Morfydd’s secret love on her fantasy island

ACTRESS Morfydd Clark said that with everything going on in the world at the moment, she prefers to read young adult fantasy novels, so she only has to deal with the perils of an alternative universe.

Even so, the very day that she rang me from Auckland in New Zealand, where she’s been holed up for a year, working on a new Lord Of The Rings TV series, she’d heard from her sister back in Wales that Mati, her toy poodle, had somehow managed to fall off a roof.

Whaaaat?! She explained that her sister had taken the dog with her to a cafe. ‘She apparently crawled through these railings and ended up falling,’ she told me, adding that Mati’s fine; though her sister may take longer to recover!

Speaking of scared, I jumped out of my skin when I first saw Clark as the title character in director Rose Glass’s superb film Saint Maud (out in cinemas today), about a nurse who believes she’s our saviour. It’s an outstanding performance; and means Clark will now surely be on every director’s radar.

Saint Maud is Morfydd’s third picture to hit cinema screens this year. She’s in Craig Roberts’s recently released Eternal Beauty, and Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield, which is still available digitally.

She told me that her enforced exile means she’s very homesick, but she plans to leave off travelling ‘until it seems sensible and essential for me’.

She has found comfort in the fact that New Zealand reminds her of Wales. ‘It’s the cragginess,’ she said, wistfully. And though it may be spring there at the moment, ‘for a Welsh person, it’s jumping in the sea weather’.

When she’s not reading her fantasy fiction, Morfydd can be found distracting herself with the TV series Black Sails, starring Toby Stephens as a pirate, which she’s only just discovered.

‘Everybody behaves brutally,’ she said, ‘but also everyone’s absolutely brave in it — the opposite of Succession [the media dynasty drama on Sky], where everyone’s a coward.’

She laughed and added: ‘Oh, and I’m utterly in love now with Toby Stephens!’