At 23, Joanna Vanderham has already bagged an enviable bouquet of roles — primetime BBC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hollywood — but there’s one small problem: her directors have a tendency to regret it. Back in 2012, she was cast in the Julianne Moore vehicle What Maisie Knew without any audition, just off the back of a showreel, and shipped over from Britain to New York. After the first day’s filming, though, with a nervous Vanderham barely off the plane, this seemed less of a good idea.
“The directors told me at the film’s wrap party that after they did the first shot, they had to go and talk about the fact that they’d made a mistake,” the actress recalls in a Soho restaurant — still aghast, but able to enjoy the anecdote. “They said they’d have to recast.” Clearly they didn’t, though — how did Vanderham save her skin? “They said, ‘Oh, we looked at your close-up and we realised you could act.’”
Something similar presumably went through the minds of the producers of the RSC’s Othello, which opened in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. In Iqbal Khan’s production, Vanderham plays the doomed Desdemona — only her second professional stage outing since she left drama school in 2011. The show, and the actress, have gained glowing reviews, but again it was a close call. “Iqbal called me [beforehand] and said the producers were worried that I didn’t have enough experience,” Vanderham says. “Which I understand, but it’s kind of infuriating, because it’s a Catch-22. How do you break that? He basically said, ‘I am taking a chance on you — don’t f*** it up.’”
You might think you’d need nerves of steel to deal with all this, and you’d be right. Vanderham, it turns out, is no average willowy rent-a-blonde. She may have the face of a doll, but it’s a wilful doll: those eyes can harden, the chin can get quite stubborn, the mouth can become a moue. Perhaps when you’re half Scottish, half Dutch, you’ve been bred to be particularly no-nonsense. (The Dutch surname is really spelt “Van Der Ham”, and only compressed to avoid complications; you pronounce it “Van Dare Ham”, though, because “I’m Scottish!”.)
I like playing characters who have a bit of steel to them
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Anyway, it’s that nice combo of pretty and plucky that has seen her bag a sequence of strong roles since leaving drama school only a few years ago: first, in Sky’s Martina Cole drama The Runaway (she actually filmed that while still a student at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama); then the lead, Denise, in the BBC’s period shop drama The Paradise; and, more recently, in the BBC’s big Australian-colony drama, Banished.
Next up, you will see her in another period piece from the corporation, although it’s a bit less gruelling than 18th-century Australia.
She is Marian, the upper-crust debutante in love with the farmhand next door, in a new adaptation of LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between. If it’s set during one idyllic Edwardian summer, in your obligatory stately home, it’s by no means a picnic; a summer tragedy where Marian, forced to marry up, rather than down, is an ambiguous and angry creature. “You could interpret her as being a bit flippant, a bit self-absorbed, a bit dismissive — but actually it’s her coping mechanism,” says Vanderham.
The role has already been taken once — by Julie Christie, no less, in Joseph Losey’s admired 1971 feature film. Luckily, Vanderham hadn’t seen it, or indeed heard of it, before filming. She is quite happy to put her own stamp on the role. “I like playing characters who have a bit of steel to them,” she says. “My agent knows that as well,” she adds, “so I’ll often get sent scripts where the character is a bit don’t-mess-with-me.”
Today, over a civilised afternoon, Vanderham is not quite don’t-mess-with-me, just enjoyably straightforward. In showbiz, you tend to find that actors are quite fun to talk to at the beginning of their careers, when still green, and at the very end, when they couldn’t give a fig; there’s just 30 years in between when they sound a bit tired. Thankfully, Vanderham is still very green. The daughter of a businessman and a doctor, born in Scone and later educated in Dundee, she wanted to be a vet until her mother said: “You do know that you spend most of your time looking after sick animals and putting them down?” So she persevered with her acting, which she had been doing since she was small.
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Granted, she is not Edinburgh-bred, but you can imagine her sat dubiously to the side in Miss Jean Brodie’s class, wondering if all these goings-on are a good idea. She recounts a recent conversation with friends. “We were saying how half the people in the world will analyse life, and its meaning, and why are we here; and half the people in the world will think about it now and again, but...” She trails off apologetically. “I’m kind of the latter!
“I’m not sure if it’s particularly healthy or not, but I’ve slowly become aware of the fact that someone will, you know, start talking about whether you have a soul, and it’s, like” — she makes a confused face. “I mean, I’m pretty much a grown-up, and I’ve never thought about that. It did maybe cross my mind once, when I was, like, six, in RE class. But I don’t know — I just deal with what is happening now. I think it keeps you sane.”
It’s not as if she doesn’t think about things, though. As we ping back and forth, she comes across as a typical member of her millennial generation, exercised by rising student fees, rising rents, rising arts cuts and just rising political dissatisfaction. It carries into her work, too. “That is definitely something I’ve struggled with, because I’ve got myself into trouble with too much of an opinion,” she chuckles. How? “I don’t know... it just frustrates me when things aren’t done the way they should be done!”
Luckily, she laughs as she says that; but when I say that must be a tricky stance to take, as a young woman in a male-dominated industry, she gets serious again. “I’m just going to keep getting myself into trouble, then. It’s harder to bite my tongue.” (Apparently, in his phone call, Khan also said he was worried she’d feel outweighed by the more veteran actors in the rehearsal room. “I was, like, ‘Nooo! They’ll all want me to shut up by the second week!’”)
She has already worked with several industry greats, not least Moore in What Maisie Knew and Lesley Manville in The Go-Between. (Manville plays Vanderham’s mother, icily furious as she sees her daughter trying to evade her responsibilities.) I ask her if those are careers she’d like to emulate; she says, well, yes, kind of, but also that “I don’t think you can ever really want somebody else’s career, because that’s already been done”.
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What about any advice? She can’t think of any to hand — but she did spot a certain something with both Moore and Manville. “The one thing I would say is that both are problem-solvers. So, when I say to people myself [in work], ‘Do you want to try this?’, it’s not because I’m trying to be obnoxious. It’s because I sometimes forget that I’m not Lesley, and I’m not Julianne, and they help, so I want to help.” Again, she says it with a laugh — she’s pleasantly self-aware. Manville, she says, was hilarious to work with off screen, but good at keeping her on her toes when needs be.
“When I was working with her, I found out I was going to be in Vogue, and I was really excited. She turned around and said supportively, ‘I hope you have the same reaction when you get cast at the National.’ And I said, don’t worry — that is where my heart is.”
The role in The Go-Between seemed like fate. When she was in Australia filming Banished, she went into a second-hand bookstore and asked for a recommendation; they gave her Hartley’s 1953 novel, narrated by the boy (the “Go-Between”) who facilitates Marian’s affair. When she returned from Oz, her first audition was for the BBC’s new version. Having never seen Christie’s take, she had plenty of original opinions for the producers about how Marian should be played.
“I think they were quite excited by the fact that I didn’t say, ‘I will do a Julie,’” she reflects. She had no idea the film, scripted by Harold Pinter, was so revered. “My God, I’m glad I didn’t know, it would have been such a pressure. We all went out for dinner beforehand with the company, and I asked — should I watch it? And everyone was, like, no, no, no, no, no!” She still hasn’t seen it. “I’m quite tempted to watch it now. Mind you, I keep saying that, then I find myself thinking, ‘Oh, I’m so busy...’”
I do hope she doesn’t have all her creases ironed out. It seems unlikely, though. “I read this thing online that was, like, ‘Tips from a 50-year-old: things to do in your thirties’. I thought it was going to be, like, go bungee jumping! And it was all ‘eat well’, ‘start exercising’, ‘sleep’...” She is appalled. “It’s such a killjoy. I’m glad I’m not 30 yet.”
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And, damn her, so am I.
The Go-Between airs on BBC1 in September; Othello runs at the RST, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Fri, and will be broadcast in cinemas on Wed