The Herald - The Herald Magazine
COVER STORY
As the shy child of hippies in the north of Scotland she was bullied for her English accent and unconventional upbringing. Then as a teenager in London her quest for modelling work ended in homelessness. But her fortunes turned and now, having posed for C
Rising star Amber Anderson on new BBC drama Strike
Random Question for Amber Anderson No.6: What scares you, Amber? “It’s when you can feel your life is going into a new chapter and you’re ready for it and excited about it and you know it’s coming and it’s all good … But it’s also kind of terrifying. “I’m weirdly scared of the exciting things.” She pauses and looks up. “But I’m also scared of heights …”
AMBER Anderson is standing against a brightly coloured wall. She is wearing a tight top, tight jeans and smoking a cigarette. If you walked past you would definitely look twice. Maybe you would think you recognise her face. Is she a model? Is she an actor?
Amber Anderson is sitting in the bistro of a Notting Hill hotel. She is talking about her days modelling and acting. And she is talking about all the kind of terrifying but exciting new things that have been happening in her life. And all the old, bad things she has left behind.
Amber Anderson is 25 years old, grew up in (among other places) Inverness, lives in a flat with her boyfriend and her cats around the corner from where we are sitting, wears a diamond ring shaped like a cross, and is worried that I won’t be able to hear her over the bistro’s soundtrack of early 1990s R&B.
She is loud enough, though, for me to hear that she has lost her Scottish accent. “When I’m drunk my accent comes back. I had an accent until I was 16, 17. But the Invernesian accent is quite light.”
Until now Anderson is possibly best known for appearing in ads for Kenzo and on the red carpet with her ex, a certain Paolo Nutini. But right now it’s Anderson the actor who is moving front and centre. Maybe you caught her last Christmas opposite Rowan Atkinson in ITV’s Maigret special? (She watched it at her gran’s in Dorset surrounded by friends and family, which was, she says, “excruciating”).
Later this year she will turn up alongside Natalie Dormer in a new film, In Darkness, a psychological thriller in which she gets to put all those years she spent at music school to good use by playing the violin.
But more pressingly there is her role in the BBC/HBO drama Strike. The Cuckoo’s Calling is the first adaptation of the Cormorant Strike detective novels written by Robert Galbraith (or, as she is better known, JK Rowling). Anderson stars opposite Holliday Grainger and Tom Burke. It is, no doubt, something of a step up.
The Cuckoo’s Calling is set in the world of supermodels. There’s been a murder, you won’t be surprised to hear. Anderson plays the best friend of the victim.
It is the first time she’s agreed to play a model rather than just be one. “I’ve always turned down model roles. I started modelling and acting at the same time. It would be very easy to always play models. I’ve turned it down a lot.” This was different, though. “JK Rowling, BBC, HBO. It’s the right thing. And it’s good.”
If nothing else, the drama’s portrayal of models is a world away from the vacuous cliche usually spooned out by TV and film. Anderson’s character is three-dimensional and, she adds, has a brain. “Actually a lot of people [in the industry] do,” she points out.
There was a time when “actor-modelwhatever” was a dismissive tag. Things are changing. Anderson is hoping she can continue to do both.
“Acting takes a lot longer to build up momentum. I’ve been lucky to have modelling because it’s meant I was able to move to London and become financially independent quite young and not have to necessarily compromise too much or work two jobs or do things a lot of my actor friends have to do.”
The official Anderson CV goes like this. Scouted at 14, came to London when she was 16 for two months in her summer holidays from music school and picked up an acting agent. Did her first audition for Tim Burton for Alice in Wonderland. She didn’t get the job but she quickly established herself as a model working for Chanel, Kenzo and Agent Provocateur.
“Erin O’Connor became a friend when I was 16 and she still is my friend and she taught me a lot. She took me down my first red carpet. Literally. By the arm.”
The acting took longer to take off but after parts in Your Highness, The Riot Club and Black Mirror things are ramping up.
Presumably, Amber, modelling and acting require very different skill sets? “Very. As a model you have to develop an unbelievable sense of self-awareness. You have to know what every angle of your body looks like at all times because that’s your job. It’s almost like you develop this third eye which is watching yourself from above.
“For an actor you cannot have that exist. So it’s knowing when to turn that off. I think to act you have to be able to put all your focus on to the other person [in the scene] and not have any self-consciousness.”
And you can do that? “I had to teach myself. Funnily enough, my acting agent and I were talking the other day and she said to me that when I was 18 you could see I was a model. There was a slightly held, posed element to it.”
The other thing that’s different is the nature of rejection, she says. “You have to be really thick-skinned to be a model. I find acting rejection easier to deal with when compared to modelling rejection.”
Acting rejections are about someone deciding you don’t fit for the role. Modelling rejections are more personal. “You will have moments where people look you up and down and say that something is wrong. It’s not personal, but it can feel personal.
“It can literally be: ‘No, her ears are too wide’ or ‘her boobs are too big’ or ‘her arms are too long’. And that’s weird.”
Well yes, especially when you are a teenager and you are coming to terms with your physicality.
Then there’s the baggage of personal biography. “I had a very tumultuous childhood. I was badly bullied. This is