Meet the new anti-hero
Flawed, funny and promiscuous women are getting their moment on screen and Emily Beecham is
PLAYING a convincing drunk on camera may be a notoriously tricky business but, as Emily Beecham explains to me, feigning inebriation without breaking character in a south-London chicken shop is a whole different ball game. “The people who sold me the chicken perhaps thought I was quite nuts,” laughs the 33-year-old actor, best known for 28 Weeks Later and US fantasy series Into the Badlands. “Although I didn’t really pay attention to them because I was doing the drunk thing. It was all quite technical as well because I had to come out, hit this mark and cross the road without killing myself.”
This image of behind-the-scenes meticulousness put to work in an unvarnished urban setting is as good as any in giving you a sense of Daphne, the film Beecham and I have met to talk about. Set amid the crowded weeknight pubs and strip-lit off licences of modernday London, it’s the tale of titular trainwreck Daphne Vitale (Beecham), a flawed, bitterly funny, and blithely promiscuous aspirant sous chef whose hedonistic existence is suddenly upended when she encounters a violent incident.
Directed by Scottish first-timer Peter Mackie and already generating a fair bit of buzz following screenings at festivals, it’s an incredibly effective, thoroughly 2017 indie marvel that deftly walks the line between acerbic comedy (“If you mean yes, just say yes. Don’t be a twat,” mutters Daphne after her boss says, “correct”) and squirming, nuanced tragedy.
What’s more, Beecham — joint winner of the Best Performance award at June’s Edinburgh International Film Festival — is a complete revelation, utterly selling Daphne’s recognisable brand of spiky millennial dysfunction.
So, having been handed the careermaking role after starring in a thematically similar short film made with Mackie, did Beecham draw on personal experience to play Daphne? “I definitely feel that I recognise parts of friends and parts of myself in her,” says Beecham, perched on a low-slung sofa in the BFI and nibbling popcorn to quell some selfconfessed “hanxiety”.
Beecham i s wr y, watchful and considered with her words. “Daphne’s just so unusual and she’s not the kind of character who’s represented enough on screen,” she says. “Although I think at the moment there seem to be a lot more interesting female characters. Fleabag is in a similar vein. Daphne doesn’t aim to please and she has what many people might think are quite masculine traits — which I like.”
She isn’t the first to spot similarities between her film and Phoebe WallerB r i d ge ’s B a f t a -w i n n i n g cultural phenomenon (more than one early review has branded Daphne “the bigscreen Fleabag”). But Beecham, who counts Waller-Bridge as a friend, is keen to deny charges of hurried bandwagonjumping. “We were actually making them at the same time. It wasn’t influenced by Fleabag at all,” she says, noting subtle differences between the two filthy-minded anti-heroines.
“With Daphne, the sex seems like something she’s kind of doing out of boredom,” s ays B e e c h a m, w i t h reference to her character’s multiple hook-ups. “Fleabag probably has more of a strong objective to sleep with as many people as possible but Daphne is more of a drifter.”
ONE undeniable shared thread running through both projec ts, however, is an examination of how young people — and specifically young, single women — career through London. “She’s quite isolated and disconnected,” says Beecham. “A lot of people in a big city like London can probably relate to that.”
Filmed in and around Elephant and Castle, the movie holds up a mirror to a version of the capital that’s rarely glimpsed on sc reen. B eecham’s stumbling encounters with pedestrians and unwitting, real-life chicken shop employees — covertly filmed at longrange — only underscore this easy naturalism. And the performer threw herself into the challenge of playing a chef in a frantic London kitchen too.
“I did work experience at 10 Greek Street and I loved it,” beams Beecham, before pausing. “I mean, they wouldn’t let me work there in the busy hours because that’s when chefs get really