I bought an inflatable bra for the Spooks audition… it did the trick
No one need worry that gorgeous Scottish actress Shauna Macdonald will let her big break in the hit spy series Spooks go to her head.
She doesn’t pay much attention to the hype about “fame” and people telling her “this is your time” — because she’s heard it all before.
Only two years ago it seemed Shauna was heading for the big time in Hollywood after winning the female lead in The Rocket Post, a big budget movie starring Kevin McKidd and Gary Lewis, of Billy Elliott and Gangs of New York fame.
The film’s producer labelled her “Scotland’s Kate Winslet” and heaped praise on her abilities.
Shauna says: “Oh yes the producer said all that stuff — but that’s producers for you.”
“They are just trying to get money for their films. And I mean, if you’re going to be compared to anyone it might as well be someone who starred in an Oscar-winning film like Titanic!”
Ironically, for all the producer’s fine words The Rocket Post, which was filmed on the Hebridean Island of Taransay, made famous by the BBC’s Castaway series, may now never be released after the death four months ago of its talented director Stephen Whittaker.
Shauna says: “It will be absolutely terrible if the film does not come out, but that is the real risk now.”
The young actress is a beautiful 22-year-old, with strawberry blonde hair and striking azure eyes.
The smattering of pale freckles add to her air of innocence and youth as she fiddles with her long hair.
Her eyes focus down on the table in the BBC office where we are chatting as she takes a few moments to control her emotions:
She says: “Stephen was only 53 when he died. He was taken before his time. It was a great loss to his loved ones.
“He taught me a great deal and it was the first time I have dealt with a loss like that — the death of a friend.”
Shauna has already become a familiar face on our TV screens after her introduction to the top BBC1 series about MI5 agents this month.
We are meeting at BBC Centre, London, to discuss her role as fiesty Sam Buxton, a new spy recruit on Spooks, but first she wants to express her feelings about The Rocket Post and the movie that promised so much.
She says: “Stephen cared so much about the film and at times I was so scared — I would be thinking ‘Oh God! I can’t do this. I am hopeless and I thought I could do this professionally? I will never be able to do this’.
“And then you would have a director like him, who would come over and ask my opinion on something.” She pulls her long pony tail in and out of the band holding it and adds quietly: “Now none of us know if the version which Stephen envisaged and the film we all wanted to make, will be the one which appears — if it does at all.
“The fact that the film he wanted to make might be lost is the worry of everyone that loved and respected him.”
Despite her tender age, Shauna has an old head on young shoulders.
She is well aware that the movie was a great chance for her, an unknown actress plucked straight from drama school, to make her name across the Atlantic.
She adds: “It would be good for me if the film were released because my character, Catherine Mackay is so different to my character of Sam in Spooks.”
The Rocket Post is based on the true story of Gerhardt Zucher, a dashing young German rocket scientist who came to Britain offering to help the government in the 1930s.
The government, nervous of being seen to take part in an arms race, put Zucher on the payroll of the Postmaster-General, and despatched him in secret to Scarp, an inhabited island near Taransay, to develop postal rockets to send mail from Scarp to Harris.
It ended in glorious failure. Zucher’s second rocket exploded scattering thousands of letters on Scarp’s beaches.
He returned to Germany, refused to help the Nazis develop the V1s and V2s and vanished.
In the film, Shauna’s character scandalises the islanders when she falls for the handsome scientist, much to the horror of her fiance, played by Kevin McKidd.
She says: “When I got the role in The Rocket Post I thought it was tailor-made for me.
“I was playing a girl who’s from Scarp — my father’s from Lewis. She’s 19 — I’m 20.
“She wants to leave and become a teacher, expand her mind. She feels slightly unsettled on where she is in relation to the world. That was me.
“It is all in limbo now and I feel all we can do — the actors who were in the film — is talk about it and hope that it gets released.
“I had my twentieth birthday on Taransay while we were filming and I had a glass of champagne and a card and birthday cake in the sunshine. It was a wonderful way to celebrate.”
Now that the serious moment is over, she giggles again and pulls her pony tail out letting her hair cascade over her shoulders as she fills me in on her experiences on-set with Spooks and its established stars, Matthew Macfadyen, as Tom, Keeley Hawes as Zoe and David Oyelowo as Danny.
She says: “I got to do some serious shopping to play Sam. I went to Selfridges and had a personal shopper and everything!
“It was brilliant! I thought wow this is it — I really have made it!”
Shauna has a figure any woman would envy and the wardrobe department have picked clothes to show it off. Many of Sam’s tops are clinging and reveal Shauna’s tiny waist.
However, even she is no stranger to a bit of body-insecurity and admits that she wore an inflatable bra to make sure she was noticed at her audition for Spooks:
The actress reveals: “I had been rejected for a job just before I went for Spooks and was feeling a bit hard done by.”
She put on the pumped up underwear a short skirt and knee-high boots and got the job, adding: “It seemed to do the trick!”
Today she is wearing a sage green skinny-rib jumper and slinky combat pants which hug her hips.
“This top is Sam’s, ” she admits, “but the wardrobe department are very generous and we get to buy our character’s clothes half-price. I think I have bought everything of Sam’s.”
Brought up in Edinburgh with an elder sister who is a physiotherapist and parents who work in computers, Shauna became interested in drama at school in Portobello in her early teens.
She went on to join the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
While still at college she won a role in The Debt Collector with Billy Connolly and also had roles in a small film called Day Break and Late Night Shopping, a Scottish teen flick which won a prize at the Berlin film festival.
For The Rocket Post she took a term off drama college, but went back to finish her course.
She says: “I came straight out of college to start the seven month shoot on Spooks. It was quite daunting because all the other actors knew each other and were familiar with their characters from the previous series.
“But funnily enough Sam is supposed to be pretty daunted joining MI5 and scared and just feeling her way, so it fitted in to the plot quite well.
“After the first couple of weeks I was fine anyway.”
Off screen Keeley and Matthew are enjoying a real-life romance and often their happiness spilled onto set in the form of frequent “corpsing” — those moments when an actor is rendered speechless by an uncontrollable attack of the giggles.
She says: “It was all quite tense on set and alot of it is filmed in a windowless room, but Keeley and Matthew were just the worst for corpsing.”
They were so bad! Especially when they were in a scene together — but actually the hours were so long that it was quite a relief when they would burst out laughing.”
“They always set each other off. Both of them had to work much longer hours than me and in a room with no daylight you do tend to over-react to things.”
“Sometimes I had to remind myself, ‘this is not real — it’s just a game, you can go home afterwards’.”
Shauna’s ability to laugh at herself will no doubt ensure she never takes her job too seriously.
And she confesses she has another string to her bow should things fail to work out.
She says: “I am living with friends in a rented flat in London and we are planning to make greeting cards and sell them on Spitalfields market to make some money.
“I am really serious about it — I never do anything half-arsed, it’s all or nothing with me, but I haven’t had any time to make them yet!”
At the rate Shauna’s career is going she won’t be in need of that Spitalfield’s stall anytime soon!
Spooks goes out on BBC1 Mondays at 9pm.
By Annie Leask for The Mirror.
(Source: The Free Library)