Kelly Reilly: I have to say that I am not the most ambitious person in the world.
Stephen Applebaum: So the work’s the most important thing for you?
Reilly: Definitely, definitely. It must be nice to go to these parties and show your face and be bit recognised, I’m sure that must be great for a first few months or so. But I think I would just find myself in the corner, wishing all my friends were there, and going why am I here?
So where did it all start?
I can’t remember where it started. When I was very young I was always grabbing all my friends from down the street and making them put on plays with me. But I never, ever, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could be an actor because I come from a working-class family.”
What do your parents do?
My dad’s a police officer and my mum’s a secretary. We’re a kind of two-up, two-down, very normal suburban household. I went to a normal secondary school. Other people do those jobs, you know? I forgot about it, kind of grew out of it, went to school and I had two brilliant drama teachers and that was it. They gave me plays to read and I just kind of felt that that was it for me. It wasn’t like, this is what I want to do but it was the only thing that pushed my buttons and I was good at it. That was when I was at secondary school.
Where did you go from there?
We put on plays every other week, there was a bunch of us at school who felt the same and we had a student drama teacher who came to tell us about this showcase he’d been on called The Casting Couch. I decided, being the arrogant 16-year-old I was, I’d have a go. So I wrote off a letter to the artistic director saying, ‘Please, please see me. I’m 16 years old, I’m great, I think you really need to see me and it would be a loss if you don’t’. She didn’t see me, but about 6 months later I got the audition and I was actually the youngest person to get on it. I got on it and I got an agent from it.
It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I now look back on myself at 16 and go, ‘You’re a nutter’. The older I get the more I want to step away from it and not be in the spotlight and not have any attention. Then I realise I’m kind of in the wrong job. But that’s how it started. I got this agent and she gave me my first audition, which was Prime Suspect, it was a complete fluke. Before I knew it I was doing my last year of A-levels and I just had to ask my headmistress if I could take 2 months off to go up to Manchester to film. They did and I came back and that was it: the bug was there. I wanted to go to drama school, my drama teachers were very keen that you go and learn your craft, but I didn’t have the money to do it, that was one, and I was getting more work. So I thought I’m 17, let me have a go. I’ll see what happens. I got episodes on TV, that was then and I never went back.
Continued: https://www.netribution.co.uk/features/interviews/2001/kelly_oreilly/1.html
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