Hannah Murray
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Age: 18, or three years older than Mia, the character she is playing in the West End transfer of Polly Stenham’s much-lauded Royal Court play,
That Face.
Hometown: Bristol in England’s West Country, where Murray grew up the only child of a lecturer-father and lab technician-mother, both employed by the university. “They are very science-y, not really into theater or anything like that,” she says. “But my mum’s into going to the theater, so she took me to see loads of stuff around Bristol and Bath and up to London. That was great, since theater can be very expensive and a lot of people my age don’t have the opportunity to see it.”
Currently: Making her professional stage debut alongside the likes of Tony winner Lindsay Duncan and fast-ascending star Matt Smith in the Stenham play’s limited run through July 5 at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Murray is the only new recruit to director Jeremy Herrin’s company; the original Mia, Felicity Jones, has decamped a few streets away to appear with Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton in the forthcoming Donmar revival of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden. “I’d done some plays at youth theater, but they were usually for, like, quite a small audience: mostly my parents and the parents of other people.” So, what made one of the stars of the much-vaunted British TV series
Skins have a go at this? “I really loved the play; it was so good that I would have wanted to be involved in it, whatever it was: a film TV, whatever.” What’s more, says Murray, “I was terrified by the idea of being on stage, and because it scared me so much, it felt like something I should do.”
Hannah Murray in That Face
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Girls Just Want To Have Fun: Or do they? In That Face, Mia participates in an initiation ritual at a posh boarding school that gets things off to a disturbing and disconcerting start. Can Murray relate to that milieu? “I went to a state school that was mixed, boys and girls, and I think the all-girl environment is quite different.” By way of preparation, Murray did spend a day at a single sex school “with some girls who are the same age as my character, and I went to their lessons and talked to their friends.” Her thoughts after the fact? “I got a sort of feel of what that atmosphere is like, even though they don’t taunt each other and beat each other up. There was a sense of it being a separate environment from the normal world.” Not that dipping in and out of that world has been that onerous, she says. “That’s what so exciting: You get to explore the darker side of things in a very safe environment. It’s one of the things I like a lot about acting.”
Pressure Off: The memory of the May 9 press night is still fresh in Murray’s mind. “It felt really good [though] now it feels a bit freer not to have that massive pressure.” As yet, Murray is enough of a stage neophyte not to have any set structure as regards gearing her day toward that evening’s performance. “I don’t feel routine about it yet. I just think it’s really exciting that you have this chance to do things in different ways and that your performance is not one go; it’s a continuous work-in-progress.” She’s grateful, too, that her colleagues were as welcoming as they were. “No one was approaching the play as kind of, ‘We’ve done it already.’ It was about rediscovering the play as opposed to recreating it.”
Move On: Murray has been acting professionally for two years and is best-known for originating the role of the self-destructive Cassie in Skins, on which she filmed 19 episodes across two series. “They liked to set the whole series in summer, but that meant us sometimes wearing very summery clothes in December,” she says, laughing. “It was sometimes very cold, but apart from that it was OK.” Now that the program is continuing ahead with a younger cast, Murray herself sees theater as one way to move forward. She’s keen to do more film, having been cut from her one flashback sequence in the Martin McDonagh movie In Bruges, in which she appeared opposite her That Face co-star, Matt Smith, playing the young Ralph Fiennes. “I was a prostitute and another prostitute is murdered, and I was there covered in blood,” she recalls. “It was an interesting day.”