‘Anorexia is like alcoholism – here for life’
Rising star Gemma Whelan tells Helen Chandler-wilde about the teenage years she spent in and out of therapy
Of the many challenges facing actors, being typecast is one Gemma Whelan has skilfully avoided. The 38-yearold’s career has spanned television tragedies and stand-up comedy; shoestring budget Edinburgh Fringe shows and $10 million-an-episode Game of Thrones epics. She is friends with Cockney geezer Danny Dyer, and enjoys long conversations about the Tudors with David Mitchell.
This is how she likes it, she says, hoping to model her career on Olivia Colman’s, who went from Peep Show to winning the Academy Award for Best Actress last year: “She’s got funny bones, but she’s got a very brilliant dramatic streak.”
I meet Whelan backstage at the Gielgud Theatre, where she is playing Kate in The Upstart Crow, a BBC Two Shakespeare sitcom by Ben Elton that has now transferred to the stage. She speaks quickly in a clipped stagey accent that has little trace of her Birmingham upbringing, drinking miso soup as we discuss her return to her comedy roots.
It was a natural beginning: “I was always a bit of a clown at school, and the funny role in school plays, I always really enjoyed making people laugh,” she says. She got her first break with an Edinburgh Fringe stand-up show, where she performed in character as Chastity Butterworth, an upper-class woman with a bawdy sense of humour.
Her turn caught the attention of BBC bosses, who offered her a pilot on a Radio 4 chat show based on the character. But the timing was all wrong – “Mrs Brown got hers off the ground and there wasn’t room for two character chat shows,” she reflects, an early taste of the disappointment the industry so readily provides.
She switched tack, seeking serious roles instead, and was dealt a fantastic piece of luck at one audition when the casting director told her of another part he was currently working on that she would be perfect for. An email came through, describing the gig up for grabs in an “HBO drama”. It turned out to be Game of Thrones, for the part of Yara Greyjoy, a bisexual warrior who rises from a small role to a lead in later series.
The show – auditions for which saw her beat competition from 70 other actors – opened the doors to more dramatic roles in television, including series three of BBC hit spy thriller Killing Eve, which she has just finished filming. Rumours abound that this season will see antagonist Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer, settle down and marry a woman. Whelan has “signed a lot of NDAS” so can say barely anything about it, though she can confirm that she is not Villanelle’s wife.
So who is? “I genuinely have no idea,” she says. The show is so shrouded in secrecy that Whelan doesn’t even know the entire plot: “I didn’t see all the scripts, you see only the bits that are relevant to you. It’s almost like they sort of self-combust afterwards.”
Being in the biggest shows on television as a thirtysomething actress is something Whelan sees as a logical conclusion to her work. “I had a completely impenetrable belief that this is what I wanted to do, and this is what I was going to do, and there was no alternative,” she says. Her early life, however, felt far less straightforward.
A struggle with anorexia between the ages of 13 and 18 led to her being admitted to the Reed Eating Disorder Unit in Birmingham: “Going through such a thing when you’re so young, your mental strength is challenged and you’re forced to have a lot of therapy,” she reflects. It was that arduous period that instilled in her the importance of “taking care of your mind… and, in a way that really stood me in a stead to have a certain strength that is unshakeable.”
It was by no means an easy recovery, though. “Anorexia is a little bit like alcoholism in that you never fully recover, but you are a functioning person who knows the alternative is terrible.” Now a mother to a two-year-old daughter, “the idea of me and my husband watching our child go through that is horrendous”. But the hard times have, at the very least, given her perspective: “I wasted so much time being ill so I live everything so fully and deeply now and with great enthusiasm because I don’t want to miss another moment.”
Her career certainly seems proof of that. The day before our interview, she says she was discussing details of Henry VIII’S wives with David Mitchell; Eastenders hardman Danny Dyer, whom she counts as “one of the nicest people I could ever hope to come across” since meeting him when they shared a stage in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, has been an unlikely source of wisdom, too, and was “pivotal” in her decision to move house.
Motherhood has not held her back from work: Whelan posted a picture of herself breastfeeding from the Game of Thrones set – while dressed in full costume with dirt smeared over her face. The same was required while filming Emma, released in cinemas today, in which Whelan plays the
‘I can’t recall all the many lesbians I’ve played over the years’
protagonist’s governess, Mrs Weston. “Everyone’s been so brilliant and understanding,” she says.
She shares parenting duties with her husband Gerry Howell, a fellow writer and comedian, at their home in south London. But while her own path has been relatively traditional, the romantic lives of her on-screen alter egos have been far more varied; from Yara Greyjoy to Gentleman Jack, where she played Anne Lister’s sister Marian; and now Killing Eve. “I can’t remember all the many lesbians I’ve played,” she laughs. “Those parts tend to find their way to me, rather than me seek them out,” she says. “I think perhaps my career has crossed over with a time where there is a necessity to be hugely diverse.”
Her Game of Thrones cast are still like “family”, she says; an inevitability given their 10 years on set together, perhaps, though their camaraderie has since carried over to Whatsapp. The show’s end was hard, not only in terms of leaving friends behind, but viewers’ less than favourable reactions to the finale, which she has since called her life’s “biggest disappointment”, because she thought it was “brilliant”.
She has since moved on from the disappointment and dragon-slaying. The Upstart Crow is less the diverse, serious Whelan we have seen in recent years; more the lightly bonkers character-comedy of her early career. She plays the wannabe actress daughter of Shakespeare’s landlord, a woman who is “very clever, she’s very smart, and she’s funny and she’s kind. And she’s quite silly as well.” For the first time in a long while, Whelan’s role might not be so far from reality.
The Upstart Crow is at the Gielgud Theatre until April 25. Tickets: delfontmackintosh.co.uk/tickets/ upstart-crow