Holliday Grainger: ‘I’m too f***ing chickens*** to talk about my #MeToo experiences’

As Grainger returns to her surveillance drama ‘The Capture’, she chats to Annabel Nugent about ditching the period drama petticoat, handling guns on ‘dangerous’ film sets, and why she wouldn’t want to become a spokesperson on any issue – including JK Rowling

‘I didn’t like being chaperoned by anyone that wasn’t my mum’: Grainger landed her first role aged six on ‘All Quiet on the Preston Front’ (Getty)

You have to wonder whether Holliday Grainger misses the corsets. It’s been five years since the star of Strike last wore the punishing vintage garment; an eternity really, given that she spent the better part of a decade bound into one playing frothy aristocrats in shows such as The Borgias and haughty royalty in films like Anna Karenina. “I’ve worn so many I think my bloody liver is bruised,” she cackles, a trace of her native Manchester accent peeping through the negative space of her vowels. The short answer, then, is no. She does not miss the corsets.

These days, Grainger is about comfort. The actor calls me from bed one afternoon, her hair pulled back from her high-boned, full-moon face, which is bare. Not celebrity bare (meaning concealer and mascara) but actually bare. She’s in workout clothes and her rosy cheeks are rosier than usual. I think she’s just back from a run; she swigs water from the Stella Artois pint glass on her bedside table. The most period thing about Grainger is the fact that she still uses earphones with wires.

And yet still, there is something old-world about her. The apple cheeks and pronounced swoop-de-swoop of her cupid’s bow telegraph a sensibility so conspicuously cherubic, it’s suspicious. Grainger began her career in earnest as the radiant, delightfully devious daughter of a pope in the 15th-century hit series The Borgias. Then followed a series of films plucked from a school syllabus. Jane Eyre (2011), Great Expectations (2012), Anna Karenina (2012), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2015), Guy de Maupassant’s 19th-century novel Bel Ami (2012), and Deborah Moggach’s 20th-century one Tulip Fever (2017) to name a few. Recently, Grainger has stepped into the present day with detective shows such as Strike and The Capture, which has returned for a much anticipated, ever entertaining second season and proves once again that Grainger can act sans corset, thank you very much.

For a long time, Grainger didn’t see a script for anything set after the 20th century. But in 2017, Strike offered a timely nudge. JK Rowling’s hugely popular “Robert Galbraith” novels, the fifth of which sold nearly 65,000 copies in just five days, introduced Grainger to a primetime audience courtesy of BBC One. In the adaptation of Rowling’s crime novels, Grainger plays Robin, the strawberry blonde sidekick and will-they-won’t-they love interest to Tom Burke’s PI. There’s not a corkscrew curl or petticoat in sight but Robin possesses the same sardonic intelligence as Grainger’s best period heroines.

The fifth season of Strike is nearing and excitement on social media is building. Not that Grainger would know. She is totally and completely absent from every platform – where debate continues to rage around Rowling. “I’m not on social media so I didn’t realise the level of the controversy, I don’t think.” The Strike writer has been criticised in recent years for her comments about transgender people both on Twitter and on her personal website. In recent years, Rowling’s collaborators – most notably, her Harry Potter stars, but also Grainger and Burke – have been asked to comment on the subject. “That’s just what it’s like to be an actor; you’re expected to be a spokesperson. You know, for so many years, you were expected to be a spokesperson for the female race just by being a working female vaguely in the public eye. And some people are good at it, some people aren’t.”

Grainger returns as DCI Rachel Carey with newcomer Paapa Essiedu in season two of ‘The Capture’ (BBC/Heyday/NBC Universal)

Grainger is alarmed by the prospect that anything she or another celebrity says about an issue could overshadow the issue itself. One misworded statement and it becomes the story. And honestly, she exhales, “who cares if some actor thought that about an important issue if they’ve got f*** all to do with it? Then it makes headlines and completely distracts from what the issue was actually about.” In 2020, during an interview for Strike’s fourth season, Grainger was asked about Rowling and delivered a premeditated one-liner (“She’s really lovely and easy to chat to and is very supportive whenever she comes on set”).

“I think the headline for that was like ‘Strike actors chime in’ and well, we didn’t really chime in, did we? We were told to prepare something because we were told we would be asked and we were told we’d better answer.” Today, it doesn’t feel as though Grainger is leaning on any pre-written statements. But nor is she speaking freely on the subject. She has realised there is a third, deceptively easy option. “If there’s something I don’t want to answer, I’m not going to answer it. What are you gonna do? Prise it out of me?” She shrugs with a laugh.

Grainger knows her way around the industry. She’s only 34, and still looks like the bedazzled ingenue of her youth, yet it feels as if she has been around forever – in part because she has. She was six years old in the comedy series All Quiet on the Preston Front. Getting the gig was a fluke. Her mum, a graphic designer who raised Grainger alone, knew a casting director at the BBC in Manchester looking for a little girl around Grainger’s age.

Grainger donned her first of many corsets as the delightfully devious Lucrezia Borgia in ‘The Borgias’ (2011-2013) (Showtime)

That was nearly 30 years ago now, but Grainger remembers it well. “I only ever had positive experiences then,” she says. “We stay in contact with everyone from that show.” That “we” being herself and her mum-slash-chaperone. “I didn’t like being chaperoned by anyone that wasn’t my mum. I liked my own independence and my mum could gauge that at a good level.” She recalls with horror how one ill-fated escort had tried to follow her into the toilet. “I mean, can you imagine?” She exclaims. Her mother was her safeguard, she says, who ensured that… well, Grainger isn’t sure what exactly her mum ensured, but she knows things would have been different without her there. “She protected me from a lot, I’m sure.”

Grainger liked being one of the grown-ups. She was often the only kid on sets for shows like Casualty or Doctors – but she never minded. For one thing, she was used to it. “Because I had a single mum and the relationship I had with her, I was so used to being around adults that I found their company very comfortable,” she says. She also liked the cred it gave her. “I loved that I could leave school and my peers behind to go sit in this hotel bar with a bunch of adults. I’m sure they were all like, ‘Oh my God, here’s the kid…’ but that was my vibe. I thought it was so cool,” she cringes.

For someone whose career has mostly been about conveying worlds of feeling within the minutiae of movement – a narrowing of the eye, say, or a cocked eyebrow – Grainger is surprisingly expressive in conversation. On video, the actor dip into characters easily. Speaking about reprising her role as DCI Carey in The Capture, a role she hadn’t played for three years, Grainger says it was easy. “I did an awful lot of prep for season one but I didn’t feel like I had to repeat that for season two, because I just slipped into it.” Today, she slips instead into silly voices: the gruff tenor of a stern producer, and the nasal falsetto of a gremlin-like child when mimicking her younger self. On the subject of her work, she is thoughtful but never too serious. It’s her job; not her life.

Most actors recall the moment they “made it” with elation. Pure joy. But when Grainger got her big break with The Borgias, she was apprehensive. “I’m not sure I was happy about it.” Until then, she had only been a something-actor: child-actor; student-actor. It was time to drop the qualifier. “It’s not that I wanted to give up acting. I just never thought I would do it forever.” Eventually, Grainger came to accept her fate. “My twenties was me coming to terms with the fact: I am an actor,” she chuckles.

At the beginning, it’s so important but by the end when you’re fighting for those shots, running out of money, running out of time, often the safety aspect gets overlooked

Then came “the period years”, as she puts it. The corset era. The bonnet epoch. “I had wanted the period drama phase for so long. I was desperate every time Jane Austen season came around to be cast in something and I never was. I was so desperate to get in a corset and then it happened. After a few years, I was like, ‘I gotta get out of the corset. I can’t breathe!’ Physically, yes, but also I needed to get my head wrapped around something new.” Like using the word “OK”, she jokes.

With Strike and The Capture, Grainger is now in the detective years of her career. “The scripts I get sent are now all detective,” she groans in disbelief. “My God, for such a creative industry, people have zero creative vision! If you know an actor has done two [detectives] already, surely you want something original for your detective. It amazes me, that shortsightedness.” Having played parts on both sides of the law, Grainger has handled many guns on set over the years. Crucially, she clarifies, this is not the same as knowing her way around one. Speaking about her role as the 1930s gangster Bonnie Parker in the 2013 miniseries Bonnie & Clyde, Grainger recalled being nervous to shoot with half-rounds as opposed to blanks. “They don’t go quite as far, but you can do a lot of damage. You’ve got to aim at a stunt man, and it’s up to him to dodge out of the way. Sometimes I’d be like, ‘Please jump, please jump soon,’” she said at the time.

Grainger as Robin stars opposite Tim Burke in BBC’s adaptation of JK Rowling’s ‘Strike’ novels (BBC One)

“Film sets are really dangerous,” she adds now. “I think when I was younger I didn’t realise that, because I felt completely protected and looked after by people. But there’s so many time constraints to a shoot and people have so many different priorities. At the beginning, it’s so important but by the end when you’re fighting for those shots, running out of money, running out of time, often the safety aspect gets overlooked.” Grainger went to a gun training session the other day where the instructor showed her how to check whether there were rounds in the firearm. “I had no idea,” she says incredulously. “The amount of guns I shot on set and I can’t even remember that… You know, a props person will hand me a gun and say it’s empty and tell me to check but I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I just believe them because that’s not my job.” It’s not just guns that are the issue. “You’re asked to do such crazy things on a film set. I would never go horse riding and not wear a helmet! Ever!” She recalls an occasion in Budapest when she was instructed to “get on a horse you don’t know, canter across a field followed by a load of cameras – without a helmet. And it’s like what the f***? You would never do that in normal life but for some reason, because it’s on set, it’s fine.”

Grainger pauses a moment before realising another thing. “Also! It’s when you’ve got the director giving you notes, hair and make-up asking questions, and then some chatty member of staff still trying to maintain a conversation, that’s the time when someone will go, ‘Oh, here’s the gun. Or tell you whether or not the f***ing rope is secure,” she chuckles at how ludicrous it all is. “Safety’s never the priority.” People are distracted, she says, and gives me an example. “I remember this jovial, jokey first assistant director cupping this actor’s balls once as he was getting notes from a director and it was all just laughing at how he didn’t even notice because he had the director on him, and hair and make-up. Your attention is so divided; this guy didn’t even notice his balls being groped!” She laughs, but notes that the first AD should’ve never done that. “You would get in so much trouble for doing that now. Even 10 years ago, things were different.”

Jeremy Irvine as Pip with Grainger as Estella in ‘Great Expectations’

It’s strange to think Grainger – an actor only in her thirties – has experienced as many industry shifts as she has. Of course, #MeToo was pivotal. Like many people, Grainger reassessed her past experiences in the wake of the movement. “I was always quite strong and self-confident in my knowledge of what was right and wrong, so I wasn’t afraid to call things out when things were wrong, but I think the buck stopped with my experience. #MeToo made me think about the wider picture and how much actually I was responsible for normalising things. I think as a young woman, you can’t take on that responsibility; you’re not the one who has to change it.” She stops to consider for a moment. “But you do, because actually, no one’s going to change it for you.”

Grainger had terrible experiences of her own. Of course, she did. She was, after all, a young female actor in the Noughties. Asked if she ever considered going public with her own horror stories, Grainger offers a firm and resolute: “Oh my gosh, no! Absolutely no!” She explains: “I really respected everyone that came forward with their own experiences because it wouldn’t have had an impact had not everyone done that. But I’m too pussy f***ing chickens*** to do it,” she laughs. “I wouldn’t. I can’t. I just don’t want the attention on me.” Grainger observes one particular irony. “People always ask me to comment on the JK Rowling thing, but I’ve never once been asked a question about people who I was really scared to be asked about because I always thought, ‘God, if someone directly asks me, I’m gonna have to talk about it and I don’t want to.’ I was always slightly terrified, and pleasantly surprised not to be asked to comment on that person.” She must see a glint in my eye because she throws her head back in a cackle. “And don’t you dare bloody ask me now!”

New episodes of ‘The Capture’ season two are being released weekly on BBC One and iPlayer