When Louisa Harland was cast as the lead in the new Sally Wainwright drama, Renegade Nell, the director told her: “Nell needs to be one of those characters, even when she’s on the screen so much, you still want the audience to miss her when she’s not.” It’s quite an ask: Nell is a massive Doctor Who of a role, swashbuckling, always with a new accent or cool pyrotechnics or punch in the face, and Harland fills the screen every second she’s on it. Somehow, though, you do miss her when she isn’t. Meeting the 31-year-old in central London, I can see exactly why she was chosen for Nell, even though almost the first thing she says is “I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get this role. My parents still think it is so random.”
Renegade Nell is a rebel and a chancer, an 18th-century tomboy in a constant life-or-death scenario of some other bugger’s making. The year is 1705, and she’s just lost her husband in a battle that has left her both widowed and superhuman, but only sometimes. The show has a lush period feel and is a closely observed love affair with the British countryside (Harland describes the incredibly precise location scouts combing through forests searching for trees that would have been mature by 1705), but it is powered by mischief – fight scenes, disguises, magic monsters and highway robbery after highway robbery.
There are so many brilliant performances that it can casually kill off incredible actors (I won’t spoil it by telling you who); each murder comes as a genuine surprise, as you think: “They can’t seriously have done away with them?” Harland needs to look beautiful one minute and anonymous the next, shift from cockney to posh, dancer to prizefighter, and she can do all that – but more than that, she has funny bones. She was Orla McCool in Derry Girls, of course, so that much is already known. It’s hard to imagine a Sally Wainwright heroine who isn’t acerbically funny before she’s anything else. Almost the first thing Harland says to me when I sit down is that Wainwright “doesn’t enjoy writing for men. I mean, she writes brilliant men, but she enjoys wholeheartedly writing for women. Loves us.”
What Harland didn’t realise, she says, is that she was accidentally in training for her cockney accent for the two years she lived in Limehouse, east London after going to Mountview drama school, then when she moved in with her boyfriend, Calvin Demba (also an actor, off Hollyoaks) and his aunt and uncle during lockdown, “queuing outside Maureen’s [in Poplar] for pie and mash every Saturday morning”. She didn’t even need a voice coach; if she needed to check the pronunciation of anything, she’d just get Calvin to send her a voice note. “Before I would do a take,” she starts, in her Dublin like-a-warm-bath real voice, “I would just be like, [into a Poplar accent] cockney. Cockney. Cockney.” And she’s off; the vocal transformation is very funny. “A lot of accent is to do with confidence,” she says. “My partner was saying: ‘You have to sigh in a cockney accent. You have to think in a cockney accent.’” Later, she makes that trademark little squeak she’d do to get into character for Orla; who knows why it’s so tickling, it’s just a noise. Like I said, funny bones.
The youngest of three sisters (the middle one’s a psychologist, the oldest used to be a dancer), Harland grew up in Dublin with parents “so cultured, they’ve seen every film, every foreign series there, my dad was in advertising”. She recalibrates slightly, thinking she’s made them sound too luvvy. “They’re not high on praise, obviously.” She was cast in an RTÉ show about the Dublin criminal underworld, Love/Hate, before she even went to drama school, and left for London aged 19. “I couldn’t wait. I was telling everybody: ‘Did you hear, I’m moving to London?’ I wasn’t prepared for how different London was. You know, because Dublin is the capital city as well, I thought they’d be the same.” It wasn’t the same at all; she was homesick as hell. The yearning for anonymity she had, after growing up where everyone knew each other, didn’t survive 10 minutes of a city where “anonymity is all you get”. She likes it fine now, she stresses.
Derry Girls didn’t exactly pluck Harland out of obscurity. She’d done Lost in London, a bold and weird Woody Harrelson project, the first and so far only film to be shot in one take and broadcast live to cinemas. One critic called it “a daft idea … pulled off with considerable wit and brio”; it was too niche to be Harland’s breakthrough role, but it set up a major mutual fandom between she and Harrelson, which they revisited in Ulster American, the brilliantly received stage production about Brexit, Britain, Ireland, the US and everything.
Lisa McGee, the Derry Girls creator, once told me how her show was cast: they were looking for chemistry, and it took seven months to get completely the right girl combination. All the time, Harland was working in a pub in Victoria (the Jugged Hare, since you ask): “Of course I would have taken that part, I would have taken any part, it was just a bonus that it was brilliant, with great people, and people liked it.” None of them expected it to be so successful, internationally – there were jokes in there about Derry that even people from Dublin didn’t get. “I’d still say we’re more like national treasures at home than celebrities.”
Between series one and two, she says, “I couldn’t get arrested. The rest of the cast were doing so well, getting all these amazing opportunities. I just couldn’t quite break in. I was back working the pub.” Actually, it wasn’t “all doom and gloom and the pub”. In 2019, she got a show at London’s Royal Court, Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp, with Toby Jones and Deborah Findlay. “Just after I finished that play, the pandemic hit. I thought I’d never do theatre again, and I was thinking: ‘Maybe I’m not the right personality for this industry.’ Even seeing how people handle themselves on set, or in press, I thought: ‘I’m not like that. Maybe that’s why it’s not clicking, and why it is clicking for the rest.’”
I can see what she means: she has an unguarded, unself-conscious quality that isn’t very actorly. She says at one point, in a roundabout way, that she’s a “normal-looking person”, which isn’t right at all – she’s very striking – but I don’t doubt that that’s what she believes, and that’s her self-fashioning: a regular person who happens to act. While she’s close to some people from drama school and has her cockney voice coach-actor boyfriend, she’s not what you’d call blinded by the bright lights. “I’m trying to think: ‘Have I found my tribe now?’ As an actor, you really need to have friends who have normal jobs. Two of my best friends, one works in Dunnes Stores [the Irish M&S] and the other works in Paddy Power.”
The other pandemic effect was to shunt back the third series of Derry Girls to 2021. “It was a huge gap,” she says, “especially when you’ve got adults playing kids. Thank God it was a comedy.” It was from the set of Derry Girls that she auditioned for Nell: “I think it helped that I couldn’t fly over to London for any recalls because I was filming. It was a good look – ‘she’s busy’.”
Renegade Nell is very traditional storytelling, in many ways: it’s a Disney+ show and skates on the edge of adult and young adult, with fantasy elements, quite a lot of class war, and satisfying David and Goliath dynamics. “It’s a 12, which means no swearing or nipples but loads of blood and guts and violence,” she says. “That’s not the official definition. I’ve just realised that’s what a 12 means.”
In a lot of its conventions – principally, that whenever Nell dresses as a man, sometimes no more elaborately than putting on a hat, everyone swallows whole that they’re talking to a man, not a woman in a hat – it exists somewhere between Shakespeare and panto, but not naively; it definitely knows what it’s doing. “I’ve been asked about the gender politics,” she says. “‘Is there a point you’re trying to make? Is Nell gender fluid or non-binary? How does she identify?’ That never came in to the story. Why does she dress as a man? To pass as a man.” She did three months of stunt training before they started filming, and is awed by her stunt double, “Melissa Humler, she was on the French Olympic bouldering team and she grew up in a circus, she can do anything. Even the way she stood, I took a lot from.”
In the wake of shooting Renegade Nell, Harland was cast in Long Day’s Journey into Night, the Eugene O’Neill classic that opens on 19 March in the West End, a wildly starry cast headed by Brian Cox. She’d love to do Broadway, she says; would love to add American to her accent portfolio: “As an Irish person, we already have a slight nasality.” Does that mean she’d have to get a new boyfriend for the voice coaching? “No,” she says, robustly, loyally. “Calv’s American is already pretty good.”
First things first, though, she really wants to see another season, at the very least, as Nell: “I feel like we’ve only just set up this world, and it’s such an interesting one, the possibilities are endless. I even said the other day: ‘If this goes really well, shall we do two and three together?’”
Renegade Nell is on Disney+ on 29 March.
