Five minutes with … CLARE DUNNE

THE HERSELF STAR WRITES HER OWN SCRIPT FOR SUCCESS ON THE BIG SCREEN

When Clare Dunne Irish actress first got and the screenwriter idea for drama Herself, a film about a strong-willed mother named Sandra who escapes an abusive relationship and builds her own home, she hadn’t envisioned herself in it at all. But a starring role in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2016 all-female version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV put Dunne centre stage on the big screen.

“Phyllida was the one who said, ‘OK, it has to be Clare that plays the role of Sandra. She’s perfect casting,” Dunne, 33, tells WHO of Lloyd, who also directed Mamma Mia! and The Iron Lady. “It did feel like quite an honour representing Sandra. I had to step up, and that was kind of cool.”

Sandra is guarded at first and reluctant to ask for help. Why?

I realised from my research that, at first, you don’t even think there’s anyone there to help you. They’ve become so used to a conditional kind of love. But it’s the beginning of her learning to take care of – and love – herself because she has to do that in order to move forward.

Early on, Molly (played by Molly McCann) asks her mother about her birthmark. Why was that important?

I think it was just the irony that I have a birthmark on my eye that kind of looked like a black eye, and that I’m playing the notorious “battered woman” in the film. So the producers and Phyllida were like, “Actually, that’s something that we might want to know about at the start of the movie, just like in a very simple way.” Sandra a special jokes spot in “because the film there’s God gave loads her of Sandras in Dublin” … My nieces and nephews, when they got to about the age of 3, noticed that I have something different on my face. And they always asked me, and I was saying to [Phyllida] how I always gave them a really funny answer. So we decided to go with [one] version, but subconsciously we also got to kind of embed in the audience that there are loads of Sandras in Dublin, and that was kind of by design. Does making a passion project spoil you for what’s next?

Ironically, I feel like I have an urge to write a different kind of love story, to go backwards in time to when a couple are only getting together. And so I accidentally started writing something recently that’s now taking some momentum of its own. So I’m hoping to direct that.