When it comes to tense, claustrophobic viewing, almost nothing matches Boiling Point. The Observer described the film – which follows a hectic London restaurant on the most catastrophic night of its existence – as “conjuring the raw experience of an inexorably accelerating panic attack.” Watching Stephen Graham battle debt and addiction as volatile head chef Andy – while his team try to contain his combustible personality long enough to finish serving customers – is an immersion in 94 minutes of brutal, jittery brilliance. No wonder another critic called it “the most stressful film of the year.”
Apparently, though, it’s more fun to star in. “It’s exhilarating!” says Vinette Robinson, who plays sous chef Carly in the movie and its new four-part TV adaptation. “It’s exciting because so much of it is off the cuff.”
The film was all shot in one take, so essentially performed live, like a play. The script was little more than bullet points, leaving the actors to devise much of the action themselves. This, combined with its weaving camera angles and on-point portrayals of awful customers, made it an intense and wholly immersive experience – and it became an international hit, shortlisted for awards including Graham’s first Bafta nomination. No one does agitated quite like Graham, I say to Robinson. “That is true,” she agrees. “He is known for the stressful roles. Although he did also do Matilda.”
Though Robinson had previously appeared in Doctor Who (where she played Rosa Parks), Sherlock and Black Mirror, not to mention stage roles at the RSC and the National Theatre, the film thrust her into the limelight. “When people recognise me on the street, it’s mostly for Boiling Point,” she says. Indeed, there is something about Carly – the brilliant yet humble female chef trying to do good work in the midst of exploding male egos – that touched a nerve.
This time around, Carly is in the driving seat. The BBC series picks up after the events of the film, where Carly is now running a restaurant with some of the old team. Graham, Ray Panthaki and Hannah Walters all reprise their roles, but there are new characters too. It’s also not shot in one take, which allows us to see the characters outside the kitchen and get more insight into their lives. For instance, Carly is juggling work with caring for her unwell mother, which was Robinson’s idea. “Originally I had made Carly’s backstory about a father and a daughter. But when I was talking to James [Cummings, executive producer], I really wanted to give the opportunity to another woman.”
In conversation over video call, Robinson is warm, good-humoured and precise: she corrects me when I say she is the lead in the series (“I’m just the head of the ensemble”). She is most expressive when talking about the project and acting as a craft, rather than anything personal, and I get the sense that the glamorous side of acting is of much less interest to her than the actual work.
So did she have as much input in the TV show as she did in the film? Robinson says that while the script was more fleshed out, and “we knew we’d be doing some improvising, directors are the ones in charge. It’s not like the theatre when essentially, once the show starts, the actors are in charge of that performance. [Film and TV] is the director’s medium, not the actor’s.”
Boiling Point joins a handful of recent high-profile shows that have focused on chefs – most notably The Bear and Jez Butterworth’s Mammals. I suggest to Robinson that cheffing compels because it’s one of the few arenas where class privilege falls away, and a talented kid from a council estate can end up scaling the heights of their profession. Not unlike Robinson herself, who was born into a working-class Bradford family, and still has the Yorkshire accent to prove it. Early in her career, she says, her mixed Jamaican/British heritage limited her to playing “teenage sex workers and drug-addicted, single mothers”, and she was told at her bursary audition for drama school that she couldn’t do theatre. “It gave me fire,” she says.
Did the role of Carly, who battles the structural setbacks of being a woman in a man’s world, appeal to her because of her own experiences? “There is definitely an aspirational quality to being a chef,” she says. “It’s a very adrenaline-fuelled world and there’s something fundamental about people coming together and eating socially. As for me, I’m a working-class girl from Bradford, but it’s very hard to place that narrative on to yourself,” she says. “The tale of the underdog is one of the most pervasive tales and Carly is that. But I think the culture of food is changing a bit.”
A chef she spoke to while preparing for the role told her that kitchens are traditionally military-like, where shows of strength are common and a patriarchal and hierarchical culture persists. “But now there are also a lot of affluent kids who have been eating at all these amazing restaurants with their parents. That engenders their love of food and they go into the industry. Then there’s a fight between them and the more scrappy working-class chefs.”
She bats away parallels with the world of acting, which has become increasingly posh as working-class actors have found it ever harder to access and fund their training. “The real parallel I found was the passion,” she muses. “The obsession with doing it well. It’s part of you. When you’re at that level of cooking, it’s part of your identity, it’s how you make sense of the world. That was the side of Carly I could really relate to, though I would say I have a healthier relationship with acting.”
Robinson is now working on a Channel 4 drama, The Gathering, from writer Helen Walsh. “It’s about a girl who goes missing from a rave although it’s also about parents and how they exert control over their children,” she says. “It’s like that Larkin poem, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.”
After that, she is keen to play an even wider range of roles (“Can someone please cast me as a footballer’s wife?” she laughs), and to retain her sense of adventure. “As an actor you can feel like a cog in the wheel, but why you got into this was the creative process,” she says. “And the further you go in film and TV it’s more of a beast, a machine, so you can get lost, more so than at grassroots theatre level. You have to keep the connection to why you started doing this – and that’s just a sense of fun and range.”
Boiling Point is on BBC One on 1 October.
