Vinette Robinson
BOILING POINT/ THE GATHERING
I¡ 2021, ¢ before Disney+’s series The Bear raised our anxiety levels, there was the similarly stressful film Boiling Point, set in a restaurant kitchen and all shot in one take. It was made on a minimal budget and Vinette Robinson, 39, who starred in it with Stephen Graham, says no one expected it to be such a hit. “We just made this little lm for the love of it, and then it had this incredible response.” It was turned into a BBC series in 2023, and Robinson returned as Carly, now a head chef.
It was Graham, his wife Hannah Walters (who also stars) and director Philip Barantini who wanted Robinson for the role. Graham and Walters saw her in Steven Knight’s A Christmas Carol as Bob Cratchit’s wife Mary. “They really championed me. They help a lot of people on camera and o camera that you’d never know about. They’re really paying it forward, which is inspiring, giving people opportunities who wouldn’t normally get them.”
Robinson grew up on a council estate in Bradford, where the idea of becoming an actor never crossed her mind. Until, that is, she was 13. In her school English class, she had to dramatise poems, and her teacher entered one that Robinson and her friend did into a local festival. She recalls it feeling electric up on that stage.
“As soon as I said I wanted to be an actor, my mum was the only one who was behind me. Everyone else was like, ‘You’re mad. This career is not for you.’ I had some pretty horrendous feedback from certain drama schools, who were horrible to me. When I went to audition, they told me I didn’t know enough and some were really snobby. Without that belief from my mum at home, I wouldn’t have felt condent or believed I could do it.”
Robinson had not one, but several, bursaries to cover her fees at London’s
Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, as well as her living expenses. She also worked all the way through drama school. “You only get people from certain backgrounds who can aord to do this job,” Robinson says of the lack of schemes available now. “A wide range of voices just enrich the industry. It’s about going into dierent communities and schools, and not just private schools that can aord to do drama as a luxury, because that’s where you will nd a variety of people. It’s fundamental that everyone has access to the arts in whatever form that may be, because it expands people’s lives.”
T are told are in the hands of the television commissioners. “It drives me mad,” Robinson says, to see programmes where people are shown having a horrible time just because they’re from a working-class background. She mentions Michaela Coel’s council-estate-set Chewing Gum as an antidote to that. “I would never have thought I could be a commissioner. How do we reach dierent communities to get them into those jobs as well?”
“I had huge amounts of imposter syndrome – as I know loads of people do in this industry – just coming from the background I do. It’s such a tough industry and I always felt like I had to change myself or be something dierent. Then I realised that just gets in the way of the work.”
Robinson has played everything from a shop assistant in Cold Feet and a police sergeant in Sherlock to Rosa Parks in Doctor Who. Her next role is a helicopter parent in Channel 4’s The Gathering, which examines the rivalry between teen gymnasts, and their socio-economic backgrounds. “I’m really proud of it,” Robinson says. “I really believe in the power of storytelling. Look at Mr Bates vs the Post O ce and the dialogue it opened up. Television drama can reach into people’s living rooms and make them think dierently about an issue. “It’s really easy to diminish what we do, because we’re not saving lives, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. We need stories to make sense of this human experience.”
‘It’s fundamental that everyone has access to the arts’