Derry Girls actor Kathy Kiera Clarke: ‘I feel like everything I did before doesn’t exist in many ways’
“I have a very, very early memory of being in primary school at the height of the Troubles,” Kathy Kiera Clarke tells me. “I remember asking a dinner lady: ‘Am I Irish?’ And she said: ‘Yes.’ And I said: ‘Am I speaking Irish then?’ I remember it so vivid. She said: ‘Ask your mum.’ Ha, ha!”
The versatile actor, a proud product of west Belfast, has been living in London for more than 30 years. Indeed, we speak as the sun swims through her attic flat in leafy Muswell Hill. But she could hardly seem more Irish. The accent still retains its angles. Her humour is well salted.
Clarke has worked hard since moving across in the mid-1990s. Theatre at The Tricycle in Kilburn and at the prestigious Glasgow Citizens. Back to Dublin for work at the Abbey. An array of dramatic turns in telly and film. She will, however, be best known to most readers as the perennially distracted Aunt Sarah in Lisa McGee’s inimitable sitcom Derry Girls. Always missing the point, lovable in her absorption, she is a comic creation for the ages.
“I think I need to be careful about what I say here,” she says good-naturedly. “I feel like everything I did before doesn’t exist in many ways. And I find that frustrating. I played Lady Macbeth. I played Medea. I’ve done Schiller. I’ve done all of this, and it’s sort of like that doesn’t exist.”
Lest there be any confusion, she loves the character and she cherishes the sitcom for capturing teenage normality amid the violent abnormality of the violence. “Lisa just created something so beautiful and perfect,” Clarke says. But there is a busy life to be discussed before we get back to Derry Girls.
Born in the mid-1970s, Clarke lived through some of the grimmest times for Belfast. The children of that era didn’t understand everything that was swilling around them, but they often grasped more than their parents would have preferred.
“I came to London at 18, and it was only when I got here that I realised how insane it was,” she says. “My childhood was very happy. But, yes, of course. I remember the road on fire. I remember vividly the hunger strikers dying. Bobby Sands died on May 5th, the day after my birthday.”
You get the sense that she has spent much of the interceding time recalibrating her emotions about that period.
“With hindsight, I’m very aware of the actual horror of growing up in all that, and how that must have been for my mummy and daddy with two sons and three daughters,” she says. “And, of course, our boys were of the generation that went off to New York. I have very vivid memories of that time, and the feeling of that time, and the fear. You had school assemblies every week, praying for people – his daddy had been shot, or his brother.”
Kathy Kiera Clarke (left) as Aunt Sarah in Derry Girls
From an early age, theatre was a release. Clarke was lucky enough to attend St Louise’s Comprehensive College on the Upper Falls. The school delivers well across the disciplines, but is particularly noted for expertise in performing arts and media. When the rest of us were smoking cigs in the bicycle shed, Clarke was (even if she didn’t yet know it) laying down the foundations for her busy career.
“The English department would put on a play – an O’Casey or whatever – and then the drama department would do My Fair Lady or whatever. So we lived in the drama room. And in our last year in school, we founded a theatre company. We won a competition, and the prize was that we came here and performed in the Olivier. Some of us got offered work from that.”
She took the work and she moved. One can only imagine how performing at the Olivier – the largest of three spaces at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank – might turn a young actor’s head, but that still sounds like one heck of a leap in the dark. Particularly as she already had secured a place at Trinity College Dublin. How did her parents react to her throwing that in for the uncertainty of the actor’s life? Did they take it on the chin?
“They actually did,” she says. “I was saying this to a friend the other day. We lost my mummy over a year ago now. And it was very sudden.”
As we speak, Clarke is appearing in Heartsink, a new play by Farine Clarke at the Riverside Studios in west London. Dealing with a doctor’s experiences after becoming a patient, the piece ends up touching on the rawest form of loss. Clarke tells me part of the reason she took the part was she was still on her own “journey with grief”.
“I was thinking about this one conversation I had with my mummy in the last months of her life,” she says. “And we didn’t know she was dying. It was just a conversation I was having with her, and she said something so pure and simple and beautiful and heartbreaking. She said: ‘I had to learn to let you go very young.’ How selfless is that? How full of love is that? So, no, there was no pressure put on me. It must have been really hard for them to say ‘slán’. There’s me packing my bags and I didn’t know anybody in London.”
I just made a strong decision that could have been very, very wrong
— Kathy Kiera Clarke
When I airily ask how she coped with the long periods of unemployment that young actors endure, she explains that, from the beginning, she was actually pretty busy. She moved over for a production of Frank McGuinness’s Factory Girls at the Tricycle with Michelle Fairley and Eileen Pollock. She did that production of Medea at Glasgow Citizens. You can see her in the video for Blur’s 1993 single For Tomorrow.
“In the early years it was pretty constant for me,” she says. “It was later years that it wasn’t so constant. That was very difficult, when I would literally be standing packing my shopping and thinking: well, you’ve made a terrible mistake here. What have you done here? I’d be thinking: I would like to have a nine-to-five job where I could plan my life and have autonomy. It was difficult later when those times happened.”
All of which should clarify that, by the time Derry Girls arrived, Clarke was loaded with experience. You won’t need to be told much about the phenomenon. From the moment it landed in early 2018, McGee’s show was a popular sensation. Four schoolgirls from that city and one visiting English boy knock about the Foyle in the latter years of the Troubles. They get into scrapes. They learn about love and life. It was generous without being cutesy. It was wise without being preachy. And, like all the best ensemble comedies, it was cast in considerable depth. Everyone has their favourite Derry Girl, but many audience members will prefer secondary characters such as Siobhán McSweeney’s weary Sister Michael or Clarke as the supremely dim, sometimes accidentally on-the-money Aunt Sarah. I wonder if Clarke saw the potential in her from the first script she read.
“I did see the potential in her. Absolutely, I did,” she says. “I was in a lean time – a bit frightened about where things were going. And I remember people, in the months leading up to it, sending me texts: ‘There’s this thing called Derry Girls casting. They’re casting the kids at the minute.’ I remember talking to my agent – they were like: ‘We’re on it’ – and I said: ‘Well, they’ll be wanting mummies and aunties.’ I read it and just thought: oh my God, this is just brilliant. It’s so funny and I had one meeting for Sarah, and I got her.”
Nobody can doubt Clarke’s contribution to the character. The script is, of course, first class, but as much of the comedy derives from the actor’s eerily walleyed performance. She perfectly conveys the character existing at an oblique angle to all those around her.
“She could have been, in the hands of any of our amazing actresses from home, been played 25 different ways,” Clarke says. “I just made a strong decision that could have been very, very wrong. I said to Lisa: ‘I think she’s like someone who appears to be on Diazepam all the time, but she’s not.’ She’s really innocent. Rather than being a very confident single mother, she’s had sex once and got pregnant. Of course, that’s there to be extracted to begin with. But then, as Lisa did with all of the characters, she started to write for me, because obviously we’d put flesh and bones upon the incredible creations that were in her head.”
Derry Girls: Siobhán McSweeney, Louisa Harland, Kathy Kiera Clarke, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Nicola Coughlan and Dylan Llewellyn at the TV Baftas. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty
They surely knew early on that the show was going to work. It would have been less clear Derry Girls would gather such a fervent following. With delightful neatness, it became Channel 4’s most popular sitcom since the equally Irish Father Ted more than two decades earlier. It was the most watched show in Northern Ireland since records began and, defying those who felt the accents wouldn’t travel, went on to become a hit across the planet.
[ Derry Girls’ Saoirse-Monica Jackson: ‘Dyslexia shaped me. I’m always thinking two steps ahead’Opens in new window ]
“After the first episode went out, I went out for dinner because I didn’t want to be anywhere near a TV or phone,” she says. “And my phone blew up. When I turned it back on, everybody was going: ‘oh, my God, this thing is fantastic!’ I think it was recommissioned pretty much immediately after the first episode went out. People from every country come up and want to talk to you about it, and want to share their own experiences.”
So what did it to for Clarke’s career? Her face has now been in a million homes.
“I’ve talked to Pauline McLynn and I’ve talked to Ardal O’Hanlon and, you know, with those iconic comedic characters, it’s a double-edged sword, career-wise,” she says. “Especially when you’re at a different point in your career. If it’s a launch pad and you’re a much younger actor, the scope is all there for you. But if you’re at a point in your career where castability is already something you’re struggling with, or they don’t quite know where to put you, then suddenly they go: ‘Ah, there’s a box to put her in.’ Do you know what I mean? That’s a long-winded way of saying it’s a double-edged sword.”
She has no such reservations about the show itself. It seems she can barely move for strangers expressing their love.
“It actually happened to me last night again,” she says. “Somebody will come up and say it helped them through a very difficult point in their lives and thank you for it.”
She sounds genuinely moved. And why not?
Heartsink by Farine Clarke runs at the Riverside Studios in London until Sunday, May 10th
