Dakota Blue Richards

Most actors don’t begin their careers starring alongside the likes of Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig - but Dakota Blue Richards did. Currently performing in anthropology at the Hampstead Theatre, she talks to us about the show’s themes of artificial intelligence, navigating a career as a child actor and how she came to set up a floristry business.

You’ve been acting since you were cast in The Golden Compass at age 11 - did you expect to make a career out of it?

I never really had any childhood ambitions to be an actor. I enjoyed performing - I went to a dance school for a year and I always enjoyed being part of school productions and stuff like that, but I never harboured any ambitions to be an actor. I only really auditioned for The Golden Compass because I liked the books so much! Even through that process I had absolutely no inclination I might get the role. Then I got an agent off the back of Compass, and I think when that ball gets rolling it’s quite hard to stop - there’s a lot of expectation put on you, especially as a child, and a lot of pressure, that if you want to act you can’t really take a break. So I think once that idea was implanted in my mind it became something I pursued, and I didn’t really know anything else at that point, and once you’re in it you’re kind of in it until you’re not.

Did you find that stressful, having to keep up that momentum as a child?

Yeah, I do think it’s an enormous amount of pressure to put on a child. Firstly, many productions are incredibly demanding, even the very high budget ones like Compass where I was well looked after and there was a lot of attention paid to my needs as a child, still the production was very demanding - it was long, and it was all new to me. I think on independent productions, where there are less protections and less time and money is afforded to maintaining your childhood, I suppose, your education and those sorts of things, those are even more tricky. Also, the audition process is stressful - you have to really invest a lot of time and energy and emotion into every audition you go for, and statistically speaking you’re not going to get most of them, so that process is draining and it requires an awful amount of resilience, which is a lot to put on a child. It did feel suddenly like my life was dictated somewhat by what the adults in my life expected of me. I think also there’s a stigma around acting, that anybody who leaves acting or does anything else with their life after acting only does so because they failed as an actor, which is actually not the case at all, knowing a lot of actors. Like any career you can leave it for any number of reasons. So that pressure is a lot - maybe I didn’t feel that as strongly in my childhood, but certainly in my teens.

In the past several years you’ve done a number of stage productions - how did you manage the jump from screen to stage work?

There are a lot of differences between screen and stage work. I definitely struggled with some technical aspects. My first stage job was a Tom Stoppard play, Arcadia, and I think had I been playing a theatre which was quite intimate, with good acoustics, it might have been easier. Arcadia was a tour, so we were in a different theatre every week, and so sometimes we were playing to audiences of three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, which, vocally, requires less than if you’re performing to nine hundred, or I think the largest venue we did was thirteen hundred! So that’s definitely a challenge if you’ve never done it before - that was quite a steep learning curve for me. But the basics of it are the same, and also with the rehearsal process you’re afforded much more time to learn those things and explore your performance and build it, so it feels more active and considered. So I suppose maybe an easier transition going that way than it would’ve been starting acting on stage and then going to screen.

A more recent screen role you might be recognised for is WPC Shirley Trewlove, a female police officer in the 1960s, in ITV’s Endeavour - how did you get into playing a character in a completely different line of work and time period to yourself?

As Shirley Trewlove in Endeavour

I was really excited to get that part - it was a really lovely production, the cast are wonderful actors and incredible people, every single one of them. Shaun Evans and Anton Lesser especially, are such nurturing, kind people, and Shaun’s a great leader for that kind of production, and it felt like a comfortable, safe space. I was a little unsure of how to approach the character, because being dropped into a production that had been on for three years by the time I joined was a little bit daunting, and I wasn’t given much backstory for my character, so I wasn’t really sure of who she was, where she was coming from, the life experiences that had shaped her - often in TV productions if that kind of stuff isn’t obvious in the script there isn’t time to put it in in the way you might in a play. So I did feel like I was kind of winging it, but of course being in a production over the course of three years, which is the longest I’ve ever been on one, you do find that character and come into her as you’re playing her. It was incredibly difficult to research, as to be honest they just didn’t really exist, women in the police force at that time, and the ones who did exist weren’t well documented, so I was sort of relying on being carried by the writing.

You’re currently starring in anthropology at the Hampstead Theatre - what’s the show about?

It’s a show about sisterhood and grief and AI - an interesting mix! At the beginning of the show there are two sisters, Merril and Angie, and Angie has been missing presumed dead for over a year. Merril - who works in tech and building algorithms - builds an AI version of her sister, in the hopes of finding a sort of unconventional closure, and very quickly the AI starts to surprise her. So I play Angie, but as an AI!

The theme of AI is particularly relevant in the acting world at the moment, with actors and writers striking in the US over the potential use of AI to replace human talent - do you have any opinions about that?

I do. I think being part of this show at this time has been very interesting, as I’ve been doing a lot of research about AI, and we’ve been fortunate though to speak to a conversation language programmer called Catherine, who’s just been an incredible resource for us all. My feelings about it are that it’s not the AI we ought to be scared of, it’s the people using it. I think, as ever, it’s the same with weapons, the thing by itself is not dangerous, but the way that people use it could be. And it’s incredibly important that there is legislation in place to protect people’s rights, people’s identities, to make sure that it’s not being used in a nefarious way, but I also feel it has the capacity to be an incredible tool, to do things for us that go far beyond replacing someone’s performance in a movie. It’s a shame, in a way, that the debate has been so focused on the negatives of it, though understandably, when I think it has the capacity to be really beneficial. But the show certainly touches on the idea of replicating and replacing somebody, essentially.

As Angie in anthropology

What stands out to you in a script or a character?

I like complexity in a character - I don’t think that’s necessarily always been reflected in the work I’ve done though! But the thing I’m drawn to is complex characters, because I feel that no person is just one thing, and what’s perfectly illustrated in anthropology is the multitudes contained within each character, like the way Angie is described by Merril, she describes her in such vivid detail, and there are parts of her that are so fantastic and admirable, these qualities that Merril loves about her, and then there are these qualities about her that are just awful and borderline unbearable! There’s a line where Merril says “Everybody loves you, until they can’t stand you”, and it’s that that’s so interesting. No person is wholly good or wholly bad, and it’s that complexity and that real authentic humanity, which is actually really rare in writing - you see it more in theatre and a bit in film, but you don’t see it quite so much in television. That’s what really gets me itching as an actor, to get stuck into something.

How long is the rehearsal process for a stage show - around the same or longer than a film or TV show?

Depending on the film you might have a couple of days rehearsal, TV almost none. There was no rehearsal process for Endeavour at all. To be honest, we were frequently given the scenes on Endeavour five minutes before we went to shoot them - that’s just the nature of TV, there’s so much content you have to get through in a day, and the turnaround for the writing of the episodes, the timeframes on it, are insane. The rehearsal process on a play, on everything I’ve done, has been about four weeks and then a week of tech rehearsals, and of course on a show like this there is a lot of tech, so even in previous we’ve been ironing out some of those bumps. I’m not on stage - my performance is live, but I’m acting through a mic and a screen, and everyone’s performances come directly to my headphones. I’m acting through most of the show to a camera, so it's not that different to a performance for screen.

You’ve written some screenplays yourself - are you actively working on taking any of them into production?

Kind of - I wouldn’t say there’s anything to keep an eye on right now, as there are so many other things that take priority. I enjoy writing through, and have been doing it for a few years. Initially I just started doing it for myself, because I enjoyed the process of writing, and I have been sort of pushed by people who’ve read my stuff into getting it made, so yeah, that is the goal but it’s not top of my list at the moment.

You also have a floristry business - how did you come to set that up?

That actually came out of lockdown! I do a lot of voiceover work, so when the creative industries shut down I was able to continue working from home, but I took everything in the news very seriously at the time and was very panicked, so when they said everybody needed to retrain I thought “Shit, I don’t have any other skills!”, and I was wracking my brain to think what would be something I could learn, that would make me happy, so I took a floristry course and just loved it. I really enjoyed learning about it and the creativity, and I started doing floristry work pretty much as soon as my course finished. It’s just been so good for me - it’s such a healing thing for me, and so enriching - and it’s nice to have a creative outlet that isn’t connected to the acting industry. Even when I’m acting I still have a fair amount of free time, so it’s nice to have something I’m passionate about to work on. I don’t know if it’s something I’ll keep up forever, but it’s just such a nice part of my life now.

Words: Scott Bates

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anthropology is at the Hampstead Theatre until October 14th - find out more here