Isobel “Bel” Powley, 31, was born in west London. In 2016 she was Bafta-nominated for The Diary of a Teenage Girl and shortlisted for a British independent film award for playing Princess Margaret in A Royal Night Out. Subsequent film roles include The King of Staten Island and Mary Shelley, where she met her fiance, actor Douglas Booth. On TV, she’s starred in The Morning Show and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love. She now plays Hermine “Miep” Gies in miniseries A Small Light, based on the true story of the young woman who hid the Frank family during the second world war and preserved Anne’s diary.
Were you familiar with Miep Gies’s story?
I’d read Anne Frank’s diary as a kid, and I’m Jewish myself, so you grow up with this weight of history running through your family, but I knew nothing about Miep Gies. I was offered the role on Holocaust Memorial Day, which felt kind of special, but was genuinely like: Who is that? Nor did I know about the occupation of the Netherlands and the Dutch resistance. The first thing I did was get my butt over to Amsterdam. It’s a city that operates in a very specific way – everyone cycles everywhere, it’s built on waterways – so I immersed myself in how it feels to live there. I visited the Anne Frank museum, obviously, but also went to Miep’s old apartment and cycled the same routes as her. That was my springboard for working on this.
