We meet Dafne Keen, star of His Dark Materials
TV Times meets Dafne Keen, the teenager at the heart of Sunday night’s biggest drama
Dafne Keen has a life that many little girls dream of. At the age of just 14, she has already starred in a blockbuster Hollywood film alongside Hugh Jackman (2017’s Logan, the 10th film in the X-men franchise), and she’s currently the heroine of BBC1’S hit Sunday-night drama His Dark Materials, in which she gets to face off against Ruth Wilson and ride armoured polar bears.
Dafne, whose British dad, Will, co-stars as Father Macphail and whose Spanish mum, María, appears in BBC1’S daytime crime saga The Mallorca Files, certainly has stardust sprinkled over her childhood.
Here, she tells TV Times how she felt to be cast in such a hotly anticipated TV series…
Are you enjoying playing Lyra?
It’s an amazing privilege to play her, especially as she grows up and you watch her developing. I had two years of auditions, so it was quite a long process. I really thought I wouldn’t get it.
How familiar were you with the story?
I’d watched the [2007] film The Golden Compass but I hadn’t read Philip Pullman’s books because they were written before I was born.
But then I started reading them for the job and I was hooked – they are brilliant.
What has it been like working with such famous co-stars?
They are all amazing actors and lovely people. Me and Lin-manuel Miranda basically have the same relationship that Lyra and [aeronaut] Lee Scoresby have on screen.
Obviously Lin knows a lot about musicals [he was the leading man in Mary Poppins Returns and created musical Hamilton] and I do too, so we’re constantly off-set singing in the balloon and joking. I had a lot of very intense scenes with Ruth Wilson [Mrs Coulter] and she would joke around in between takes. James Mcavoy [Lord Asriel] and I talk quite a lot about Hugh Jackman, because we’ve both worked with him and we both love him!
Which scenes did you most enjoy filming? I loved riding the polar bear puppets. I was too light for the rig, which was very funny – they made it but they didn’t calculate my weight, so then they had to harness me because I bounced too much off the bear!
What is it like going to work with your dad? I had one scene with him and he was very creepy! He’s a really nice guy in real life, but he looks like a psychopath in this!
Did you always know you’d be an actor?
I used to love David Attenborough and I wanted his job! I wanted to go around the world like him, but then I realised I’d need to study maths and biology and I wasn’t going to do that! Then I did a short film and became an actor.
What do your school friends think of it all? Oh, they’re used to it by now. It’s like, ‘Oh Dafne is away in Cardiff filming again, it’s fine’ and then when I get back they forget I haven’t been there for seven months!