For most of the past two years, Liz Carr has been shielding or, at the very least, being extremely careful. Today. for instance, we’re sitting outside a London restaurant near her home, even though it’s a grey and windswept day, and the hot chocolate she is warming her hands on is rapidly cooling. And so when she attended the Olivier theatre awards last month, it felt like a big deal, not just because she had been nominated for best supporting actress, but because it was the first time she had been indoors, among so many people – several thousand at the Royal Albert Hall – for a long time.
“Everything feels like a risk assessment,” she says. Funerals, yes. Going to the cinema, no (though she would love to). The awards, for which she was nominated for her role in The Normal Heart at the National Theatre, felt “once in a lifetime – though hopefully not. I had to be there.” It was a good job she turned up, I point out: she won. Carr laughs. “I’m glad I did. But it was frightening as well.”
