Issy Knopfler
Currently starring in Channel 4’s drama series Before We Die, Issy Knopfler tells us about meeting her best friend on her first film, shooting a TV show during a pandemic and the creatives she most admires.
How long have you been acting? When did you know it was what you wanted to do?
I went to a performing arts school - ArtsEd - when I was about 13, 14 years old, and that was kind of where I fell in love with it. I knew that I loved acting and theatre and music and the arts in general, and I was moved there as I wasn’t doing very well at an academic school, and I think it was there that I realised that it was what I wanted to do as a career. I found my “tribe” there, and fell in love with the craft and all the other kids there - I thought “This is my family, this is my home”. I just literally couldn’t be doing anything else. I mean I’ve met plenty of other actors, I have plenty of friends who have no formal qualification at all, but for me going to ArtsEd was integral to my realising it was what I wanted to do with my life. I graduated when I was 18, and have been giving it a good go in the real world ever since.
What was your first acting job out of drama school?
The first professional job I got was an indie feature film called Everything I Ever Wanted To Tell My Daughter About Men, which was written by a woman called Lorien Haynes, who also starred in it - it was sort of biographical in a way. They were looking for a younger actress who could play her from age 16 to her late twenties, early thirties, and it was just luck as it is for so many of these things - I read the script and fell in love with it, and she wanted to FaceTime me from LA, but I got my time zones wrong and FaceTimed her when she was in bed! That was the start of a great relationship - she’s now my neighbour and we’re best friends!
Was that shot in LA?
It was shot in both the UK and the US. She is English, and her life started here, so we shot a lot of it in the UK, then her life took her to the States, to LA, so we did some of it there too.
How did you approach playing someone who’s written a film about her life?
Lorien originally wrote it as a play, and it was originally written as a kind of love letter to her real-life daughter, who’s a couple of years younger than me. I flew out to LA to meet her and discuss everything, and because it was an indie she offered to put me up with her and her daughter! I stayed with them in their house for a couple of weeks, and they are the most brilliant pair - I adore them so much. It was pretty much just spending late nights together, watching movies, discussing where we grew up, what England meant to us, what our relationship histories had been like, because a lot of the movie is about how different relationships affected her life from growing up to the present. It was just a lot of time spent together, and you can’t separate us now!
You’ve recently starred in Channel 4’s Before We Die - how did you get that role?
It was a self-tape from my agent, just before the pandemic. I did the tape, sent it off - and then Covid happened. I didn’t hear anything for months - in fact all of the auditions I did in late 2019 and early 2020, none of us expected to hear anything back from them as everything just shut down. Then a few months into the pandemic I got a phone call to say I’d been offered the part, and I was like “For what?” and they said “You know, the Channel 4 show!”, but I didn’t remember! They’d managed to get it off the ground and figured out how to shoot it within the circumstances - there was no recall, no huge process, it was just one self-tape, and I think most of us were cast that way. The first season was shot during the pandemic, and the second was shot at the end of 2022.
Did you find shooting the second series easier than the first, without any Covid restrictions?
We shot the show in Belgium, and for the first season we were almost confined to a building we were all living in. For season two we could go home in between shoot dates, if we had a week off where we weren’t needed, but I did find that during shooting the first, because it’s centred around this close mafia family, we spent so much time together because we were bubbled as a cast, we’d go out on walks together on the days we weren’t filming, and I think that was integral really to us bonding as a family. It was very different on season two, more relaxed in a sense, as we could go home and see our partners, our kids, whereas on season one we were kind of forced to be this actual family!
Did you work on any other projects during the pandemic?
I did one, a series called Signora Volpe for Acorn TV, with Emilia Fox, and we shot that in Italy. That was towards the end of it all though, so things were opening up a bit and you could go to a restaurant, etc, so it was slightly more relaxed. But the first season of Before We Die was shot more in the depths of the pandemic.
What do you look for in scripts that come your way?
As Bianca in Before We Die
I always think I’m the luckiest girl in the world if I have a wonderfully fierce, cool girl put in front of me who I’m not like in real life. I’m kind of nervous and I’m an overthinker, and I’ve been lucky enough to play quite a few of these just fabulously ballsy women who take this fantastic standpoint on female rage, or female hysteria, or just something that I would struggle to access or voice as myself. A really big inspiration for me just before I graduated ArtsEd was The Witch, the Anya Taylor-Joy movie, and when I saw that and her in that, she was just so beautifully, disturbingly fierce and I was like “That’s what I want to do, I will run to that in any part”. I think that everything she’s done are parts that I would be drawn to.
Which other actors and filmmakers do you admire and enjoy watching?
My first answer to that is always going to be Anya, but one of my favourite filmmakers of all-time - and maybe this is a generic answer - is Christopher Nolan. I remember just wanting so badly to be Jessica Chastain in Interstellar - it’s primarily a story about a man, where gender is concerned, but so much of it comes back to Murphy, to Jessica Chastain’s role, it is such an important part of the entire storyline. I just have this mad obsession with the necessity for women’s stories in cinema, and I love the way Christopher Nolan tells that story, he brings it back to female rage and abandonment.
Would you want to write or direct yourself?
I would! I’m terrified of it because it’s so daunting, but I massively do. That’s something that I’m constantly thinking about and constantly wanting to sink my teeth into. I do write a little bit, but I definitely want to more. Maybe if I find the right writing partner!
Words: Scott Bates
Photos: Phil Sharp (excl Before We Die still)