Mum closed her eyes for my scene in Vikings. It’s not pleasant
Amber Jean Rowan lit up our screens aged 16 on The Model Agent. Now, at 21, she’s made the leap into acting. But her RTÉ drama debut won’t be an easy watch – especially for her parents
series Breaking Bad. ‘He was a fascinating director to work with, he was really cool and made us all feel comfortable.’
She believes her involvement in the production helped her land the role of Ida on hit BBC One drama series, Ripper Street.
‘That was a great show and I really enjoyed my character. Ida was really interesting because there were two sides to her — she was vulnerable but she did have great strength.
‘The episode I was in was about this group of Fagin’s gang-like women who wanted to get revenge on men who didn’t stick up for them. I was used as bait in the brothel house run by Miss Susan, played by the wonderful MyAnna Buring,’ she says of t he actress who pl ays Edna Braithwaite in Downton Abbey. At the risk of being typecast, Amber recently finished filming her lead role in another Vikings vehicle, a feature film called The Berserkers, filmed in the woods near Port Talbot in South Wales.
Except this time she plays female warrior Aladan alongside Coronation Street actor Sol Heras, who played Ryan Connor on the soap.
‘It was quite physical and I had never done anything like that before,’ says Amber of the film.
‘I had to learn how to fire a bow and arrow, how to fall properly, how to hit properly. Well, hitting for the camera lens means not really hitting the person but making it look as though I was with my lanky arms,’ she laughs.
‘I also had to learn to run like a warrior — I did a lot of running! It was great to be able to play a strong woman like that in a world of men, it was an interesting character. She was the strongest woman I’ve played to date, in many ways.’
A fellow cast member uploaded a picture of Amber dressed in full costume — including chainmail — while she was picking up some groceries in a small Welsh shop.
‘That was very funny, they got a serious fright. Port Talbot is a small town.’
Her lips are sealed about her feature film, which begins shooting in London next week. All she will say is that she had her corset fitting on Tuesday and that the action is set in the 1800s.
‘Unfortunately I can’t talk about it just yet but, yes, there are corsets and petticoats.
‘I had to wear corsets on Ripper Street too. You kind of get used to them but I do get bruises.
‘They are made especially for you so they aren’t that bad — they just take a few days to get used to.
‘They’re not the most comfortable after lunch.’
Amber’s fair skin and dark eyes lend her something of a vintage beauty and she confirms that it ‘seems to be the period stuff that’s coming my way. They are great roles and I hope to just continue to make films I’m interested in and to tell good stories.’
With plenty of work coming in, Amber has bitten the bullet and moved to London to take her career to the next level.
‘I only moved over here last week so it’s been really busy since I’ve been here and I haven’t had the chance to settle in properly. I love being really busy, though,’ adds Amber, who quotes Anthony Burrill’s ‘Work hard and be nice to people’ as her philosophy on life.
‘For the past few months I have been going over and back so it made a lot more sense to move here and I just got a place. I love Dublin and it will always be home — but this feels like the right move at the right time.’
When she gets a free moment, there’s her flat in Brixton to decorate. ‘I’ve never done it before so I’m going to see what grabs my eye. London has always been a big part of my life — I have always been over and back — but now I’m setting up home. So I’ll be buying bits and bobs and getting a bit domesticated.’
Until now, when she came to London for work, Amber stayed with model agent Fiona Ellis in her Willesden Green home.
‘Her house was amazing — just incredible. She’s in interior design now,’ says adds, of Fiona’s Ellis Eye Interiors.
‘I remember when I was staying there I just wanted to live there. I wanted it to be my house,’ giggles Amber, who will also be meeting up with friends she knows in London in the coming weeks.
‘There is a mixture — a couple of actors from school, modelling friends. It has all been very welcoming.’
She is also looking forward to her debut in an RTÉ drama series with Vikings — however brief and gruesome it may be.
The same cannot be said, we imagine, for her poor parents.
THE Vikings is on RTÉ2 tomorrow at 9.30pm
IT’S quite understandable that Amber Jean Rowan’s mother closed her eyes as she previewed her daughter’s latest role. The Dublin actor and former model — runner-up on 2009 show The Model Agent — plays a slave girl who is raped in the new RTÉ drama series Vikings, which begins tomorrow night. Amber is the Anglo-Saxon slave girl of Floki, described as ‘a boat builder and incorrigible trickster’, who is the lead character Ragnar Lothbrok’s eccentric and closest friend.
Another of Ragnar’s sidekicks is his brother Rollo, who accompanies the Norseman known as the scourge of France and England on his daring raids.
It is Rollo, played by actor Clive Standen, who rapes Amber’s character, in a scene that many viewers will find unsettling, to say the least.
‘It was difficult but I think everyone was really gracious on set and careful with how they managed it,’ says Amber, 21, speaking from her home in London, where she moved just last week.
‘We talked about it a lot previously to make sure that everyone was comfortable with what they were doing. It was always going to be very difficult to do that kind of scene but everyone was really nice about it.’
Of course, the Vikings were notorious for their plunder and pillage, but aren’t rape scenes on TV and film unnecessarily gratuitous?
‘That’s a hard question to answer but it wasn’t a rape scene just for the sake of a rape scene. It was to show the dark side of Rollo’s character and to show that he can be a bad person.
‘After that scene you know what he is capable of.
‘You can’t say a rape scene is tasteful, by any means, but there was no nudity and it wasn’t aggressive in an over-thetop way,’ she adds.
How does she think Irish audiences will respond to the scene? ‘To be honest, I’m not quite sure. I don’t know how to answer that.’ What do her parents think? ‘They have seen it and obviously it’s not going to be the nicest thing to watch your daughter in a rape scene. It is not the most pleasant picture to have i n your mind. I said, “You shouldn’t really watch it.” I think my Mom shut her eyes.’ We’ll bet she did. From leafy Clontarf, Amber attended the prestigious Loreto College in St Stephen’s Green and the nearby Institute of Education.
The youngest of three, her sister Kerrie, 25, is a human rights lawyer based in Israel and brother Keith is studying the classics.
Amber discovered her love of acting, oddly enough, through her gymnastics class in 2002.
‘We all ended up being stunt girls on the big Hollywood film Reign Of Fire. I loved the whole experience and from that day I was always saying, “Mum, I want to go to drama school”. It has always been in my life since then.’
She is an alumnus of the Betty Ann Norton stage school and the Independ-
I was a stunt girl on Reign Of Fire. Acting has been my life since
ent Theatre Workshop and as an adult has been involved in the actors’ studio on Dublin’s Barrow Street. Mostly, though, she has been ‘learning on the job’.
But Amber first came to our attention, aged 16, on RTÉ’s model scout show The Model Agent, fronted by British woman Fiona Ellis, who discovered supermodel Erin O’Connor.
A willowy beauty whose strawberry blonde hair and freckles are offset by, unusually, brown eyes, Amber was runner-up to Belfast teenager CarrieAnn Burton, who famously became pregnant during the series. At the time Amber spoke openly and bravely about suffering from the hair loss condition alopecia, but today she says, ‘I prefer not to talk about it any more’.
She credits modelling for giving her ‘a great work ethic’ and enabling her to travel to ‘New York, London, a good bit of America, Mexico, beautiful places in Europe, the Caribbean — a good mix of cultures’.
And though it is her Dublin model agent Morgan the Agency who set up
Modelling was a side thing but it gave me my work ethic
our interview this week, Amber claims to not be modelling any more.
‘Acting was always my thing. Modelling was just a side thing,’ she insists.
Many Irish models dream of making the transition into acting and in recent years there has been a mass exodus of them on hopeful sojourns to LA — among them Nadia Forde, Tiffany Stanley, Ruth O’Neill and Roz Lipsett.
How Amber has negotiated the transition is another ‘hard question to answer’ but she believes in perseverance and she has, say the critics, the talent to back it up.
‘I love LA but I don’t think I could base myself out there. I was over there last February for a little while — I was in a film in a film festival out there,’ she says of The O’Briens, in which she plays an American girlfriend with what certainly sounds like an impeccable accent.
‘Accents have always come easy to me, thank God,’ she says.
In the summer of 2012 she auditioned for the part of a slave girl in Vikings, the latest big budget venture of The Tudors creator, Michael Hirst.
Emmy-winning costume designer Joan Bergin is also involved and ‘all the costumes are absolutely beautiful’, says Amber.
The €30million drama series first aired on History Channel in America to an audience of 6.2million last year, which Amber hopes might help her get work over there.
‘I have a really great agent over there now — Resolution, they’re called,’ she says, while her London agent is Saskia Mulder with Artist Partnership.
‘It was a small part — we filmed it over two days in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow,’ says Amber of Vikings.
‘But it was nice to be a part of it and to be involved. They were gruesome scenes — acting a rape scene is intense and they had to make sure they had someone who was able to do that competently.
‘It was a great opportunity and since then there has been a roll- on effect. I’ve got a few parts in great features. It was a great starting point for my career.’
Amber’s scenes i n Vikings were directed by Johan Renck, who has also directed three episodes of cult drama