Flowers star Georgina Campbell says acting is 100 per cent too posh
The actress talks working with Olivia Colman and being on a fast-track to fame
Georgina Campbell is fretting that Olivia Colman will think she’s a stalker. “I’m following her around,” she tells me, laughing. She’s referring to the actresses’ joint-billing in both Channel 4’s new comedy Flowers and Broadchurch’s third series, which starts filming next month. “I talk about her a lot in interviews, so I’m worried I’ll go on Broadchurch and she’s going to think I’m this creep.”
Campbell comes across as anything but. She laughs more in 40 minutes — even through a mouthful of avocado eggs Benedict — than most people manage in a week. There’s also an endearing can’t-believe-her-luck attitude to success (she’s thrilled to have a Wikipedia page, even though it’s inaccurate) that makes me think of Charlie and his golden ticket to the chocolate factory.
At 23, she’s on the fast-track to fame. After the traditional path of Casualty, Holby and Doctors (she dubs them “the training ground”) she won a Bafta last year for BBC3’s Murdered by My Boyfriend, beating Sheridan Smith. A photo of Campbell’s gobsmacked expression as her name was read out spread across the internet. Even now, she seems shocked. “It was crazy, so weird. It’s still really weird.”She had thought her chances so slim she hadn’t written a speech. “You could tell! I mumbled, I don’t know what about. I didn’t even thank my family! Afterwards, my mum was like ‘thanks’. People do polls of who is going to win, and I was always at the bottom. Like crazy at the bottom. Two per cent.”
Since then, she’s kept adding roles to her CV. Flowers, a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family, starts tonight, with episodes every night this week.
She plays Abigail, who both the twin children, creepy Donald and awkward Amy, pine for. “People say Abigail is the sane one but you find out more about her later and see similarities between her and Amy. They’re both tortured souls and they find each other.”
The series was written by Will Sharpe, who also directed and starred in it. “He’s greedy! Will has been allowed to run wild with it. He’s created something so different.” Would she write herself? “I’d like to. I do as a hobby.” She looks embarrassed at the admission, then adds: “You want to be good at everything but you’re not necessarily.”
When we meet, she’s just finished reading Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, which she adored. She’s a proud feminist but can’t stomach the policing of the movement. “It needs to be more inclusive. Sometimes people feel scared of feminism because they get the idea — and it isn’t true — that it’s [all] women who hate men, don’t wear make-up or shave their armpits.”
She’s warming to her theme now. “And if you like rap music where they’re saying the word ‘bitch’ then you’re not a feminist. That’s silly. You should be able to enjoy whatever you want and still say that you want equality for women.”
I tell her that Murdered by My Boyfriend struck me as a feminist project. She nods. “I didn’t know that the biggest group of women affected by domestic violence were 16-24. A lot of young women saw it and thought — not about the assaults necessarily but the psychological stuff — ‘that happened to me’. Like someone going through your Facebook or your phone.”
Her own, smaller bugbear is men telling women on the street to smile. “I hate it. It’s like you’re their amusement, like women have to be agreeable for men. And as soon as the man isn’t getting what he wants, he turns on [you]: ‘Why is this cow behaving like that?’ It’s bizarre. No one expects men to go around grinning from ear to ear.”
I ask if there’s a similar sexism in casting. “It happens a lot that women have to play the girlfriend role, which isn’t as three-dimensional as the male role. There isn’t much room for different kinds of women.”
She feels the complexity of women is “washed over”: “They’re not allowed to have as many levels as men. So many fantastic male characters are brooding, angry and not nice; that doesn’t happen as much with women.” This is improving, though: “There’s lots of strong female leads now. It makes you realise it doesn’t matter about gender, whether [the lead] is a man or woman. People will watch it if it’s good.”
We turn to another kind of diversity — is acting “too posh”? “100 per cent.” She mentions Nottingham’s (free) Television Workshop, where many This Is England actors trained, as a means to ensure working-class actors enter the industry. “We need more things like that ... how else are you going to represent a whole portion of the population?”
Campbell is mixed race, with a Jamaican father and white mother. She thinks racial scrutiny of awards season looks at the problem “way too late”. “When Lenny Henry said there should be a quota, people said to me ‘would you really want a role because they’re trying to tick a black box?’ I’d rather it than nothing, so maybe. Sometimes it takes that to open up people’s minds.”
A problem in the UK, she adds, is that our main export is period dramas. “That’s what people around the world love us for, and we tend to whitewash period dramas completely.”
She repines at those who say “that’s what it would have been like then”: “No. This country has had Indian and black people for centuries. Mostly they would have been in service but think of Belle [Dido Elizabeth Belle, a mixed-race heiress whose story was made into a 2013 film]. Those stories get ignored. It’s the game of ‘this is what people expect from us, why change the formula?’”
Next, Campbell will be filming Broadchurch. She was a fan of the show before being cast and can’t resist mentioning her hero again: “I watch everything with Olivia Colman in.”
After an acclaimed first series, the second received poorer reviews. “The second series got a dip,” she acknowledges. “[But] it still got so many viewers. It’s like the difficult second album: once you’ve outdone everyone’s expectations, it’s hard to do that again.”
She also has a second crime drama — the BBC’s much-hyped One Of Us — scheduled for September. So is this is a golden age for TV? She nods. “In TV now, you have these big budget productions with the same values as film. There was a time when you were a film or a TV actor — now people do everything.”
Campbell has made her first foray into film with Guy Ritchie’s Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur. How different was that from TV? “Completely. In TV, it’s like a family, you know everyone. There’s so many people with film. We spent three days doing one scene.”
She plays Kay, a prostitute. “King Arthur gets taken in by a brothel as a child, so we are part of his family. We follow him on his journey.” She seems embarrassed at this, adding: “And medieval prostitutes dress well: there’s lot of ankle-length gowns. It’s a family film!”
In the meantime, she has a weirder ambition: getting a pet rat. “Last year, I had just gone through a break-up, and suddenly was like ‘I want a rat’ but no one — my family or friends— wants me to.” She adds that her flat-mate has threatened not to feed the theoretical rat while she’s away on jobs. Campbell lives in Camberwell (“People always tell me it’s a bit rough. It isn’t”) but is LA the dream? “Not the dream, but I’d like to check it out.”
What other ambitions are unfulfilled? “I’ve always wanted to do a horror film. I don’t know if my agent will be happy I said that, when I get sent some crap horror films, but I’d like to do a good one, like It Follows, or the Babadook.”
But as she heads off to Camberwell, it’s for a more prosaic pursuit: “Our flat’s a mess and I’m going back to clean it.”
Flowers starts tonight on Channel 4.
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