Chloe actress Erin Doherty has admitted that she is 'terrified of social media', and only posts on Instagram to keep fans in the loop with upcoming projects. But the The Crown star has revealed that she changed her morning routine in order to get into her character of Becky Green.
Becky lives a drab life, caring for her mother who has early on-set dementia in her seaside flat on the outskirts of Bristol. In a bid to escape from her dull reality, Becky obsesses over Chloe Fairbourne (Poppy Gilbert), who seems to have a picture perfect life, which Becky pores over on social media.
When Chloe suddenly passes away, Becky takes it upon herself to find out exactly what happened to her object of obsession by adopting a new persona and infiltrating the late Chloe's social circle. Speaking to the Evening Standard, Erin admitted she had to change her social media usage to tap into her character of Becky before filming.
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The 29-year-old said: "I was like, I’m going to do it my way and post about the work but take a step back in terms of the personal connection… they don’t need to know about my dog walks.”
To really adopt the character of Becky, Erin confessed that she altered her morning habits: "I would change my morning routine and I would go online, just behave that way to try and get into that frame of mind. Even now, I’ve still got that weird instinctive thing of grabbing my phone.
"How crazy is that - that we can’t just sit down and have a conversation or watch something without being like, ‘right, where’s my phone…’ It’s really scary.”
Creator of Chloe, Sex Education's Alice Seabright, has said that the main character of the show 'goes on to do things that are highly unrelatable', but because she digitally involves herself in the lives of others as a coping mechanism to deal with her own dull life, we can almost relate to some of the behaviours she exhibits.
Also speaking to the Evening Standard, Alice has said that her show isn't necessarily 'an analysis of what social media is today', but instead that the social media serves the story around 'friendship and identity and grief'. With a surge of new writers having grown up in the digital age, Alice says she "got social media towards the end of her teens, so at least I was a formed person before that existed".
But Alice thinks that it has taken some time for some screenwriters to adapt to the way that the internet infiltrates every aspect of our lives, and include that in their writing. She confessed: "To be honest, it's a huge challenge.
"From a storytelling point of view, it's actually a massive thing to grapple with, so I think it's understandable that it's taken some time. It's such a massive shift in the way we live our lives - if you're genuinely setting something in the contemporary world, stories play out differently. People's emotional experience of the world is very different to the way it was 20 years ago."
And this 'huge shift' brings with it a whole plethora of new challenges when it comes to shooting the scenes. Alice said: "I definitely never want to shoot another shot of a phone ever again.
"It’s trying to express what it feels like to see and consume those images rather than literally what it looks like. The whole show’s sort of doing that with Becky, trying to get in her head and trying to understand her subjective experience.
"One thing that we were really interested in was exploring this idea of what’s behind an image? You can bring those images to life again and again, in different ways that start to subvert that.”
The finale of Chloe airs tonight on BBC One at 9pm, although the whole series is already out on iPlayer.
