A Class Act

Her luminous good looks made her the star of Little Dorrit and Upstairs Downstairs. As she prepares to light up our TV screens once again in BBC2's White Heat next month, Claire Foy tells The Independent about filming embarrassing sex scenes...

Born in 1984 in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in Stepping Hill hospital, scene of the recent spate of suspicious saline-drip deaths, Foy is the youngest of three siblings and part of a large, extended Irish (on her mother's side) family. She moved south to Buckinghamshire with her father's job (he was a salesman for Rank Xerox) and an averagely happy sort of childhood was only slightly discomfited, at the age of eight, by her parents' divorce. Claire was the least academic of the three children, but her mother's persistence with the schools' appeal system finally got her into the same grammar school as her older siblings, and she mustered enough A-level grades to secure a place at Liverpool John Moores University to do a joint-honours degree in drama and 'screen studies', with a vague idea of becoming a cinematographer – "not realising that you have to have an interest in lighting people," she laughs. "You should see the video of this children's TV programme we made at university. It was shockingly lit."


Foy was the only graduate from her course to actually go on and study acting – a year's course at the Oxford School of Drama. "I wouldn't have been able to go to drama school when I was 19," she says. "I don't think I was even conscious of life... I was like a zombie. But when I finished uni' I just realised... just go and do it, stop being a knob." What she could not have foreseen was the speed with which she would "go and do it". An obligatory episode of the BBC1 daytime soap Doctors and the pilot of BBC3's supernatural drama Being Human under her belt, Foy was plucked, as they say, from obscurity to play the title role in BBC1's 16-part adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. "It was a bit of a shock... yeah, it was very weird," she recalls. "I remember the first audition where I was sat with a load of ginger girls, and everyone was ginger apart from me. Rachel Frett, the casting director, was really plugging for me – I don't know why. I must have looked right because I was not doing it right. Then the BBC do like launching people, they do like finding people who haven't done anything before, and Andrew Davies likes doing that because then people think you are that character."

Actually, Davies has said that he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be "a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze," and indeed the enduring image of the series was not Andy Serkis's bravura malevolence as Rigaud, or Tom Courtenay's shambling brilliance as Mr Dorrit, but Foy's delicate and very still, pellucid white face and big blue eyes staring out from beneath her bonnet – more Irish moss than English rose, and the very picture of innocence. Of Little Dorrit, and the camera's absorption in her visage, she says: "It actually set me up quite well because the director, Dearbhla [Walsh], said to me, 'Your face is powerful enough to communicate stuff, so just trust that you don't have to...' you know. And less really is more."

So does that face get recognised in shops? "It depends whether I've been on the telly the night before. The Promise was the thing that got most people stopping." Peter Kosminsky's drama, in which Foy played a stroppy 18-year-old, Erin, experiencing a political and historical consciousness-raising gap-year in Israel, showed that she could do more than look beatific beneath a bonnet. The Night Watch, an adaptation of Sarah Waters's Sapphic love story unfolding against the backdrop of the Blitz, saw her playing Anna Maxwell Martin's girlfriend, while she appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in a low-budget movie, Wreckers ("He's a complete geek... he's got more brain power than I will ever have so it just makes it so difficult to have a conversation with him"). And in a complete change of style and pace, she was the tabloid editor whose resemblance to Rebekah Brooks was entirely coincidental, in Channel 4's spoof of the phone-tapping scandal, Hacks. "I should play someone normal," she says.

Just not for the next few months as Foy will be prominent on our television screens in contrasting roles – as the fascist supporting Lady Persephone Towyn in Upstairs Downstairs, and then as Charlotte, a middle-class feminist in mid-Sixties London in the generational saga White Heat. It is the latter, and one aspect in particular, that is clearly on her mind. Paula Milne's new saga follows a group of student housemates from 1965 London to the present day (it's already been dubbed Our Friends in the South) and sees Foy returning to the more watchful ways of Amy Dorrit. Her Charlotte is a fledgling feminist, putting 'This Ad Degrades Women' stickers on London Underground posters, and falling into bed with her radicalised landlord (played by Sam Claflin). "If I never had to do [a sex scene] again that would be the best thing in the world because no one in their right mind would enjoy that," she says. "You're worried about what the crew are thinking, whether they're really uncomfortable, whether you're uncomfortable. You're just thinking, God, let this be over."

The Night Watch was the first time she had ever had to experience something like that; playfully sharing a bath Anna Wilson-Jones and a bed with Maxwell-Martin. "I remember thinking at the time, 'When it's on the telly I'm going to die' and actually I really didn't care. Because I'd done the worst bit of it... it's not like every time you see somebody, people are going to think they've seen you naked. You forget it, you just forget it."

This month she's taking her mother on holiday to New York, and is then doing the rounds with her newly acquired American agent. Martin Scorsese and Mark Rylance are mentioned as directors she'd like to act for. "I'd like to work with directors who really make you work hard,"she says. "I'd like to be given a responsibility and have to live up to it. I don't want to do anything easy because I've got the rest of my life to do that. Before I have kids and stuff I might as well get all the horrible, you know, self-involved stuff out of the way." An actor with a horror of self-involvement? Now there's a thing.