Gemma Leah Devereux on hanging with the Hollywood elite and turning to writing during the pandemic
‘Everyone’s the same on this earth so I never get starstruck’ Star of new RTÉ drama Smother
It’s not every actress who would be happy with someone taking a razor to their lovely locks for the sake of a role. But then Gemma-Leah Devereux is not every actress. The 30-year-old Dubliner is as happy working alongside an Oscar winner in a big budget movie as she is filming an indie script with a little-known cast – as long as the work is right. After playing a cancer patient in the film The Bright Side, Gemma-Leah went straight into something completely different as Anna Ahern in RTÉ’s new drama Smother, which begins tomorrow, her pixie crop being the only tell-tale sign of her previous role. In Smother, Gemma-Leah plays Anna, a daughter and stepdaughter turned stepmother herself, who finds her family at the centre of a murder inquiry as family secrets unravel what seemed to be charmed lives on the surface. Filmed last year, the show is a dramatic thriller, full of twists and turns, with an all-star cast including Dervla Kirwan, Seána Kerslake, Stuart Graham, Carrie Crowley and many more familiar faces. ‘There are so many things I have been told not to say,’ Gemma-Leah says of the drama, giving only a bare insight into the story. ‘Anna is stepmother to two children and she sees them as her kids – she brought them up.’
She was thrilled, she says, to find out she’d be working with the likes of Dervla and Stuart on the show but especially delighted that she would finally be acting with one of her closest pals, Seána Kerslake. ‘Seána and me are best mates and we hang out outside of acting loads,’ Gemma-Leah says. ‘We have been trying to work together for ages but things have never worked out. Then when we found out we were both doing this and we were getting to work together, we were delighted. We got to hang out loads because everyone was getting tested on set and the actors were in a kind of a bubble and you weren’t really allowed to leave.’
Gemma-Leah and Seána met at a kind of actor’s studio class in The Factory – and what an alumni it was, featuring the likes of Jack Reynor, Barry Keoghan and Brian Gleeson. Certainly they’ve all gone on to achieve a lot. ‘It was a cool crowd of people who have all come up together,’ Gemma-Leah says. ‘It’s great to see everyone doing so well.’
Just like her classmates, she has enjoyed some amazing roles, including that of Liza Minelli alongside none other than Renée Zellweger in her Oscar-winning performance of Judy Garland. Taking on the role of someone a iconic as Liza was a challenge Gemma relished. ‘Liza Minelli is such an icon for me and I love her and it was such a big thing to get and I wanted to be so truthful,’ she explains. ‘But all you can do is your best with anything and hope that it hits the ground running.
‘There is a series called Discovering about famous actors that I love watching and the morning I was told I had the part of Liza Minelli, I was watching one about Judy Garland. It was amazing, I had an amazing day and then I realised and I got a bit scared,’ she says laughing. ‘She is the second real character I have played. I did Citizen Lane with Tom Vaughan Lawlor and I played his sister Ruth Shine. I would love to play someone real again.’ But sadly Gemma-Leah didn’t get to talk to the iconic Ms Minelli. ‘She was really against the movie,’ she explains of her icon. ‘I hope that she saw it and liked it but from the start she was against it. I think Renée did an amazing job and it is a beautiful film.’
Most of us would have had legs made of
‘LIZA MINELLI IS SUCH AN ICON FOR ME, I LOVE HER, SO IT WAS SUCH A BIG ROLE TO GET’
‘I LIKED HAVING A SKINHEAD, THERE WAS SOMETHING SO LIBERATING ABOUT IT’
jelly when encountering a Hollywood superstar like Renée but Gemma-Leah admits she doesn’t get star struck at all. In fact, she thinks it’s important not to be, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to do her job properly. ‘Renée is such a professional,’ she says. ‘She is so lovely. Even from the read-through she was so lovely. You learn a lot working with people like that and trying to see what they are doing.
‘I don’t really get star struck. I do appreciate the experience and trying to learn from people but I think if you get too star struck it’s not realistic. Everyone’s the same on this earth and if you are meeting them and you can’t get to see what they are doing that would be a waste. If I had been very nervous around her I probably wouldn’t get the best experience. Also she is just so fantastic.
She has been in the industry so long and when she did Judy she hadn’t done anything for ages but she was just as sharp as anything.’
Renée didn’t have any airs or graces, nor does Gemma-Leah in spite of everything she has already achieved. She went from a huge film with separate trailers and Hollywood royalty back to Ireland to do another award-winner that she is just as proud of. ‘The Bright Side is a film about a comedian called Kate McLaughlin who, after feeling her life isn’t worth living, finds out she has cancer. I needed to shave my head for that so I was completely bald for quite a while. My hair was only growing back when I got the part in Smother.’
Inspired by a memoir by Anne Gildea, The Bright Side won the audience award at the Cork Film Festival last year and should be getting a general release in 2021.
‘When people see it, they will see there is so much light to it and it is so funny at times,’ says Gemma-Leah. ‘The script is so brilliant that there are times when you shouldn’t really be laughing but it’s so funny and then the next scene is heartbreaking. I think that’s why people will like it – it is a completely different look at cancer and mental health.’
Gemma-Leah had no qualms at all about shaving off her dark hair and says it gave her a sense of freedom. ‘I did like having a skinhead,’ she admits. ‘There was something about it that was just very liberating. There is so much emphasis on what women look like and there was something very liberating about stripping right back to the person you are. You’re not your hair or your money or your job.’
It is a brave move but then bravery is something that Gemma-Leah has in spades. Brought up in south Dublin, her dad is a businessman and her mum is a leading hairdresser who she says inspired her children to do
whatever they wanted. For Gemma-Leah that was acting. Every waking hour after school and at weekends was spent in acting and dance classes. She was inspired by family trips to
London, where the family went to the theatre and took in a musical.
No one else in her family went into acting – her brother Brian is a former TV presenter and her sister Clare is a leading stylist and trichologist.
‘My mom is so creative,’ she says. ‘She has a lifetime achievement award for hairdressing and is part of the Hairdressing Federation of Ireland. She has always had the attitude that you can do anything with your life and has always told us that she would support us in whatever we wanted to do. All I wanted to do was acting. I have never wanted to be anything else. I think it’s kind of like a vocation – it’s sort of given to you. For me, anyway, I don’t see myself ever doing anything else. It’s fantastic that it’s all going along slowly but surely, the way I needed it to.’
After studying drama at the prestigious Arts Ed in London, Gemma-Leah got her first big break on the set of The Tudors. It was a turbulent time as the series was coming to an end but as a wideeyed first timer, she loved every minute. ‘I played Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald and I was filming for about five months in total,’ she says. ‘It was only a small part but I was in it all the time as I was one of the ladies in waiting for Tamzin Merchant’s character Catherine Howard.
‘That was the first time I was on such a big set, the costumes were amazing and I was working with such class people. It was all just so new and exciting, I was learning so much – how to behave and how not to behave,’ she giggles.
Following that, she got a part in comedy horror Stitches with comedian Ross Noble and since then has been honing her craft to the point where she no longer has to get casual work in between jobs.
She lives in London normally but has been at home since the first lockdown and although there are things she misses about the city she left, she has enjoyed being with her family in this peculiar year. There are other projects she has been working on, including one with John Connors, and she has also turned her hand to writing in the downtime between roles.
‘The lockdowns to me seemed like a very normal thing because as an actor you are always kind of going from job to job and when you aren’t working you are doing auditions and tapes and so on. I really miss socialising, going to gigs and the theatre. But once everything is happy and healthy that’s great. It’s just a matter of trying to get through it. I’ve been kept busy working and I have actually started writing some things too. So far so good anyway.’
Gemma-Leah’s modesty makes acting sound easy but it’s not just luck that has propelled her so far. She is an exceptional talent who will be lighting up our screens for many years to come. ‘It definitely is a really hard career and it’s not always easy, especially when you are waiting around for the next job,’ she admits. ‘But when you are working it’s so worth it.
‘I love my job, I really do, and I am so blessed to do it. I am so lucky I have got to do this so far. But I just think if you believe in yourself that’s the main thing and keep fighting for what you want then you will get there.
‘I believe that what’s meant to be won’t pass you by, even as frustrating as it can be. There have been times when I absolutely wanted a part but didn’t get it but I always look back and think, well, that wasn’t meant for me.
‘You are in your own race in life, you are not in competition with anyone else and anyone who gets something over you, that’s their path, it was always theirs. I think you do have to be quite determined because, as everybody knows there is so much rejection with acting but it’s quite a personal thing. But you just have to be really determined and keep going.
‘I do take my work very seriously and I work really hard at what I am doing. But there’s no real secret – you just have to keep going and keep doing the best work you can.’
Smother begins on RTÉ One tomorrow at 9.30pm