LOVIBOND GIRL:
She’s got the small screen pretty much sewn up, but she is about to make her stage debut in Sheffield, Ophelia Lovibond talks to Nick Ahad.
E all know the way we watch – or as the marketing bods would have it, “consume” – television, has changed. The advent and total domination of the boxset culture means that “bingewatching” is now a part of our lives. We no longer tune in next time to see if our daring duo will survive – we just check the clock, work out how many hours of sleep we’ll get if we watch just one more episode – and then we watch just one more episode.
This cultural shift has had an interesting impact on the way we view the stars of our favourite TV shows. When you spend hours in a room with your favourite characters you end up feeling a genuine connection to them. How else do you explain the vast numbers of different types of people wearing T-shirts bearing the likeness of Walter White you see on the streets of our cities?
It also means for me that when I meet Ophelia Lovibond I am blushing furiously. Sitting opposite is someone who plays an integral role in one of my go-to boxsets.
Lovibond, whose name sounds like it belongs to a Bond girl, plays Kitty, the protégé to Johnny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes in the American reboot of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Retitled Elementary for the Americans, there was much consternation when it was announced that the series, created by Robert Doherty, would feature a Sherlock Holmes living in present day New York and a female Dr Watson in the shape of Lucy Liu. The series was also set to make much of Sherlock living as a recovering addict. So much about the concept was sacrilegious – plus it premiered not long after Benedict Cumberbatch had rebooted Sherlock for a new generation of British television viewers so Elementary was considered by many to be unnecessary. It soon transpired that the naysayers really need not have worried. Elementary is brilliant, a deserved international hit and a big part of the series and its success is Ophelia Lovibond’s complex character in the show, Kitty.
“It could have been a pretty unpleasant experience – big stars, big TV show, huge network, loads of producers – and it just wasn’t. It was an incredible experience the whole way through,” says Lovibond. “The team is actually known as the Elementary family because everyone is so friendly – which really isn’t typical of those sorts of procedural dramas.
“The role of Kitty was such a surprise – it came out of nowhere. Those sorts of roles for women in TV really don’t come along very often, but the creator of the show, Rob, was really keen that Kitty be a full, three-dimensional character. Everyone on the show was really behind giving her a proper character arc.”