At the same time, she says, “I was obviously wearing a Protestant school uniform, and as I walked through the Catholic part of town, I’d get spat at and hissed at for being a Prod. It was like, ‘I can’t f***ing win.’ But I made some really good Protestant friends who really stood by me, despite the fact that their families were giving them a hard time. So I’m quite glad I went to that school, because I met people and experienced things I just wouldn’t have if I’d gone to a Catholic school.”
Moreover, such experiences served the ebullient, beautiful and highly entertaining actress very well in what is likely to be her breakthrough role, in Ken Loach’s latest incendiary slice of life, Ae Fond Kiss (from the Robert Burns valedictory poem). Loach’s third Glasgow film, after My Name is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, the story features Birthistle as Roisin, an Irish teacher who falls in love with a Pakistani DJ, Casim (played by a newcomer, Atta Yaqub), much to the chagrin of his family, who are planning his arranged marriage.
The film not only essays the familiar minefield of mixed-race romance, it considers the daily persecutions of British Asians in post-9/11 society. And, with their inimitable attention to the subtleties of any dilemma, Loach and his writer, Paul Laverty, added extra depth by making Roisin not Scottish, but Irish.
“I think they decided it could work quite well if she was from Ireland, because it makes her as much of an outsider in her community as Casim is in his. It’s something they have in common; there’s a nice symmetry there. And it made Roisin more of a loner, so that it’s really important to her to fight for the relationship.”
Birthistle says she is “as independent and bloody-minded” as Roisin, perhaps more so. “I wouldn’t bite my tongue as much as Roisin does. But I do think Ken casts as close to the character as he can. So you are bringing a lot of yourself to the part, more so than usual. And there’s something about the way he works that makes you feel quite vulnerable, in a way — in a good way. You’re really going on your gut instinct. There’s a full script, but they only give it to you in stages, the night before the scenes. And you don’t rehearse. So, for most scenes, we’d go, ‘Okay, let’s just shoot and see what happens.’”
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She warms to her theme of the idiosyncrasies of the Loach method. “Some days, they don’t give you the script at all. You ask, ‘So what are we doing today?’ And Ken will say: ‘Why don’t you sit there and react to what the other char-acter says to you?’‘Okay, Ken, so what are they going to tell me?’ ‘Oh, you’ll find out. Rolling! Action!’ You’re thrown right in. So your reaction is very genuine.”
She had wanted to work with the director, she says, “come hell or high water”, to the extent that she was a bundle of nerves when it came to her audition. “But as soon as I went in, my nerves just disappeared, because Ken is so unassuming, I think, and normal. He has no airs or graces about him whatsoever. He put me at my ease.
“For my second audition, there was someone crouching in the corner like this” — she runs into the corner of the room and bends her head bashfully — “and I thought, that must be Ken. He actually does that sometimes when he’s shooting. He’s trying to blend into the wallpaper. He kind of thinks he shouldn’t be there, that he’s intruding and it’s unfair to the actors if he’s standing there looking at them. He doesn’t want the actors to have anything in their eye line that might disturb them.
“But he’s a total perfectionist, too. He won’t leave anything until he’s 100% happy with it. I think, if anything, you’re a bit spoilt on a Ken Loach film. I want to be treated like that the next job I do. And I won’t be.”
When the 29-year-old describes Roisin as “likeable, down to earth”, she could just as easily be describing herself. We meet in the Groucho Club, but the brittle and self-conscious London media haunt doesn’t suit her; she is, simply, far too nice, too artless for the place. For the interview, we’ve been given an empty room to ourselves, but when the staff come in and noisily prepare it for the evening, she casually asks: “Do you want to go somewhere else?” She leads the way through the maze of rooms until she finds a completely empty one (with no tables or chairs), plonks herself down on the floor and continues talking. In the pampered world of celebrity interviews, such behaviour is remarkably endearing.
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She was born in Bray, just outside Dublin, and before the family moved to Derry for her father’s work, she attended a school run by Loreto nuns. “So I had a fairly bog-standard Catholic upbringing. I went to a Catholic school, I made my first Holy Communion, I made my confirmation, I went to Mass every Sunday. Then, at 15, I started to rebel about going to Mass. I didn’t want what the Catholic church teaches, and I was really digging my heels in. My mum had a bit of a hissy fit,” she chuckles, “but my dad had stopped going years ago, so he couldn’t say anything. He just sat quietly in the corner.”
By all accounts, her parents were more relaxed than most: “I continued to go for another year, just to keep my mum happy, and then she realised that I was old enough to have my own opinion.”
The seemingly perverse choice of school in Derry was actually for pragmatic and caring reasons, her parents trying to find a co-ed that could accommodate both their son and daughter. But, perhaps because of its inhospitality, Birthistle spent most of her time there “looking out of the window at the punks, wishing I could be with them”. By her own admission, she wasn’t the most accomplished student. She became much more engaged when she joined a performing-arts course in the city. “They hadn’t run the course before, and they didn’t have half the tutors or half the money they needed. So a lot of time was spent just sitting around, smoking fags and drinking coffee. I laughed solidly for two years, I had so much fun. It was brilliant. And we had a really good drama teacher. I loved his classes, and that’s why I decided I actually wanted to act.”
After attending drama school back in Dublin, Birthistle’s career got off to a flying start with a role in the Irish television soap opera Glenroe, set in the Wicklow Mountains. “Glenroe was a real institution in Ireland,” she says. “I went in and played a posh farmer for a couple of years. When my character fell for one of the farmers and got involved in a love triangle, it was all very scandalous. I was in the tabloids as a raunchy, naughty farmer girl. Apparently — how sad that someone actually sat and timed this — I had the longest kiss in the history of Irish soap. I think it was something like 15 seconds. But it was in Ireland, don’t forget.”
As well as learning how to drive a tractor — “I could actually drive it better than I could a car. It was very glamorous, with the wellies and the overalls and the mud” — the show gave the then 20-year-old her first experience in front of a camera. Since then, she’s appeared in a handful of Irish films, in the UK television drama Trust, opposite Robson Green, and, most memorably, as Maura Young, whose brother John was killed in the Bloody Sunday massacre, in Jimmy McGovern’s drama Sunday.
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“I will never do something like that again. The film focused on the Youngs, and the family were on set a lot of the time. They were really supportive, as was the whole community. It was an extraordinary job, because it meant so much to them.
“There was one really emotional moment, when I was filming and the real Maura was watching us behind the camera. She just found it too upsetting and had to leave. You want to do them proud, you know. You’re them, you’re telling their story, and it’s a bloody important one as well. I’m lucky to be involved in projects like Sunday and Ae Fond Kiss, which deal with social and political issues.”
She moved to London four years ago, and the move seems to have paid off, both professionally and personally. She’s just bought a house in Notting Hill with her musician boyfriend, Raife Burchell, drummer with the rock band Jetplane Landing. (“I’ve got an Englishman. I never thought I would, but there you go.”) And when Ae Fond Kiss played at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Birthistle was selected as one of the annual “shooting stars”: young European actors tipped for the top.
Next month, she’s off on the now-obligatory trip to Los Angeles. “My agent’s taking me over. It’s very exciting, I’ve never been before. But, you know, I won’t be sucked in by it. I’ll take it with a pinch of salt.” Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the young woman sprawled on the floor in her jeans and pink plimsolls, fiddling with her earrings, is going to let any of it go to her head.
What she wants to do right now is a comedy. “I haven’t done comedy. It would be nice to do something really daft, like Monty Python — just go and have a real laugh.” When I say that I can’t imagine her being able to keep a straight face, she proves the point by breaking into a mini fit of hysterics. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I’d spend all my time laughing. I’ll just stick to the tears.”
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Ae Fond Kiss opens on September 10