When it comes to launching an acting career, you can’t do better than landing three big TV shows in one year. Chloé Sweetlove has had that and then some: not only did she appear in the hit BBC One show Wild Cherry last year, she also appeared in Paramount+ series The Crow Girl and detective series Bergerac.
Now, season two of the latter is on the horizon and she’s ready to make her return. Sweetlove plays Kim, the 14-year-old daughter of Damien Molony’s Jim Bergerac. Both are troubled. He starts season one in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, while Kim ends up being arrested by police — the culmination of a difficult six months following the death of her mother, and Jim’s wife.
“Kim’s story is really about the immediate and ongoing aftermath of grief,” she tells me. “I think sometimes it’s quite easy to overlook the fact that she’s lost her mum really recently, mainly because she steps into this quite parental role. She’s dealing with a parent who is failing to show up in many ways and is also going through addiction issues.”
This season there’s more of that coming, as Kim looks to fly the nest whilst also dealing with her father’s issues. “What was really interesting is looking at how grief manifests in very intimate dynamics,” she says. “She is looking to go off and study music in London but that requires leaving home.”
Then again, if anyone knows about leaving home to strike out solo, it would be Sweetlove. Raised between Cape Town in South Africa and the UK, she credits her childhood with giving her, “an outsider and insider perspective… something that I draw on a lot, actually.”
She discovered acting at a young age. “I enjoyed the feeling of entertaining and there was definitely a sense of power,” she says. “I realised early on, being on stage, that I could cause laughter and that was very intoxicating to me. But I think more than that, I was a naturally curious child, specifically about adults. I would much rather spend my time hunched in a corner trying to hear what the adults were saying than playing with the other kids. I think I was particularly interested in what they didn’t say or what they didn’t want me to know.”
Though the plan was initially to focus on her studies, she ended up making the leap into acting early when she landed the role of young Evelyn (the character played by Amy Wren) in the ITV series Tutankhamun alongside Sam Neill and Max Irons. From there came an agent, then a role in thriller The Crow Girl — before landing Bergerac.
“My dream is to be transformative,” she says. “The actors I admire the most are the ones who are a bit unrecognisable from role to role. That’s the thing that lights me up. I would love to just do different stuff all the time.”
Bergerac Season 2 is streaming on U&DRAMA from April 16
