverpool John Moores University and then did a year at the Oxford School of Drama. Not long after came Little Dorrit.

“I wanted to go up for Tatty Corum [a role that went to Freema Agyeman] because she was a very moody, angry character,” says Foy. “I was so flustered at my final audition, I couldn’t believe it when they called to say I’d got Amy Dorrit. I haven’t known panic like it since. It’s the abject fear of getting your dream job.”

Foy isn’t panicking any more, but she still seems blown away by what’s happened. And she is cynical about the hype that surrounds her. “I couldn’t believe PJ Harvey even knew who I was,” she says. “I was convinced she had been told to choose me. But it’s lovely. I just hope I don’t let her down.”

And what about being the next big thing? Foy laughs. “None of that has anything to do with me,” she says. “That’s what this industry is like. It’s a game. None of it is real and you can’t take it too seriously. But, still, you know, it’s amazing.”

• White Heat begins on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2. Upstairs Downstairs, tonight, BBC1, 9pm

Thanks to the wonderful Lorna I added scans from UK publications to promote ‘Upstairs Downstairs‘ as well as the scans of recently posted interviews with Claire Foy. Stay tuned for a massive ‘White Heat‘ Scan update soon!

Claire Foy (Lady Percy) says: “The eating scenes can be the most difficult because they’re filmed again and again as the food gets colder. And you can’t get drunk – the wine is usually elderflower or grape juice.”

• Source: The Sun Hot TV Buzz

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans from 2012: Independent Magazine (UK) – February 18, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna
- Scans from 2012: Daily Express Saturday (UK) – February 18-24, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna
- Scans from 2012: The Sun Hot TV Buzz (UK) – February 18-24, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna
- Scans from 2012: Sunday Mirror (UK) – February 19, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna
- Scans from 2012: The Lady (UK) – February 24, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna
- Scans from 2012: The Stage (UK) – March 1, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna
- Scans from 2012: Daily Mail Weekend (UK) – March 3, 2012 Many thanks to Lorna

The stars of the new six-part BBC drama reflect on friendships forged in the volatile 1960s

It’s always such a fillip to meet actors who have had fun making a TV series. Perhaps fun isn’t the word. White Heat, a six-parter written by Paula Milne and coming soon to BBC2, is a sprawling bittersweet epic marking the lives of seven friends from 1965 to today, and there is angst, and darkness, against some of the fastest-changing times in British history.

But Claire Foy and Sam Claflin, two of the impossibly bubbly young stars, seem to have enjoyed not just fun but the fun of learning. “It’s been an eye-opener,” says Foy, most recently seen in Upstairs Downstairs, “to realise that so many of the things women take for granted were so hard-fought for in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Sam and I start in 1965, and it runs with all the changes, choices, right up till now, though our faces aren’t seen after 1990 – some experienced people take over.”

“Yes,” butts in Claflin, cheerfully, “the good actors [Juliet Stevenson, Michael Kitchen, Lindsay Duncan] then start being us.”

“It’s a sign of how good Paula’s script is,” says Foy, who plays feminist Charlotte in the series, “that they wanted to be involved.”

It strikes me, I say, as we meet in the green room at the BFI, where the two are faintly nervous about facing a Q&A session after a screening – they needn’t be; neither is backward in coming forward – that this was more than a job for them: it was something of an education. “Absolutely,” says Foy. “For me, it was learning that the world we have been fortunate enough to receive is because of what happened in ’65, ’72, because of people like Charlotte, and it was so recent. Things moved so quickly just before I was born. Now they might be moving back. Women were so excited about education, that was the thing. Not ‘being famous’, or having nice shoes.”

“And the fact that people were so interested in politics,” adds Claflin, once a talented footballer who possibly gained more female fans by stopping doing that to appear in Any Human Heart and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Back then, in our characters’ decades, it was exciting, politics was everything.”

“What the experience made me think about,” says Foy, “was getting older. You see the characters making choices, decisions, through their life, ending up a certain way, and you think, oh God, if he’d only gone that way, or oh, if she hadn’t been so stubborn and gone that way. Our characters both have to make huge choices, it’s kind of like Sliding Doors. Hey, that could be a second series… what would have happened if?”

Here at Digital Spy, we’re a little bit excited about BBC Two’s brand new drama White Heat! The show focuses on seven students living in a house together in the 1960s… then follows them as they grow up!

We’ll be bringing you chats with the cast every day until the show airs, and first up are the lovely Claire Foy and Sam Claflin, who spoke to reporters when we visited them on set. Read on to find out what they had to say!

Sam, is that your hair? It looks a bit Kevin Keegan!
Sam: “I wish it was mine! You’re definitely not the first person to say that. It’s of the time, I’m told. It’s a weft. I had no idea what a weft was before we started – it’s become the bane of my life now! They’re basically like clip-on things but they glue them to my hair or my head… I feel like such a diva sitting there having all my make up and hair done! But I’m not the only one, so no complaints.”

What about your hair, Claire – is that a weft?
Claire: “Yeah. I don’t know where it ends and I begin any more!”
Sam: “We all go through so many looks of different eras. I think they’re just trying to change it up a bit.”

What’s your favourite look?
Sam: “1968, I think for me. It’s a bit more grungy, no flared tight jeans, and a bit shorter hair. Only a bit shorter.”
Claire: “Less like Kevin Keegan!”

Are you never tempted to go home with your hair like that?
Sam: “I’d love to.”
Claire: “He suits it, doesn’t he?”
Sam: “I’m so tempted to grow it but I’ve never had the opportunity unfortunately so I’m living the moment while I’m on set, making the most of it! What’s your favourite era?”
Claire: “’70s, because I get to wear trousers. That’s it, really! And the rest of the time the skirts are just quite short and it’s a bit embarrassing. But yes, definitely ’70s. I don’t know, I wear less make up and try less hard.”

So tell us a bit about your characters.
Claire: “I play Charlotte Pugh. When you first see her when she’s 18, she’s come from quite a staid, 1950s, mum and dad, mock tudor house in Gerrards Cross and she just wants to break away. She’s one of the first teenagers, I suppose, of the generation, and wants to break away from it and really do something and go to university and really live her life and be really exciting and she does. However! She’s really, really ambitious and driven and quite controlled but as she gets older she sort of realises that everything comes to bite her on her arse, and all the ambitions that she has don’t necessarily become fulfilled. And her mum’s mad – her mum’s deranged. She’s a good one.”
Sam: “I’m the bad one! I lead people astray.”

You’re so proud of that!
Sam: “I am! It’s such a great opportunity for any actor. He’s not the bad guy – he’s basically the lovable rogue. He’s the bad boy I suppose – the James Dean of the ’70s.”
Claire: [laughs] “I love that!”
Sam: “I’m speaking very highly of myself! No, but hopefully I’ll bring across an element to him which the audience should be able to sympathise and empathise with. He quite heavily gets into drugs, he’s very passionate about politics. He’s from a very privileged upbringing – his father’s very wealthy and his grandfather’s a viscount, so he’s from lots of money. I think he does everything in his power to rebel against that really. He’s the landlord of the house which they all move into. His daddy bought the house, it’s that kind of [thing]. But he hates the thought of following in his father’s footsteps.”
Claire: “We’re quite similar in that way, aren’t we? Trying not to turn out like our parents.”

Do they hold onto their principles throughout the series or do they change?
Sam: “I think I do, definitely. I think he follows through as far as he can but I think he lets himself down at each hurdle. It’s usually over himself – he isn’t completely in control of himself and therefore lets himself down in moments. But he can never foresee that, and usually it’s Charlotte who tries to push him in the right direction.”
Claire: “But it’s like life gets in the way. Charlotte very much is the same person in the beginning [as at the end]. She has the same fight about her, but what she knows she can achieve is completely different and what she’s fighting for is completely different. Whereas in the beginning she thought she could change the world – I mean, they both do and they want to – and as you get older it does get eroded slightly.”
Sam: “Okay, we can’t completely change the world, but we can do it little bits at a time.”
Claire: “We’re following a period of time where they were a really political generation – they knew a lot and they saw so much happening so by the time you get to the late ’70s and it’s the first female prime minister, so much has happened in their lives that, when they first started on the journey of discovery, they never would have imagined. It’s like a political journey, it’s an emotional journey.”

You also play older characters and have wrinkle make up…
Claire: “They’re not good days!”
Sam: “That’s even longer in the make up chair.”

Is it like a glimpse into the future?
Claire: “I really hope not. I don’t know! I think Charlotte’s had a hard life, you see, so it does take its toll… that’s my excuse! Because we’re all different ages playing people who are 40 years old, it helps to have make up on that makes you feel older or wear clothes that make you feel a little bit old. So we have to use it to help us to be able to do that, really. The make up department are amazing. It’s nice to do different things… I’m glad to take it off at the end of the day!”
Sam: “It makes me very red-raw at the end of the day. It makes me feel 40 years old when I’m taking it off, actually! But like Claire mentioned, the make up and the costumes really help you feel a lot slower in your body and the physicality changes.”

What is the relationship like between Jack and Claire? It’s like the love story of the show, isn’t it?
Sam: “Well, love story… she’s in love with me, me not really, probably!”
Claire: “I think it’s going to be one of those ones where people are screaming at the television going, ‘Just hit him! Just hit him!’”
Sam: “It does get a little bit tedious on her part, bless her! I think he likes to think that he gets everything that he wants and I think the mentality of his childhood and probably being given everything he wanted as a kid, I think he continues to live life like that really. So if he wants her, he’ll have her. If he doesn’t want her, she can wait outside while he has somebody else! He’s like that.”
Claire: “I think Charlotte sees in Jack the man he becomes when he’s about 45 years old, as is so often in life! And she sees how wonderful he is and how brilliant he is and sees all his great qualities, which quite often he doesn’t see himself. And she wants to be the one to help him but he won’t let her in. It’s that classic thing – she waits and waits and waits and waits and waits and then she gets to a point where she goes, ‘Oh my God, you actually don’t care about me at all’. I have this quite a lot with her but I think she keeps going back because she does love him and she just knows that he loves her as well.”
Sam: “He doesn’t like to admit it really. I think he might have lacked a lot of love as a child from mother and father so therefore I don’t think he knows how to love or how to express his love to anybody else. It gets a bit complicated I think.”
Claire: “But it could work! It really could work and if it did work it would be wonderful. If you just stopped being an idiot! But they’re both to blame, I think – that’s the interesting thing.”
Sam: “She lets him get away with it in certain circumstances.”
Claire: “She convinces herself that he really does care about her and they’re not putting any restrictions on each other and actually it just comes back to bite her on the arse. Oh dear!”

Have you ever lived in a house share like the characters do in White Heat?
Sam: “Not with random [people], no. With mates yes, but not a house like that.”
Claire: “I lived with seven girls! We were in Liverpool and it was sort of… really bad. Amazing at the same time! I couldn’t imagine if there were boys in the house as well. It would have been terrible!”
Sam: “I’ve lived with boys and girls and I find that boys are generally cleaner than girls. Generally! This is a big generalisation! This is Jack’s thoughts! No, I’m very clean. Just to put that out there.”

What do you make of the comparisons between White Heat and shows like This Life or Our Friends In The North?
Sam: “I think this is very different. It has similarities, of course it does, but it has similarities to… Mad Men.”
Claire: “Oh God, don’t say that!”
Sam: “This is like the new Lord of the Rings! I think there are always similarities but hopefully we’ll bring something very fresh and new and I think the fact that we’re all very young, and we seem to get on really well, there’s a lovely dynamic between us as people as well as actors as well as the characters, so hopefully we’ll be able to portray that.”
Claire: “And Our Friends In The North was a huge success, so hopefully that’s quite a good thing! I suppose it could be worse, it could be something else!”

White Heat begins on Thursday, March 8 at 9pm on BBC Two.

Claire Foy leaps onto the bench opposite me, momentarily forgetting she’s wearing a teeny miniskirt. ‘Uggh,’ she exclaims passionately as she tugs at her skirt, doing her best to maintain some dignity. ‘There have been quite a few tricky moments with this outfit and I hate my legs. I can’t wait for the Seventies to start so I can get some trousers on.’

We are on set for Claire’s latest television show, White Heat. She plays a strident feminist called Charlotte in the drama, which follows seven flatmates from their rebellious Sixties student days up to the present. She’s also sporting red hair, which she likes more than the miniskirts. ‘I’ve always wanted to go red so it was great to have to do it for a job,’ she says. ‘But it’s only now that I’ve discovered my hair grows very quickly, so I have to get it dyed ginger every other week.’ Then she laughs so raucously she needs to tug at her skirt again.

Claire, 27, the fastest rising actress on television, is known for her still elegance playing period characters such as the title role in Little Dorrit and the fascist Lady Persephone Towyn in Upstairs Downstairs. In the flesh, though, she is boisterously modern and immediately engaging. As we chat in the buffet coach in an unglamorous car park outside the former carpet warehouse where White Heat is being filmed, she manages to both chomp her way through a huge sandwich – ‘I love food and thank God I’ve got a fast metabolism’ – and talk at 100 miles an hour.

‘When I first saw the script I thought I can’t do it, I have to age from 18 to 45 and we often go from one age to the next in the same day. It’s quite terrifying,’ she says pausing for breath. ‘At first I thought that maybe I should develop a stoop, but then I realised how ridiculous that would be.

‘I like Charlotte. She’s a funny one; she’s opinionated but quite cool with it. She’s driven by the idea of making a difference; one of the first waves of feminists. But she makes a mistake we all know about. She falls in love with her landlord, Jack. He treats her so badly but she thinks if she waits around long enough he’ll change. It shows that even for a woman who talks about not wanting a man to define her, it’s easier to say than actually do.’

Claire admits she’s struggled to get to grips with how different life was for women just 50 years ago. ‘To go to university, to go on protests, they were massive things to do then and it makes me feel extremely bad I haven’t thanked the women who went before me for all they did for us. As a modern woman you take it all for granted.’

Claire could take a lot for granted but she doesn’t. She won her first major role as Amy Dorrit as soon as she left drama school; writer Andrew Davies said he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be ‘a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze’. She hasn’t stopped working since, with roles as diverse as a newspaper boss in Channel 4 satire Hacks to a medieval girl accused of witchcraft in the Nicholas Cage film Season Of The Witch. ‘I did go into shock for three months after Little Dorrit but then I decided you can’t think ahead – you have to take a day at a time.’

The daughter of a Rank Xerox salesman, Claire was born in Stockport but spent most of her childhood in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. The youngest of three, her parents divorced when she was eight but stayed in the same village. As a youngster she trained as a ballet dancer. ‘Then, when I was 13 I developed juvenile arthritis, so I couldn’t do it any more. I grew out of it, but it was obvious I’d never be a dancer. That’s when I turned to acting, although I never really thought I could do it.

‘I was an attention-seeker at home and used to put on shows, but at school I was never the prettiest or the most talented. It was always an uphill struggle against lots of intelligent, well-off girls who were very beautiful at 13. I definitely felt like the ugly duckling, the one who didn’t have any money or go on holidays. I just thought everyone else was better than me.’

Aged 17 she developed a benign tumour in one eye. She has said she felt she looked like ‘a Cyclops’ and told how she was on steroids for a year which made her put on weight and suffer from acne. She now credits her illness with giving her perspective on a business which is largely based on looks.

It also gave her the confidence to take drama and screen studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She was planning to be a cinematographer but fell more in love with acting and won a place at the Oxford School of Drama. Her tutors there gave her enough self-belief to think she could make it. ‘I realised I had been putting off what I really wanted to do. You’ve just got to have the guts to go for it. So I did, and it’s worked out very well.’

Very well indeed. If ever you need proof you’ve made it, then appearing in two very different prime-time dramas on the BBC at the same time must surely be it. She is currently back on air as Lady Persie in Upstairs Downstairs and as controversial as ever. In the first episode she passionately snogged her brother-in-law Lord Holland. ‘She’s completely precocious and wayward and does whatever she wants,’ says Claire of her Upstairs Downstairs alter ego. ‘That’s one of the main reasons I like playing her so much. Sometimes it’s difficult to get your head around things she does. But I think she’s brilliant.’

In real life Claire has been dating The History Boys actor Stephen Campbell Moore since meeting him two years ago on Season Of The Witch; the pair share a flat in Notting Hill and have shot the pilot for a medical comedy called The Pulse together. Next up she has a large role in the Hollywood film Vivaldi about the composer’s experiences as a music master in a school for the illegitimate daughters of Venetian courtesans. She’s also just been taken on by the same LA agent who looks after another girl-of-the moment – Dragon Tattoo actress Rooney Mara – and she’s planning to give Hollywood a go.

There’s already plenty of interest but she insists she will remain the down-to-earth girl television producers over here have fallen in love with. ‘Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller, for example, are normal girls but their lives as celebrities are very far removed from what I want,’ she says. ‘For the first time in my life my bank account isn’t overdrawn, but I’m very aware all this is probably not going to last.’ Several million people may beg to differ.

White Heat starts on BBC2 on Thursday at 9pm.

Upstairs Downstairs, BBC1, tomorrow, 9pm.

from The Stage / by Matthew Hemley

With both Upstairs Downstairs and White Heat being screened on the BBC this month, Claire Foy talks to Matthew Hemley about feeling surprisingly comfortable in front of the camera

Claire Foy has been busy filming that much for television in recent months, she needs a reminder about which show it is I’m referring to when I mention I’ve seen the first two episodes of her latest drama.

“Is that White Heat?,” she asks.

Yes, I respond. Although, to be fair, it could easily have been Upstairs Downstairs, which also stars Foy and which is also being broadcast by the BBC this month. Indeed, since taking the title role in the BBC’s adaptation of Little Dorrit back in 2008, Foy has rarely been off our screens.

She appeared in Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal for Sky, took the lead in Peter Kosminsky’s The Promise for Channel 4, joined the cast for the BBC’s adaptation of The Night Watch, and has recently tackled comedy with Hacks. In between, she has also found time to star alongside Nicolas Cage in the Hollywood film Season of the Witch and is now back on the BBC with a second series of Upstairs Downstairs and White Heat.

The latter is a six-part drama series by Paula Milne (who also adapted The Night Watch for the BBC) and is about the lives of seven characters, with the series spanning the 1960s through to present day. The seven characters first meet as young students who live as flat mates in London’s Tufnell Park. The series then follows them over four decades as their lives are shaped by the political events of each era – including the death of Churchill and the ascendancy of Thatcher, up to the present day.

In the series, Foy plays Charlotte, who is described as an “intelligent feminist”. However, Foy was initially called in to audition for another part.

“They wanted me to go up for another role, but I said, I think I like Charlotte,” she reveals, adding with a laugh: “That sounds bad because she is the main part, but ignore that.”

Charlotte, she says, is the “most normal” person she has played. In the series, Foy has to portray her up to the age of 40, which she says required “ageing up” (she is 27).

“At first we were all like, crikey, we have to play 40-year-olds,” she says. “But it’s not really that much of a leap. People who are 40 don’t walk with Zimmer frames. No one at the age of 40 feels like a 100-year-old. They feel just like they did when they were 18. That was interesting.”

While Foy and her co-stars play their roles up to the age of 40, each character also has an even older version of themselves in the series.

Foy’s is played by Juliet Stevenson.

“They had a hard job, because they came in and played a role we had already done,” Foy explains. “But Juliet watched what we had shot, and we could have talked about the character had we needed to. But there was no need to do that and, in a way, I hope it works for that reason.”

For her own part, Foy was meticulous about combing Milne’s script for clues about her character. This way of working, she says, is absolutely vital to her. When she was a student at the Oxford School of Drama, a director called Richard Beecham told her that an actor has to use the clues that are in a script.

“And you do,” Foy says. “If you don’t, you’re amazing, and I think it’s so brave not to. The script is the only place I get inspiration from. I am not very good at picking a character out of the blue and deciding if they have a limp or something. I am not good at that. I work better when I have got the stuff in front of you and you have to get your head around it.”

She adds: “Writers want to see you playing the character rather than doing an impersonation of it. So you really need to find something you identify with or understand. It’s important to make the effort to be the person a writer has written.”

So what did Foy learn from the script about Charlotte?

The actress says she had to “delve quite a lot” into Milne’s script, and discovered from this research that Charlotte is “politically aware” but a “calm, closed person”.

“The hint in the script for me was that she is the person who never depends on other people or goes to them with problems,” she explains. “Only when she is in dire straits will she ask for help. At the same time, for certain people, she is there for them all the time. She is very giving towards people she loves.”

Foy reveals that Milne’s story is semi-autobiographical, and that the writer lived through everything she has written about. Because the series spans decades, Foy acknowledges there may well be comparisons between it and Our Friends in the North. But she adds that there are “massive differences” between the two and that it would be “awful to be compared and contrasted”.

Even if White Heat and Our Friends in the North aren’t compared, however, then two shows that always will be compared are Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey. Foy plays Lady Persephone Towyn in the former, which is back for a second outing this month, written by Heidi Thomas. All of which means TV viewers will be seeing a lot of her on the BBC this month.

Which is interesting given that Foy did not think she would have a career on screen when she first started studying drama at the Oxford School of Drama. They did do a lot of work training to appear on camera, but Foy says she was bad at this.

“And I was told I was awful,” she laughs. “It was the most shameful thing in the whole world. So I thought I am not going to have a movie career. However, when I left, most of the work came from TV really.”

Her first stint on television was for the pilot of Being Human, before landing an episode of Doctors and then the lead in Little Dorrit.

“On that, I worked with incredible directors and actors and it was like going back to school in a way. I can’t believe I had the confidence to do it,” she says. “Looking back I don’t know where it came from.”

Although obviously proud of her work on Little Dorrit, Foy says it is her work on the four-part series The Promise for Channel 4 that she is particularly pleased with. She calls this show, about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, a “beautiful piece of drama” and adds that she hopes producers try and make more television like that in the future.

For now though, she admits she has nothing planned work wise. Just what she calls “a period of blackness”.

But she is keen to try her hand at something different in the future – theatre, perhaps – and expresses a desire to sing and dance in something.

“Not at the same time however,” she says, laughing. “A play with songs would be fine to begin with.”

• White Heat begins on BBC2 on March 8 at 9pm

“As students they are all really excited about the world and what they can achieve. They are excited about what they can do with their lives, and they really do do something, unlike today’s students, who think being famous or playing Call of Duty on their computer all day is more exciting than actually being out in the world.”

Foy ages over 40 years during the course of the six-part series with the aid of prosthetics, but the highlight for her was seeing Juliet Stevenson playing her older self. ‘I went to see her on stage while I was at drama school, when she was in The Seagull. I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, I want to be able to do what you can do’. And now I am.”

• Source: Radio Times

Claire Foy has joked that her White Heat co-star Tamsin Greig was irked by being cast as her mum.

The two play mother and daughter in the new BBC Two drama, written by Paula Milne, and 27-year-old Claire said Tamsin, 45, pretended to be annoyed by the casting.

She joked: “I think Tamsin was slightly annoyed she’s playing my mum seeing as she’s only about 10 years older than me. I’m playing down in age and she’s playing up in age so it’s alright.”

Claire said the Green Wing actress was “the best mum ever”, and added she had always wanted to work with her.

“I remember seeing her in the Seagull just before going to drama school and I was slightly obsessed with her,” she said.

• Source: Press Association

From The Evening Standard, February 24 / by Stephen Armstrong

When the cast of White Heat come together for our shoot, it feels, for a moment, like seeing the 1980s Brat Pack – Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald and co – posing for a poster for their latest cult comedy. In other words, this is a cast that’s going places. Sam Claflin has been on a roll since Pirates of the Caribbean and United; Claire Foy’s screen-burning intensity in Channel 4′s The Promise was one of the performances of 2011, building on her breakthrough role as Little Dorrit; Reece Ritchie shone in Prince of Persia; while Swedish-born MyAnna Buring has a legion of obsessive fans after joining The Twilight Saga.

White Heat feels like the show that will bounce them all into full-intensity red-carpet stardom, much as the outrageously successful Our Friends in the North did for Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Mark Strong in the 1990s, and State of Play and Skins did for so many in the 2000s. The drama is an intimate yet epic BBC Two thriller from writer Paula Milne, of The Politician’s Wife and Small Island fame. Milne dripped her own life into the ambitious script, which follows the lives of seven friends from 1965 to the present, starting out as flat-share students in London and ending sprawled in the wreckage of love, loss, drugs and politics 40 years later. Imagine following the cast of Fresh Meat over the next four decades. The actors all say they’re lucky to play complex characters over decades of adventure; Milne says, ‘Me, I think we are lucky to have them.’

Claflin plays prime mover Jack, the rebel with a cause who just happens to be rich enough to own a large house in Tufnell Park, which he lets out to new students he finds interesting. He interviews hundreds, saying he’s planning an ambitious social experiment forged in 1960s’ idealism to create a perfectly formed commune where everything, even sexual partners, is shared. ‘You have to feel sorry for him,’ Claflin grins. ‘He starts off like a freedom fighter and ends up as everything he hates. He recruits like he’s got a list of stereotypes: the Asian gay guy, the black guy, the techie, the feminist… One from each group to see what happens. You’d expect it to go wrong, of course, but actually the flat share is the best bit for him.’

Claflin has done the flat share – at drama school with a bunch of buddies who ‘lived in each other’s pockets, all slept with the same person; we had burglars wander in while we were out at the pub, who were chased off through the kitchen window by our drunk mate who’d crashed out on the sofa… the usual stuff’. The experience proved so bonding that they are all his best friends, despite his career rocketing ahead after sharing a screen with Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush in last year’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Snow White & the Huntsman opposite Kristen Stewart comes out later this year and Disney has optioned him for three more movies. ‘That could be Pirates or a script developed with me involved, but at the same time it could be High School Musical 7,’ he deadpans.

His sparring partner, intelligent Northern feminist Charlotte, is played by Claire Foy in a bitter inversion of the One Day storyline’s unrequited devotion. ‘It’s a very red role,’ she grins. ‘Charlotte has got deep red hair and she’s intensely political in a way you really don’t find these days.’ Foy is light, friendly and down-to-earth, the opposite of Charlotte’s intensity. Indeed, during filming, Foy’s corpsing was the main reason for re-takes: ‘I’m 27 and I was told off for giggling,’ she admits. ‘Everyone knew how to set me off. In the big set-piece scenes, like when we were all sitting round for dinner, I’d have to avoid everyone’s gaze.’

Right now, she’s about as hot as an actor can get: she starred in Channel 4′s News of the World spoof Hacks over Christmas and plays alongside Elle Fanning and Max Irons in a forthcoming Vivaldi biopic, although she secretly fancies a bit of musical theatre. She warns us not to believe any hype: ‘I hope they don’t look back at this show in ten years’ time and say I was the duff one. The rest of the cast all went to Hollywood and Foy was left alone in a flat with her cats.’

Foy and Buring share a few ageing horror stories: adding years to their characters involved grim facial torture such as stretching out glue across their skin, ripping it off and letting the skin scrunch up in artificial wrinkles. ‘I think I’ve got some permanent ones. I call them my White Heat wrinkles,’ Buring grimaces. Her character Lilly has a fragile beauty and damaged storyline belied by MyAnna’s hearty voice and action-packed life. Born in Stockholm, her father was a surgeon and she spent her childhood travelling across the Middle East – ‘I say surgeon, he could have been a spy,’ she laughs – going to school in Oman, before coming to London for sixth form and drama school. Since then she’s been a muse for British indie directors, working as a sort of Uma Thurman to director Neil Marshall’s Quentin Tarantino in his films The Descent and Doomsday, before having the thriller Kill List written for her by Ben Wheatley.

‘Lilly probably suffers most at the hands of the 1960s,’ Buring muses. ‘Looking back at the changes that hit her – legalised abortion, new divorce laws – you think of the past as a very dark place.’ Indeed, Milne has placed politics and pleasure at the heart of the series’ plotlines. Kicking off with Churchill’s death, the Vietnam War and student protests, global events bleed into the characters’ lives: Jack turns to drugs; childbirth issues plague the women. It’s Ritchie’s gay Asian medical student who ultimately benefits most from the sweeping changes: ‘What really resonated with me was when his family cut him off for being gay and he lost touch with all of them,’ he confesses. ‘My family are everything.’ The 25-year-old from Lowestoft is straight, but is as happy playing across sexuality as he is twisting Arabic opposite Gemma Arterton and Jake Gyllenhaal for Prince of Persia, or playing Puck alongside Dame Judi Dench in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Rose Theatre in Kingston.

Back in the Kilburn house where ES is photographing the cast – clothes strewn everywhere, MyAnna asking to borrow a jumper/skirt combo for a launch party later – these four actors at the start of their journey seem unfazed, giggling and narrowly avoiding a food fight with plates of jelly. Ritchie pauses for thought. ‘I reckon Sam will be our Johnny Depp, Claire will be the next Dame Judi and MyAnna – whatever she does it’ll be mayhem,’ he says. ‘Every day on set there was something astonishing. You watch them. The show may have the history but I reckon you’re watching acting history right now.’

White Heat will be on BBC Two next month

Her luminous good looks made her the star of Little Dorrit and Upstairs Downstairs. As she prepares to light up our TV screens once again, Claire Foy talks to Gerard Gilbert.

Claire Foy is running late for her interview in the first-floor private dining room of a north London pub, finally phoning to say: “I’m downstairs”. “And I’m upstairs,” I reply, which is all very droll because Foy is of course one of the stars of Upstairs Downstairs, BBC1′s reconstituted version of the Seventies ITV classic about toffs and servants. Except that today the toffs are downstairs, or rather the cast of ‘scripted reality’ show Made in Chelsea are shooting an advert for the fashion chain River Island. “How exciting,” says Foy when she puts her head round the door. “It’s Made in Chelsea downstairs… I can’t believe it.”

What chance the cast of Made in Chelsea returning the compliment: “It’s Claire Foy upstairs… we can’t believe it”? Have they even heard of her? The difference is that while the solipsistic Sloanes are chasing fame for its own sake, celebrity is a by-product of Foy’s job. She is, however, the real class act in this building, a fact momentarily disguised by her munching a Danish pastry from a paper bag. “Breakfast,” she says between bites. “I’m lucky I have a fast metabolism… my whole family does… everyone’s got a lot of nervous energy so we burn it off.”

I’ll say. Foy is high-spirited, chatty and, I discover when transcribing my recording of our conversation, tends not to finish one sentence before embarking on a fresh one. She is, you might say, the mistress of the… And this might be more frustrating if the conversational cascade was not rounded off with a pleasantly earthy, self-deprecating laugh. She seems genuinely bemused by the fact that she has won several of the most covetable television parts of recent years, from the title role in BBC1′s Dickens adaptation, Little Dorrit, to playing Erin – the young woman investigating her grandfather’s role during the British mandate in 1940s Palestine – in Peter Kosminsky’s acclaimed Channel 4 drama The Promise. Journalists have even started calling her the “next Keira” and the “next Sienna”.

“I’m not being funny but I’m never going to be Keira Knightley,” she says in a matter-of-fact way that suggests realism rather than false-modesty. “It’s that thing of going (putting on a moronic voice) ‘the next… the next…’. I hate the idea of being touted as something that I have never tried to make myself be. I mean, I might not do anything… I might finish doing Upstairs Downstairs and just drop off the face of the planet.”

Before that unlikely event, and for the next two months, Foy will be prominent on our television screens in contrasting roles – as the fascist supporting Lady Persephone Towyn in Upstairs Downstairs, and then as Charlotte, a middle-class feminist in mid-Sixties London in the Paula Milne’s generational saga White Heat. In the first series of Upstairs Downstairs, which was set in 1936 and had the misfortune of launching in the wake of the Downton Abbey juggernaut, ‘Lady Persie’, the black-shirt, black sheep of the family, had an affair with the Mosleyite family chauffeur (shades here of Downton‘s Lady Sybil, who ran off with the Granthams’ driver). Lady Persie then turned her sights on the German ambassador to London (the real one at the time, but he’s not going to sue), Joachim von Ribbentrop. In other words, she is the Unity Mitford – the Hitler-loving Mitford sister – of the piece, and in the new series living in Nazi Germany.

“It would be interesting to see Lady Persie and Adolf Hitler around a table together,” muses Foy. “Probably she’d call him a stupid name and laugh and he’d probably quite like her.” Never mind Hitler, does Foy like Lady Persie? “You have to like every character that you play because if you don’t understand them then, you know…” she says. “Yes she stands for awful things, but when you read Unity Mitford’s diaries you realise she isn’t really conscious… they come from this privileged background where they were brought up in the country and their mum and dad were completely bonkers and they just say what they think. She doesn’t give a shit about what anybody else thinks.” But wasn’t that just the prerogative of privilege? “I am always so envious of people who do whatever they want. Obviously she’s not a very nice person, but I still think she’s hilarious.”

The snobbish Mitfords would probably categorise Foy as ‘non-U’. Born in 1984 in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in Stepping Hill hospital, scene of the recent spate of suspicious saline-drip deaths, she is the youngest of three siblings and part of a large, extended Irish (on her mother’s side) family. She moved south to Buckinghamshire with her father’s job (he was a salesman for Rank Xerox) and an averagely happy sort of childhood was only slightly discomfited, at the age of eight, by her parents’ divorce.

“As divorces go, on a scale of one to 10? I don’t remember a thing – so, 10, amazing,” she says. “My sister was five years older, so she got a lot of the… and my brother is my brother so he didn’t pay much attention either, bless him. But I didn’t really know what was going on. Or maybe I just chose not to remember, but mum and dad didn’t shout at each other or anything so… And we moved to another house in the same village so we didn’t have to change school or anything”.

Claire was the least academic of the three children, but her mother’s persistence with the schools’ appeal system finally got her into the same grammar school as her older siblings, and she mustered enough A-level grades to secure a place at Liverpool John Moores University to do a joint-honours degree in drama and ‘screen studies’, with a vague idea of becoming a cinematographer – “not realising that you have to have an interest in lighting people,” she laughs. “You should see the video of this children’s TV programme we made at university. It was shockingly lit.”

Foy was the only graduate from her course to actually go on and study acting – a year’s course at the Oxford School of Drama. “I wouldn’t have been able to go to drama school when I was 19,” she says. “I don’t think I was even conscious of life… I was like a zombie. But when I finished uni’ I just realised… just go and do it, stop being a knob.”

What she could not have foreseen was the speed with which she would “go and do it”. An obligatory episode of the BBC1 daytime soap Doctors and the pilot of BBC3′s supernatural drama Being Human under her belt, Foy was plucked, as they say, from obscurity to play the title role in BBC1′s 16-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. “It was a bit of a shock… yeah, it was very weird,” she recalls. “I remember the first audition where I was sat with a load of ginger girls, and everyone was ginger apart from me. Rachel Frett, the casting director, was really plugging for me – I don’t know why. I must have looked right because I was not doing it right. Then the BBC do like launching people, they do like finding people who haven’t done anything before, and Andrew Davies likes doing that because then people think you are that character.”

Actually, Davies has said that he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be “a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze,” and indeed the enduring image of the series was not Andy Serkis’s bravura malevolence as Rigaud, or Tom Courtenay’s shambling brilliance as Mr Dorrit, but Foy’s delicate and very still, pellucid white face and big blue eyes staring out from beneath her bonnet – more Irish moss than English rose, and the very picture of innocence. It gets me to thinking about an often overlooked aspect of an actor’s fortune, one that cannot be taught or learnt, of how the camera responds to their particular assemblage of cheekbones, eye-colour and skin-tone. And when Eva, our photographer, says “I was really excited to shoot you – you’ve got such an amazing face,” Foy seems embarrassed. Is it difficult to accept that a significant part of your fortune is something you have no control over?

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to say when people say stuff like that… it’s just my face, I’m quite lucky to have a face…” In fact, Foy doesn’t mean this facetiously, because at the age of 17 she developed a growth – a benign tumour – in one eye. “I was like a Cyclops and it was all a bit scary,” she says, “and I was on steroids for about a year and a half afterwards that makes you put on a lot of weight and have really bad skin. It’s quite good when you have something like that, because the amount of time you’ve got to look in a mirror when you’re working… the amount of time people talk about your face… It’s quite good to have some sort of perspective, because it’s just a face.”

And of Little Dorrit, and the camera’s absorption in her visage, she says: “It actually set me up quite well because the director, Dearbhla [Walsh], said to me, ‘Your face is powerful enough to communicate stuff, so just trust that you don’t have to…’ you know. And less really is more.”

Less really was more – less screen time, more money – in Foy’s follow-up project, starring opposite Nicolas Cage in the Hollywood fantasy Season of the Witch. “A really bizarre experience,” she says. “Amazing but ludicrous… how much money they spend and the places where we were staying. And there’s so much free time. I had been doing something that had 16 scripts where I was in every other scene; this was one single script that was about 90 pages long and I was in about six scenes.”

Foy liked Cage. “I think he’s a real actor, which I was surprised at… not surprised but shocked. Not shocked but he really acts,” – this last sentence being pure Foy in its skittish circularity. “He’d ask me questions like, ‘What do you do in your life?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, go to the shops…’. People who are in that position don’t really do that sort of thing anymore!”

Does Foy get recognised in shops? “It depends whether I’ve been on the telly the night before. The Promise was the thing that got most people stopping.” Peter Kosminsky’s drama, in which Foy played a stroppy 18-year-old, Erin, experiencing a political and historical consciousness-raising gap-year in Israel, showed that she could do more than look beatific beneath a bonnet. The Night Watch, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Sapphic love story unfolding against the backdrop of the Blitz, saw her playing Anna Maxwell Martin’s girlfriend, while she appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in a low-budget movie, Wreckers (“He’s a complete geek… he’s got more brain power than I will ever have so it just makes it so difficult to have a conversation with him”). And in a complete change of style and pace, she was the tabloid editor whose resemblance to Rebekah Brooks was entirely coincidental, in Channel 4′s spoof of the phone-tapping scandal, Hacks. “I should play someone normal,” she says.

White Heat, Paula Milne’s new saga following a group of student housemates from 1965 London to the present day (it’s already been dubbed Our Friends in the South) sees Foy returning to the more watchful ways of Amy Dorrit. Her Charlotte is a fledgling feminist, putting ‘This Ad Degrades Women’ stickers on London Underground posters, and falling into bed with her radicalised landlord (played by Sam Claflin). “If I never had to do [a sex scene] again that would be the best thing in the world because no one in their right mind would enjoy that,” she says. “You’re worried about what the crew are thinking, whether they’re really uncomfortable, whether you’re uncomfortable. You’re just thinking, God, let this be over.

“The Nightwatch was the first thing I had ever done like that and I remember thinking at the time, ‘When it’s on the telly I’m going to die’ and actually I really didn’t care. Because I’d done the worst bit of it… it’s not like every time you see somebody, people are going to think they’ve seen you naked. You forget it, you just forget it.”

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to her boyfriend, actor Stephen Campbell Moore, who made his name with The History Boys and who met Foy while working together on Season of the Witch. They share a flat in Notting Hill, and Foy is horrified when I jokingly describe them as the latest celebrity couple, British TV’s very own Brangelina. “A celebrity couple, Jesus Christ. I saw someone recently who I went to school with who was saying something like that and I nearly punched her.

“We did a job together – a pilot for a medical drama called Pulse that was on BBC4. It was quite funny because everyone knew we were together and [were] like, ‘You’re actually going out, aren’t you?’.”

“I don’t think I could ever do a play with him, however, because it’s too much. You’re in a room and you’re constantly being taken apart, and told to do this again and again. You don’t really want the person you’re with see you being told ‘You’re shit’ all day and every day. Anyway, he’s a brilliant actor, so I’d be lucky to be in anything that he’s in, to be honest.”

She may be being honest, but that last statement is baloney. Foy has already proved that she can carry a variety of ambitious projects, and being the sort of person that she is – cheerful and grounded – she must be very easy to work with. This month she’s taking her mother on holiday to New York, and is then doing the rounds with her newly acquired American agent.

Martin Scorsese and Mark Rylance are mentioned as directors she’d like to act for. “I’d like to work with directors who really make you work hard,”she says. “I’d like to be given a responsibility and have to live up to it. I don’t want to do anything easy because I’ve got the rest of my life to do that. Before I have kids and stuff I might as well get all the horrible, you know, self-involved stuff out of the way.” An actor with a horror of self-involvement? Now there’s a thing.

‘Upstairs Downstairs‘ returns to BBC1 tomorrow; ‘White Heat‘ begins on BBC2 in early March

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