‘I feel like I know Princess Anne’
Playing the Princess Royal in The Crown was a dream role and a real eye-opener for ERIN DOHERTY. As she stars in new BBC drama Chloe, she tells Hattie Crisell how fame came as a shock – and why she has ‘massive sympathy’ for the royals
When we meet at an airy photo studio in London’s Notting Hill, Erin Doherty is being sweetly cheerful to everyone she encounters. It takes me a while to work out why I am a little confused. And then I realise it’s because I was expecting Princess Anne. In The Crown, Erin was brilliant as the Princess Royal – so good, in fact, I am prepared for her to be just as strong-willed and arch – but she is disarmingly charming, her clipped RP accent replaced by a warm estuary one.
For Erin, 29, the acting bug bit early. Her mother, a retired GP receptionist, and her father (a Donegal man who does something involving aeroplane transportation that Erin admits she doesn’t understand) split up when she was four. In the aftermath, she and her elder sister were sent to drama school at the weekends. ‘Obviously that was a difficult time, and I think that’s why I love acting so much now,’ she says. ‘There’s a definite comfort to it, which was born then.’
After school, she studied at the Bristol
Old Vic Theatre School, where alumni include Daniel Day-Lewis and Olivia Colman. From graduation she worked in theatre, and won small roles in Call the Midwife and the BBC’s Les Misérables. Then The Crown happened: a key part as the daughter of the Queen, who happened to be played by Colman herself.
Erin’s Princess Anne was so popular in the third season that creator Peter Morgan said people kept asking him to write more for her in the fourth. Her success has left her in the nice position of being able to pick and choose her work, and she is now back on our screens in a starring role.
Erin is a natural chameleon – she tells me she never gets recognised, and on more than one occasion refers to herself in the third person, as though Erin is just another role. Her new part, as Becky in the BBC drama Chloe, makes the most of this quality. Becky is a loner who lives with her unwell (and unpleasant) mother, and finds escape online, where she obsessively scours the social-media profile of a young woman called Chloe. When Chloe dies, Becky lies her way into her friendship group in an attempt to find out what’s happened; suddenly we see that she has an impressive ability to deceive people, shape-shift and think on her feet. ‘She is so isolated and lonely and has such a low sense of self-worth that she doesn’t believe any of her actions matter,’ says Erin. ‘She doesn’t really feel the moral implications of what she’s doing.’
While some of Becky’s behaviour would best be described as ‘bonkers’, you will root for her anyway. She displays the same audacity as the great on-screen fraudsters that have gone before her, from Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me
If You Can to Matt Damon in The
Talented Mr Ripley. Does Erin have a bit of that chutzpah, too?