KAREN GILLAN GOES FROM DR. WHO TO HOLLYWOOD.
It’s said that life slows down in Los Angeles, as compared with brisker, more bustling cities such as London or New York — something to do with the balmy weather and all the pools. But not for Karen Gillan. If anything life for the flame-haired Scottish actress has sped up since she moved to the West Coast 18 months ago. She’s made several movies in several genres — a romantic comedy (The List), an action fantasy (Guardians of the Galaxy) and a paranormal horror (Oculus). She has also shot a pilot for ABC called Selfie, which was recently picked up for a series.
We’re in a suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She looks in fine fettle — her fiery hair in a pixie crop, still growing back from the time she had to shave it all off to play a cyborg super-villain in Guardians of the Galaxy.
“I’m not here on holiday,” she explains. “I’m here because there’s lots of opportunities career wise. Parts here are amazing for girls my age.”
It was a film that brought her to L.A. in the first place — Oculus, a frightener from the producers of Paranormal Activity. She was in her childhood home in Inverness, when her L.A. agents demanded that she submit an audition for the film within 24 hours.
So Gillan set up a camera in her bedroom and called her father, John, a nursinghome manager. “I had him read the other part,” she laughs. “He’s a good singer, but not the best actor! But there was no one else!”
It worked. The director, Mike Flanagan, was a huge Doctor Who fan and tailored the part for Gillan specifically. And before long, she was on location in Mobile, Alabama, a place she has compared to Scotland because “it felt quite rural and they fry everything”.
And when filming was over, she thought, “Why not stay? Move to L.A., give it a go.” It sounds like a big step, but ever since Gillan was a girl, she’s been making intrepid moves in the service of her ambition. At 16, she left Inverness for Edinburgh, determined to be an actress. Then she left Scotland at 17 for a London stage school, which she then
“I THOUGHT THEY’D BE REALLY SCARY, THE DOCTOR WHO AUDITIONS. LIKE THIS HUGE SEARCH ACROSS THE NATION.”
KAREN GILLAN
left a few months later, because she’d booked her first job. And now, at 26, she has moved to Hollywood.
But it’s not just luck that’s contributed to her success. Gillan is very sensible and hard working and avoids the temptations of Los Angeles. Even when the sun’s down, apparently, she’d sooner stay in.
“You can go to a lot of events if you choose to, I just never go,” she says. She’s just not interested, not when there are scripts to read and television to catch up on.
Has she tried out the dating scene?
“Oh no. I’m so terrified by the prospect!” she says. “Americans seem to go about it in a different way where they date loads of people at the same time. It’s probably a healthier way of finding someone, because you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. “But I’m like, ‘ Are you kissing all of them?’”
That said, there are certain aspects of L.A. life that she has warmed to — the healthy stuff, mostly. She’s addicted to spinning (a stationary bike workout). “Oh my God! I love it!” she says, clapping her hands. “I think it’s because it feels like going to a nightclub without the hangover. The music is so loud, they turn the lights off, and then they shout positive things at you while you’re doing it. That feels very American to me. Like, ‘You are an awesome person!’ At first I was like, ‘This is so funny, someone needs to put this into a comedy sketch.’ But at the end I’m like, ‘Yeah! We are awesome!’ I don’t laugh at all that positive motivational stuff anymore. But I think that’s a good thing!”
It all started because of Selfie, a new sitcom in which Gillan stars as a selfabsorbed valley girl who has plenty of Twitter followers but no actual friends. “My character’s this real Kardashian-type girl,” she says. “So I went to Soul Cycle (a modish spinning class) to just listen to their voices, because it’s a really specific way of talking. And then a week later, I’m hooked!”
Remarkable though it seems now, given how effer- vescent Gillan is in person, she was very shy and withdrawn as a younger girl.
She discovered in drama class that her shyness evaporated on stage, so she decided that she would be an actress, and set about her goal with characteristic focus. She took classes every day after school.
After a year of acting classes in Edinburgh, she left for London and the fabled Italia Conti stage school. But she didn’t like it there, so after a few months she left when she won a part on a Scottish detective show called Rebus — a small, eight-day shoot. Italia Conti had a rule against students working in their first year, but Gillan wasn’t having it. Her career was starting, and that was all there was to it.
And then the part that changed her life came along.
“I thought they’d be really scary, the Doctor Who auditions,” she says. “Like this huge search across the nation. But they only met about 10 or 15 girls. I just did one audition with the casting director, then I got a recall and had to read with Matt Smith and the producers, which was quite scary.”
She was back home, a couple of hours later, when the telephone rang. “Yeah, I did jump up and down. And I started crying too. I even screamed ‘thank you’ to the heavens! I’ve never done that before. I’m not even religious.”
With her striking looks and legs, “from here to yaya”, as one writer put it, Gillan caused quite a stir on Doctor Who. She spent three years as Amy Pond, the longest tenure in the role of any other actress since the series re-launched in 2005, and her final episode clocked close to record ratings for the show, with six million viewers. And it wasn’t just her legs that won over the fans.
“The thing about Karen is that she’s got that cute and funny combination, which is pretty much gold dust in film and TV,” says Saul Metzstein, who directed her on several episodes. “Great comic timing. I always enjoyed that slightly irritated you- take- me- all- over- theuniverse- but- I’m- not- impressed look she gives the Doctor.”
But now Doctor Who is receding into her past, as Gillan forges ahead into another frontier of the space-timeentertainment continuum. As a publicist hovers, pointing at her wrist, I ask her if there’s another actress out there, whose career might be a template for hers.
“I don’t really think about it like that,” she says after a moment’s thought.
“But there are people whose careers I admire, like Amy Adams. She’s in every brilliant film that comes out and she mixes it up with really big blockbustery-type films too.”
She climbs out of her armchair. “But at the same time, I don’t want to really emulate anyone.”