English actress Hannah Murray, best known for her roles in British teen drama series Skins as well as fantasy fiction HBO epic Game Of Thrones, discusses why she doesn’t think Sid and Cassie found each other at the end of Skins cycle one, why the original was the best, her reaction to the Red Wedding and her new project with Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch.
Hey Hannah, where are you and what have you been up to today? I’m in London at home and I haven’t been up for a huge amount of time. I’ve just had breakfast and started doing some phone interviews. It’s still pretty early in the morning over here.
Not an ideal way to spend your morning. What were your initial thoughts when the producers asked you to reprise the role of Cassie? When they initially asked me I had a very strong gut reaction of wanting to do it, which was a surprise because I didn’t think I’d ever want to go back and play her again. I just couldn’t imagine a way that I would want to do it or a story they could tell that I would want to do. But when Bryan (Elsley, Skins co-creator) pitched the idea to me of doing this one-off two hour story and what he wanted it to be about, I thought “I really want to do that”. It was surprising. It was a really nice feeling, actually, to be surprised by that. It was scary. I was nervous about how to do it. I didn’t really know how similar or different to make her, exactly where the balance should be. The challenge of that was quite exciting. It was quite a long time from the initial decision to when we actually filmed it so I got a lot of chances to talk to Bryan and read the script. We talked quite a lot about character and just general experiences because she’s the same age as I am, the same amount of time has passed in real time, so we talked a lot about being a young woman and living in London. Things that my friends had gone through, things that I had gone through. It was nice to have that much input and feel so involved.
What was the main difference you noticed in terms of process and performance? It’s difficult to say because when I first filmed Skins it was my first experience ever of making television, so I had nothing to compare it to. Obviously I feel like I’ve learned so much in the time in between that in a way the biggest difference for me, was me. How much more able I felt to cope with all of it, how much more experience I had gained, the different way I could make decisions. It was a much smaller performance this time around, a lot subtler. That’s partly because she’s in every single scene for two hours and I think that sometimes when I was playing her in the series before she was coming in for one scene in one episode and you had to have a really big impact. She was like this manic energy that came in, did something crazy then disappeared. When it’s inside your head more it has to be a subtler performance so people can sit with her for two hours.
You said that you were much more involved in the shaping of the character this time around. Do you feel closer to Cassie this time around or have you always had the same sentiment towards her? I think in some ways I felt less close to her. Not to say I didn’t feel close to her while I was working but the first time around she was the only character I had ever played. She was my only experience of acting. I felt incredibly wrapped up in her and incredibly involved in her. She was kind of the be all and end all for me. Whereas when I came back, I’d played so many different people in the time in between and also I did three jobs back to back right before I did Skins, it was kind of the fourth in a row, so she was just one of a number of roles I’d played over the course of a year who all felt equally important to me. It wasn’t such an intimate relationship in that sense. She wasn’t the only one anymore.
In your mind at the time did you think that Cassie and Sid bumped into each other after the first cycle finale? No I didn’t. I know that people love that relationship and love the idea of them being together. I don’t want to criticise anyone for loving that relationship and I totally understand that they think it’s beautiful and lovely.
No of course not. But no one is better equipped to interpret what ended up being quite an ambiguous ending than you. From my point of view I never thought that that was a healthy relationship or a good relationship in any way. I was really surprised that people were so upset that they weren’t still together or that he hasn’t turned up in the new episodes. I thought it was just this instance of this really, really sad girl, this boy says one nice thing to her, she becomes completely obsessed with him, tries to commit suicide, he doesn’t work out until after she tries to kill herself that he’s slightly more interested in her than in his hot friend. I thought it was a really interesting relationship but I thought it was also messed up in a lot of ways. So I was surprised that people were like “I really hope they found each other in New York and lived happily ever after”. I don’t think it’s unromantic to not want them to be together. I just think they’d be a lot better without each other, personally. I definitely don’t think that relationship could have survived even if they had found each other. People can debate whether that happened or not. If they did I don’t think their relationship would have survived into adulthood. It was a very adolescent relationship in a lot of ways. So yeah, I don’t think Sid and Cassie found each other. I’m probably going to upset a lot of fans by saying that.
I think the general consensus among fans is that the first cycle is clearly the best of the series and obviously something the American remake found hard to translate. What did the first cycle have that the others didn’t? Was it just the shock of the new? I haven’t seen the latest series so it’s difficult for me to compare. I think you’re right about the newness of it. It’s most exciting the first time you do something. I think we were very lucky that no one had really done that type of show before. There wasn’t anything really like it, particularly in the UK. Now I think there are a lot of great shows about young people on British television but there weren’t that many before the first season of Skins started. People became really attached to those characters because they spoke to them in a way that they hadn’t experienced before. The main strength of Skins I think is how real everyone is and how young we all were when we did it. We were a bunch of kids who were quite ordinary and realistic, I thought. I recognise all those characters, they were slightly heightened of course, but I recognise those characters in people I went to school with. That was the real charm of it. It wasn’t glossy. They weren’t rich and beautiful. They were real.
You actually play a character named Cass in Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch’s new film God Help The Girl, can you tell us about that project? It’s going to film festivals probably early next year. I’ve seen it and I really love it. It’s a musical film, written and directed by Stuart. It’s quite a low key story about these three people trying to form a band together and over the course of a summer trying to be a band for the first time. It works out in some ways and not in others. I think its got some really interesting things to say about creativity and being a creative person. Emily’s [Browning, Australian actress] character is struggling with depression to some extent which both inspires her and makes it difficult for her. There are moments in it that are really light and silly and beautiful and they are moments that are really upsetting. Aesthetically it’s quite a unique piece. It looks gorgeous. For a musical it’s refreshing to see something less flashy. Its just got a lot of heart. I’m excited for people to see it. And Emily was just incredible. She was great to work with she’s one of the most talented people I know. She’s fantastic in the film. We got a long really well she’s an amazing person.
Can you tell us about playing Gilly on Game Of Thrones because in terms of the scope and the fanbase you can’t get much more different than going from a teen drama that prides itself on realism to a fantasy fiction epic on HBO. It looks like you’re having heaps of fun. Is it as fun as it looks? It’s a really fun show. Obviously some of the stuff Gilly has had to deal with is quite harrowing but I also really like how they’ve brought quite a bit of humour to the relationship between Gilly and Sam. John Bradley-West is such a wonderful actor and such a lovely person that the main problem is usually getting through a scene without laughing. With the nature of it, it’s such a big cast and you don’t necessarily get to work with everyone but they’re always around in Belfast. It’s a really lovely atmosphere in the evenings. Everyone goes out together. It’s a really nice thing to be involved in. Everyone feels likes this massive family. I’m going back next week actually to start filming series four. I’m really looking forward to it.
You’re in the fortunate position of being on a television show where you know exactly what will happen to your character in advance, which not all actors have the luxury of knowing. Have you read ahead? I don’t read ahead. I read as far as we go. I read each book before each series.
So no agent of manager has pulled you aside and gone “by the way Hannah this happens”. I don’t know either because I haven’t read the books but you actually don’t know what ultimately happens to Gilly? I know a bit. Other people have read all the way through and talk about it. I do have a rough idea of what happens in the books. The thing is, as much as you say it’s great you can find out everything that happens to you, and obviously they’re loyal to the books to some extent, I think that David and Daniel [Benioff and Weiss, Game Of Thrones co-creators and showrunners] are very keen to still surprise the fans. I don’t think they want it to be a straight visual interpretation of the books. They want readers to be just as engaged or surprised by the story as non-readers. I think some of the most exciting things in the show are things that never happened or happened in a different way in the book. So I would never feel comfortable that I knew what was going to happen to me.
What’s the main difference between the fanbases? i don’t really get recognised from Game Of Thrones so much because I have blonde hair in real life. There have been crew members that haven’t recognised me. I haven’t had a huge amount of contact with Game Of Thrones fans but the main difference from my perspective is the scale. It’s quite overwhelming. Because Skins is a teenage drama some of the fan mail I get about Cassie people are incredibly emotionally involved with the character. It’s really personal for them. It’s a modern day, naturalistic piece so people can really identify it with their own lives. People will write very personal things about the character and what she means to them. With Game Of Thrones people are obviously interested in the characters but they are equally interested in the sets and the costumes and special effects and dragons. There’s a lot of other stuff that people can engage with that isn’t necessarily character driven.
Do you talk about people vocalising how much the character means to them and I guess the place now where that is most evident is in Youtube comments and Tumblr posts. Do you ever read what people write about what the character means to them and in some cases how much she has touched their lives and think “holy fuck”. I try not to read any stuff online because I think it is very damaging to me to do that. When I started out, I’m not proud of myself, but I read things. You’re seventeen years old and you know that people might be talking about you somewhere, obviously you’re going to look. I think it’s the most unhealthy habit I’ve ever had is reading about myself online. You look for the bad stuff and you find it and you get really upset. It’s a really masochistic pattern, really. I try not to do that anymore. It’s a dangerous thing to practice. Even reading the good stuff is unhealthy. It’s always one extreme or the other. People never seem to go on the internet to say “that was okay”. People are either really positive or negative and both those things can warp your thinking. All the really intense adoration for a character feels very detached from me. One of the things I’m really pleased about Cassie, actually, is that a lot of people hate her. I really like that she’s a character that polarises opinion. I think that’s really exciting to me that people can lover her so much and despise her.
Obviously it’s just a coincidence but were you deep in the twilight zone when Stuart was pitching God Help The Girl to you and told you he wanted you to play a character named Cass? I mean, yeah. I was annoyed because I knew some people would think it was conscious decision. It’s a coincidence, obviously. Stuart had written songs about the character ages ago. The name was in the songs. There was no way the name could be changed and I wouldn’t expect Stuart to change it. If you had watched Skins you would thing “oh that’s a weird thing”. But I also feel like the name could be lucky for me. The only thing that’s annoying is that people could potentially think I’m playing the same character because they have the same name. It’s just a weird coincidence. It’s strange.
How do you prepare for Gilly when you get back on set? The main thing that I do is I normally don’t watch the series until just before we shoot the next season. I only finished series three yesterday, I only watched it yesterday.
What was your reaction the Red Wedding? Obviously I knew what was going to happen. I’d read the books and had talked to the cast and crew about what was probably the most important scene of the series thus far. It was an incredibly impressive sequence. Obviously I didn’t have the ‘oh my god’ reaction that non-readers would have had but I will say that when I read the books I knew that Richard [Madden, Robb Stark] was going to die because he had mentioned he was leaving, it was known. But I didn’t know that Michelle [Fairley, Catelyn Stark] was going to go. I didn’t know that Catelyn died. She’s one of my favourite characters and her performance was so incredible. I was watching it and I knew Robb was going to get killed but when Catelyn died I was really shocked and it really got to me. Very arresting. Watching the episode and how close Arya is and how excited she is to see them it’s really heartbreaking. The wolf as well. Apparently David and Daniel said people were most upset about the wolf. I think the whole series is so strong. You’re never in an episode that much so it’s really great to watch it as a fan.
As a fan of the show what character do you wish Gilly could have scenes with? Which story lines are you really involved with and what performances do you really admire? There’s so many but I really love Jaime and Brienne’s story line so much. That relationship is so interesting. The way it develops is so beautiful and I think that Nikolaj [Coster-Waldau, Jaime] and Gwendoline [Christie, Brienne] are incredible. I love those characters so much, particularly in tandem. I really like Cersei. But ultimately I think Catelyn is my favourite character. A lot of that has to do with Michelle’s performance. She’s amazing. Jack Gleeson as Joffrey, too, it’s incredible how evil that boy is capable of being. He’s actually a lovely guy which is the funny part. Those are the ones I’m most involved with and probably the ones I won’t get to work with given the part of the universe my character is in but I can always hope.
Thanks Hannah. Thanks.
Skins series 7 aired last night on SBS 2. Catch Cassie’s episodes, Pure, August 29th and September 5th on SBS 2.
