from Scotsman / by Chitra Ramaswamy
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.”
