In my last year of drama school, I was Abigail in 'The Crucible' and Nina in 'The Seagull,' and I did some Shakespeare with the RSC. That's what casting directors saw me in, and I got put up for a lot of period drama auditions. I always get told I suit the costumes. I don't think I have a very modern-looking face.
When you wear the costumes in a period drama, you already feel like a different person - the clothes make you stand differently, change your posture, the way you walk. You really have to have stamina - you have two hours in hair and makeup, and then another hour to remove all that.
I feel like when you perform in a period drama, it's so easy to transform yourself into someone else because the costumes are so different.
I always liked acting in school and drama classes, but when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always told them I wanted to be a singer. I didn't want to be a jack of all trades. I wanted to master one.
I always like to be somebody scary. When I was little, my mom used to make our costumes. She's really creative and would make us great costumes without having to spend a lot.
I was incredibly nervous about doing a period drama. I thought that to play period, you had to be English-looking and blonde and very well spoken, and have gone to drama school.
I always wanted to have a family - that was one of my big wishes. And in school, I'd taken drama, and I'd always wanted to act. I did go to drama school in New York, Los Angeles and London, and I did small parts here and there, but I never really had the time. Modeling was always paying more.
I know I'm as comfortable doing period as I am contemporary. I suppose we grow up with it in a sense, in the theater. We get to put on costumes and play a lot of period dramas or plays so we're exposed to it a little bit more I think because of our theatrical background.
It's as interesting to me as someday getting to play in some beautiful period piece where the costumes are from a completely different era. This feels as extreme as that, and that's really liberating. It's really liberating to just go 180 from what my life is like. I love that! I love not having to think about clothes. I wanted to wear a uniform when I was in high school, but I couldn't. I was like, "It would be so much easier!"
I'd always wanted to do costume drama, but period dramas often become very wooden. Just because they're born in the 1400s, all of a sudden people start losing their sense of humour or their personalities.
I would love to make a 1830's period piece, a house in the country, a classic atmospheric haunted house movie, visually it would be so beautiful, the costumes, the candles, the darkness, and the quiet, no radio, to TV, the clock ticking away.
I love costumes. My dream growing up was always to have my own costume and prop shop.
I just wanted to make more of a lifestyle record instead of anything else. I wasn't trying to do anything mainstream or nothing like that. I wanted to speak on this time period where I was fed up with a couple things and I had an idea of what I wanted to do.
If someone said, "Would you like to do the period drama?," I'd say, "Hell, yeah! I'd love to do that!" To dig into history and do a story in some period would be great.
I love costumes. I love getting dressed up because it really helps my imagination make the leap to believe that I am who I say I am.
There were certain things that I watched, and I screened a series of period films as well, not because I wanted to copy those, because I wanted to be different. “Far from the Madding Crowd” was one I looked to because I thought it looked so good. “Doctor Zhivago.” Unrequited love is always a great thing. “Tess” was something I looked at, I thought Polanski got the period right.