Friendly fire

I BEGIN by telling Gina McKee that I know where she lives. This isn’t, perhaps, the wisest opening gambit with an actress “famously tight-lipped about her personal life” (The Observer), whose press interviews read like “a series of exercises in evasive civility” (The Guardian) and who gives “thoughtfully evasive answers” (The Independent).

McKee does not do personal, as her press cuttings show. So why is she reeling off a list of personal facts for me? To put the record straight, that’s why.

“I wasn’t born in Sunderland and I don’t support Sunderland. I’ve never seen a football match in my life, although I once did a voice-over for a documentary about Sunderland Football Club. And I am also three years younger than it says. I was born in 1964, as opposed to, I think they say, 61.”

She’s referring to an incorrect listing on a film website (and repeated elsewhere on the net). As for her address, I happened to have driven through the village where she lives in Sussex (she let the location slip in an interview), a few days previously.

We are in a London hotel room where she’s on publicity duty for the new film, In The Loop, a downright hilarious British comedy set in the corridors of power, in which she plays the director of communications at the Ministry of International Development.

There’s a certain irony in an actress noted for her lack of communication over personal matters playing such a part. But I don’t wish to get carried away with this – as almost every interviewee does – because I found McKee both charming and chatty. She’s a striking woman in the flesh and, this may come as a surprise, – she’s capable of laughing.

Since making her name in the TV series Our Friends In The North, she’s played many tortured and anguished women on TV, film and stage. Something of a contrast to one of her TV jobs – playing opposite Lenny Henry’s Delbert Wilkins in a sitcom as vampy newshound Libby Shuss in Brass Eye.

Making In The Loop was “great fun and like a shot in the arm – I loved it”. Director Armando Iannucci encouraged his cast to shoot an improvised version of a scene after filming the scripted one. “So you were given a lot of creative choices, a lot of freedom,” says McKee enthusiastically.

Her remarkably versatile career encompasses everything from period drama, with The Lost Prince, and Irene in the ITV remake of The Forsyte Saga among them, to movies such as Notting Hill (as wheelchair-bound Bella) and Wonderland (which won her an independent film award).

This has happened, she’ll tell you, without the benefit of any career plan. “I don’t know how anybody in this game, apart from a tiny percentage of people, can plan anything. One of the things you’ve got to manage is the lack of control,” she says.

“You can start to try to push in a certain direction, but you certainly can’t control it.”

She grew up, the daughter of a miner, around Easington, in County Durham. At 14, she was talent-spotted by Tyne Tees Television and given her first professional acting job in Quest Of Eagles.

“I didn’t do that and think, ‘okay, I’m going to be an actor’. I finished that and got on with regular life. It wasn’t really until I was 18 that I thought I’ll try and do it.”

Why should she think about acting when no one in her family had anything to do with the business? “It just wasn’t on the radar,” she says. After I did that series, a teacher threw a teacher’s pack at me one day and said, ‘you do drama or something, don’t you?’ in a really dismissive way.

“I opened this envelope and it was from the National Youth Theatre asking if any pupils were interested in joining. I read the pack and had no idea. I didn’t even know when it said ‘do two audition pieces’, what that meant. It was all brand new.

“But I did audition and I did get in, and did the National Youth Theatre summer season for a few years. It was fantastic because my learning curve was so enjoyable and steep. One of the most valuable things I learnt was that I had a choice. It seems very simple but it was a revelation.”

She was also involved with Peterlee Youth Drama Workshop, founded by Ros and Graeme Rigby. That, too, was a “brilliant opportunity” where she was involved in diverse things and learnt a huge amount.

Despite her success in Our Friends In The North, she’s escaped being labelled as only a North-East actress. “People always try to put labels on everybody, whatever walk of life you end up in. It’s inevitable,” she says. “And I think, when you’ve lived in an area like the North-East with a strong identity, then your blueprint goes deep.

‘ONE of the things I’ve enjoyed about this job is that I’ve been given lots of different opportunities and allowed to have different kinds of challenges. That’s healthy and I like it that way because it would be hard to find a comfortable cul-de-sac in this business.

“But I certainly would try to avoid comfort zones because you don’t develop and that’s what I enjoy – learning, and having a bit of fear, a bit of adrenalin.”

Some of those emotions were present the night she was named best actress at the Bafta TV awards for Our Friends In The North. “Before the ceremony I had a terrible bout of nerves. I’d put my head in the sand and not thought about it. I’d never been to anything like that before, or entertained the idea of being anywhere like that. I was overcome with fear,” she recalls.

“But then, of course, it was lovely, very enjoyable and people, friends, were happy about it, too.”

Given the right script and right character, she’d willingly do more comedy. She has, she confesses, never done comedy on stage. Is there anything she fancies doing?

“I don’t know. I always go blank when people ask me that,” she replies. Then she adds, with a laugh: “Something unexpected”.

■ In The Loop (15) opens in cinemas on Friday.