Vicky Mcclure gives good cop
No pretensions, no vanity and zero sense of entitlement: Vicky Mcclure is one of Britain’s most talented (and unassuming) actresses. She talks fryups, office jobs and Line Of Duty with Elizabeth Day
The This Is England and Line Of Duty star on fry-ups and office jobs
Vicky Mcclure is having her photograph taken. She’s lying back on a velvet-upholstered sofa, wearing printed silk pyjamas with strands of her dark brown hair swept over her face. After the camera has finished, she gets up and walks over to the computer monitor to look at the images.
“Oh,” she says, a grin spreading across her face. “They’re not bad are they?” She clasps her hands together, shoulders curving forwards and her delight at seeing the images is completely genuine. It’s as if she doesn’t entirely believe how beautiful she is, as if those striking cheekbones and deep blue eyes aren’t really anything to do with her.
“I don’t like being complimentary about my own pictures because you feel like you’re being vain,” Mcclure says later, when she is back in her familiar uniform of white Converse trainers, blue jeans and a loose-fitting navy polo-neck. “But I just appreciate that everybody’s come together and they’re all a massively creative team of really talented people. You know, the
fact that there’s hair across my face, you feel like it’s going to look mental and then you see the shot and it just looks really natural and they’ve pulled it off.”
But, she clarifies, “I think they’ve pulled it off. I don’t think I’ve pulled it off.”
Mcclure is among the most self-effacing and genuine actresses I’ve ever interviewed. It’s the second time we’ve met and she actually remembers me, rather than just pretending. The first time, Mcclure had just filmed the second series of the BBC’S hit police procedural,
Line Of Duty. It became the most popular drama ever aired on BBC Two and won a clutch of awards.
Now, at 33, Mcclure is back in her role as Detective Constable Kate Fleming for the fourth series. This time, Westworld actress Thandie Newton stars as a policewoman under investigation for suspected corrupt activities, and the series has been promoted to BBC One.
Annoyingly, Mcclure isn’t allowed to tell me anything about the plot. What she will say is that Newton is “a really funny, brilliant woman with a wicked sense of humour”. Also, that they filmed it in Belfast at the same time as Game
Of Thrones was being filmed there and she once saw Jon Snow (Kit Harington) at a local curry house. In the absence of any detail, let’s just agree that Line
Of Duty is properly addictive television. The fascination lies both in Jed Mercurio’s fast-paced script and in the riveting characterisation. There are coppers more criminal than the people they’re arresting and complicated women who act in unsympathetic ways. As Kate Fleming, Mcclure engages the audience’s sympathy for her professionalism over the fact she’s an absent mother who has cheated on her partner – the writing is refreshingly non-judgemental.
Did Mcclure ever think the show was going to be such a hit? “No,” she says, frankly. She was surprised to be cast in the first series because, back then, she was known as Lol in the epoch-defining This Is England series, directed by her friend and mentor Shane Meadows. She was an indie darling, rather than a mainstream leading lady.
“That the BBC would trust us with a cop drama like that!” She lets the thought hang, as if she still can’t believe it.
Line Of Duty opened other doors, too. Mcclure went on to play an unscrupulous tabloid reporter in ITV’S
Broadchurch (complete with hair extensions that were her idea) and was recently seen in an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and chilling psychological drama The Replacement.
MCCLURE IS ONE OF OUR MOST VERSATILE AND TALENTED ACTRESSES.
She dealt with a harrowing storyline of child abuse in This Is
England and was able to convey the pain and trauma with an understated delicacy that belied the subject matter. In
Line Of Duty, part of the challenge is spouting out reams of professional police jargon in every scene.
“Yeah,” Mcclure grins. “I call it ‘Lines of Duty’, because some of the scenes are 20 pages long – those big interview scenes. I once said to Jed, ‘What does this mean?’ And he explained it to me and I said, ‘Can I not just say that?’ And he was like, ‘No, because it doesn’t sound very good.’” The success hasn’t gone to her head. In person, Mcclure is as warm, solicitous and funny as ever. She answers questions looking you directly in the eye, often circling back on sentences to make sure she’s expressed herself as clearly as possible.
At one point, we start talking about whether her relationship with her appearance has changed since seeing herself on screen, and she admits, “I will never conform to what is perfection because apparently we should all eat bloody avocados and kale and be exercising. I appreciate that it’s good to be healthy and I don’t knock anybody [but] I feel like I’m a dying breed. When you constantly see a stream of flipping people at the gym on your Instagram page, it’s massively depressing. But I don’t like the gym. And I don’t have any need right now to become an exercise freak. I don’t sit down. I’m always here, there and everywhere. So I don’t see it as a problem. I look at my nana and granddad, they’re 91 and 92, and they eat lard and all sorts of stuff and I think, ‘Well, they’re doing fine. I can have a fry-up on a Saturday morning.’”
IT’S BECOME SOMETHING OF A CLICHÉ TO SAY THAT ACTORS ARE ‘GROUNDED’ BUT MCCLURE TRULY IS.
She doesn’t live in London, has never been tempted by the bright lights of Los Angeles and bought a house last year in her hometown of Nottingham with her
I will never CONFORM to what is perfection… I don’t have any NEED to be an exercise freak. I don’t see it as a problem”
long-term partner, Jonny Owen, an actor, writer and director who is 12 years her senior.
Mcclure loves Nottingham. As a child, she attended the now-famous Nottingham Television Workshop, whose alumni include Samantha Morton and Jack O’connell, because “they gave out the forms at school and it was free.” Her mum, Carol, dad, Mick, a butcher-turned-joiner, and sister, Jenny, were supportive “but never pushy” and she still goes to her parents for a Sunday roast.
“I’d never owned my own house before,” Mcclure says. “I’d never owned my own fridge because I lived with my mum and dad, and then I went to rented accommodation that were all fully furnished. The fact that I could pick my own fridge, and all that kind of stuff – it was a massive deal. It made me feel really grown up.”
They’ve just finished doing up the kitchen and she is, she says, “really in love with it”. Her favourite television programme is Masterchef, although she couldn’t imagine ever going on the celebrity version because she’s not that kind of cook. “We don’t own a water bath. And seafood… I always get a bit scared that I might poison Jonny because I haven’t cooked it properly.”
For New Year’s, they didn’t go out but just stayed home and danced in her beloved kitchen. Owen and her own family are clearly a big part of the reason Mcclure is so centred. But it’s also to do with knowing that she’s worked hard to get to where she is.
When she was younger, she had a place at the Italia Conti stage school, but her parents couldn’t afford the fees (“I’m glad I didn’t go now”) and that has left her with an abiding sense of the value of graft. For many of the eight years that Mcclure was starring in This Is England (the 2006 film and three spin-off series on Channel 4), she was holding down a day job at a local surveyors’ office.
“I used to train new staff on the phones. One day I was there with my flip chart talking about data protection or something, and someone put their hand up and asked: ‘Are you in This
Is England?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘So, like, what are you doing here?’ I think the assumption that we’re all loaded and swanning about, making films all the time is just wrong. I’ve never, ever been unemployed. From the age of 16 I’ve always earned my own money. That doesn’t mean I’ve always acted. I’ve worked in Boots, H Samuel, Dorothy Perkins, I’ve done my fair share of jobs that I didn’t want to be doing. But it paid for me to get to London. It would pay for me to be able to buy the ink for my printer so I could print my scripts. A tenner is a lot of money when you haven’t got it.”
Mcclure has strong views on equality of access, especially in an acting world increasingly dominated by former public schoolboys like Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne.
“I do think there are so many people getting lost in the system that are uber-talented, because they can’t afford to go to these schools to learn those skills and to find out what it is that makes you a good actor. So how do we find them? Why should the fact that this person’s mum and dad are absolutely loaded be any different to this person’s mum and dad who work equally as hard but just don’t earn that kind of money? The doctors and the lawyers and the bankers need the plumbers, they need the joiners, because when their sink breaks and they can’t brush their teeth in the morning, or their toilet’s broke, they can’t fix it. Yes, alright, we’ve got these big actors that have been to Eton and they’ve all got these very to-do accents, which sound beautifully articulate. But they’re never going to be in This Is England, and they can’t have it all.”
The building’s fire alarm starts to sound. We sit for a bit, expecting it to stop. It doesn’t. Mcclure gets up and shrugs her shoulders through the straps of a giant Adidas rucksack. She stayed in London last night and is going back to Nottingham later so all her overnight gear is in the bag. When she stands, she looks like she might topple over. But that’s her: self-sufficient and uncomplaining.
The fire alarm is still going when we leave. “It’s okay,” she tells me, “I am actually a qualified fire warden.”
Of course she is. It’s just one of Vicky Mcclure’s many and varied talents.