Drama Queen: Chloe Pirrie on new BBC drama Troy: Fall of a City

She should be getting used to it. Since Pirrie made her big screen debut in Scott Graham’s beautiful if bleak 2012 Scottish film Shell, her career has been moving on up. She’s just appeared in the second series of The Crown on Netflix where she played Eileen Parker, the unhappy wife of Prince Philip’s private secretary and now she’s got a leading role in the BBC’s new swords-and-sandals drama Troy: Fall of a City. She’s on the Trojan side, playing Andromache (that’s Androm-akey if, like me, you’re not sure how to pronounce it), Hector’s wife. Oh, and she’s royalty too, no less. Take that, Claire Foy.

David (The Night Manager) Farr’s new drama is a retelling of the Trojan war, also starring the likes of David Threlfall, Joseph Mawle (who worked with Pirrie on Shell), Tom Weston-Jones (who is playing Hector), Bella Dane and Johnny Harris. Expect blood and battles and Greek gods behaving badly. “They’re really petty,” Pirrie laughs. If you want to blame anyone for the Trojan war, she suggests, blame the gods.

The dress is back on the hanger now and Pirrie is in civvies in the hotel bar. Having watched Sally Wainwright’s Bronte drama To Walk Invisible the night before, I’ve arrived in Shoreditch trailing notions of Pirrie framed by her portrayal of Emily Bronte, all flint and spark and fire.

The 30-year-old woman in front of me, though, turns out to be an impressive mixture of cool reserve and focused ambition instead. She is not one to be drawn on her opinion of royalty (Trojan or otherwise), but Pirrie’s not afraid of saying that when it comes to her career she doesn’t want to be a spear-carrier any more. “No, because I’ve done that.”

Well indeed. She’s filled her share of bit parts and small roles in the past (since 2010 you might have seen her in passing in Doctors, Misfits or Paolo Sorrentino’s beautiful-looking but otherwise awful arthouse movie Youth alongside Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel).

And we haven’t even mentioned her roles in the BBC’s adaptation of War and Peace and the spy drama The Game. Does she ever take holidays? “I try to. I have to be quite strict about taking time off.”
That makes it sound like a duty, Chloe. Strict, really? “You have to be, otherwise you just never leave because you always miss out on something. I had to say to my agent last year: ‘Do not send me audition tapes on holiday because inevitably something comes in that’s amazing.’ I’m lucky I’m getting this stuff but I just need to lie in the sun. You’ve got to draw lines in the sand.”

To get things going I’ve brought some stupid questions (OK, more-than-the-usual stupid questions). Such as, you ask? Such as, Chloe, do people buy you Chloe perfume as a present. “When I was about 12 or something. I think I still have it. I don’t know if I’ve ever worn it. There was someone at drama school who called me Piri Piri Chicken.”
Hilarious. 

Do you have a signature dish? “I do a great thing with bulgur wheat. And I make a very good macaroni cheese. I love cooking. It’s one of my things.”

Can you drive?

“Yes.”

Do you drive?

“No, but I’ve just bought my first car. I passed my test when I was 17 and I haven’t driven since, except for acting jobs, ironically.”

When she feels confident enough she might even make it back up to Edinburgh, she says. “I get a bit nervous on motorways, so I need to knuckle down and do a bit more practice and then I will do the drive.”

Pirrie grew up in Stockbridge, an only child. Her mum’s a physiotherapist and her dad a lawyer. She attended the Mary Erskine School where it sounds like she drifted through. “I was a little bit unengaged at school.” By the time she got to Highers, though, she realised she had better start applying herself. She did, to a stressful degree. She got good results, Oxbridge was mooted, but she worried that the academic pressure might be too much for her.

She admits, too, that there were things going on in her life that didn’t help. Her parents split up for a start. But that wasn’t the problem, she says. “One’s childhood is littered with things. Everyone’s got stuff.”
No, her real problem was a struggle with anxiety and depression. “The reasons for that I won’t go into, but the reality was that’s where I was. I was sort of functioning highly, but …”

She’s distanced enough from it now to look back and draw some positives. “In a way I’m glad I experienced that at a young age because then I’m able to recognise it when you go through other stuff later in life. You go: ‘Oh, no, I’ve been here before and I got through it. And if I got through it at 15 then at 25 I can do this.”

At school, drama was one outlet for Pirrie. A space where she could have fun and where she didn’t feel pressured. The moment it suddenly felt like it could be something more than that was when she was cast in a school production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. “I remember doing rehearsals and thinking: ‘Oh, I feel like I’m at home. I can do this. This is what I should be doing.’”

Soon, she was applying to drama school, working in cafes and bars around Edinburgh to pay for her trips to London for auditions. At 18 she won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Basically, you ran away to the circus then? “Yeah,” she says, smiling.

Who was the girl who made that journey to London? “I think I was greener than I recognised at the time. It had been a real struggle getting in. Just the fact that someone went: ‘Yes, you’re good and you can do this and we’ll give you a chance …’ It was like a hand out of the clouds.”

The wait to hear if she had a place, she remembers, was hugely difficult. But necessary, she adds. “It’s very important to go through rejection. The reality of my job is you are being rejected multiple times a month.
“You’ve got to be really tough. I think Joanna Lumley said once that you’ve got to have the skin of a rhinoceros but the sensitivity of a baby, because you have to constantly walk into rooms, take your skin off in front of people and then be all right when they choose somebody else. And a lot of it has nothing to do with your performance. It’s other things.”

Even when Pirrie started picking up acting jobs, the bar and restaurant work continued. She’s not sure she could hack that now “because you just have to put up with so much s***,” she says.

“There’s a period in your twenties when you can kind of cope, but towards the end of waitressing I realised there was something about the service industry that can grind you down.”

The way people treat you, you mean? “Yeah. I think it’s really important to experience it because you’ll never treat anyone badly once you’ve been on the receiving end of some COMPLETE ASSHOLE.”

She drops back to normal volume. “I remember being sat down with a manager and he was like: ‘Yeah, we’ve noticed that your attitude has slightly changed towards the customers.’ And I just went off on one.”
Her last shift was working in a burger restaurant in Camden on a Saturday night. “I had the worst day imaginable. I did a double shift and a table walked out on me, leaving me with the bill. I had to pay for their £70 meal. All my tips. And that was just one of the things that happened that day.

“I got home at one in the morning saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And my boyfriend was like: ‘Maybe just don’t. You’ve just done this episode of Misfits, you’ve got enough money, just leave it.’

“So I did and I haven’t really looked back.”

Does Pirrie still get the fear when a job ends and there is nothing else on the table? Sure, she says. “But I’ve definitely got better at balancing it and you start to do the odd voiceover. There are other things you can do to keep yourself going.”

So we will have heard your voice then? “Potentially on a couple of supermarket ads.”

The thing about sharks, Pirrie tells me, is how calm they are. “Obviously, it wouldn’t be calm if they were eating you,” she adds. But when you’re shark cage diving in the ocean and they’re drifting past you, she says, you can see just how serene, how calm, how beautiful they are. “So not the Jaws thing,” she says, maybe a little dreamily.

All jobs have their perks and when you are filming Troy in South Africa for six months, swimming with three great whites, it turns out, is one of them. 

“And I only learnt to swim the year before last, so it was the ultimate ultimate,” Pirrie tells me.

And then there’s the horse riding and going on safari with her boyfriend. Really, you wonder she had time to do any work at all.

Sharks come in different forms of course. And inevitably some of them appear in our conversation. One of the advantages of becoming an established name, Pirrie says, is the luxury of choice, the realisation that you don’t have to take every job offered.

“I don’t have to work for this person if I don’t like the script or I’ve got a bad feeling or I’m in an audition room and someone’s making me feel a bit uncomfortable. I can actually leave.

She pauses, then adds. “There’s a lot of that stuff about at the moment.”
Well, indeed. We live in a post-Weinstein world. We are through the looking glass and looking again at the idea of a young woman wanting to audition and having to walk into a room full of strangers.

“Yeah and you forget that,” says Pirrie. “It becomes normalised to you, the imbalance of power. You feel like you’re at the bottom of the pile. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s just that the system is set up that way. When you’re starting out you’re very vulnerable and if you’re not protected …”

This is the stuff actors are talking about now, she says. Working in bars at least taught her life lessons that held her in good stead in her acting career.

“You learn how to look after yourself. You learn how to call someone out. It takes a while to get that confidence.”

She hopes that the headlines and horror stories that have emerged in recent months will lead to positive changes. “The Casting Directors’ Guild has just published a set of official guidelines to how auditions should be run,” she points out. “A lot of them seem obvious, but having that come out is really significant.

“I’ve not had any traumatic experiences in auditions but I have been in situations where I’ve gone: ‘I don’t know if this is appropriate. I don’t know that I want to give you all this information about my personal life that I don’t owe you and you’re not paying for me yet.’

“And you’re asked to improvise something with another actor. ‘Oh, you’ve chosen the one where we have to be all romantic …’

“I’ve stopped auditions when that’s happened occasionally. Every actor has a horror story about some person. ‘Is this legit? Is this real?’ People ask: ‘How do you end up going to someone’s hotel room?’ Well, there are all these little infringements and then it seems normal. Meetings get changed last minute from a cafe to somewhere else and you don’t question it.”

That can all change now, she hopes. “I just hope this movement means the generation of younger actors will feel more empowered to trust their instincts when they suspect something is not right.”

Change can take other forms too. More women writing and directing will change the stories we are told, she hopes. “And we’re already seeing that,” Pirrie says. “I’ve been in for three films this year that, though they’ve not been female-led entirely, have had big female roles. The writers were female. It’s exciting. That’s new. I don’t think that was around 10 years ago. We’re seeing a change. I am, anyway.”
And Pirrie is now in a position to pick and choose it seems. And she is choosy. 

Yes, she says, she’d like to work with Ken Loach (“I don’t know how many more films he’s going to do”). And if Andrea Arnold or Lynne Ramsay came calling she’d answer the phone.

But, ultimately, it’s about whether the job excites her or not. “You can be seduced by lots of names who are executive producers, but are you ever going to get to hang with them? Probably not. So, it’s all about the material.

“You read scripts sometimes and you think: ‘This has been written by an idiot.’”

As well as making a great macaroni cheese and giving a great swish, Pirrie is not afraid of saying what she thinks. It’s one of her strengths, I suspect. What’s her weakness?

“I think I am a bit of a perfectionist, definitely. And I used to finish people’s sentences for them. I got told that’s really annoying.”

Troy: Fall of a City begins on BBC One at 9.10pm tonight

Make-up by Jo Jo Hamilton: 
www.johamiltonmakeup.co.uk
Hair by Narad Kutowaroo 
using Unite Hair: www.naradkutowaroo.com
Dresses by Sophia Kah: 
sophiakah.com/en/
With thanks to The Curtain, 45 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3PT, thecurtain.com