Erin Doherty didn’t expect to be scared of a boy almost two decades her junior. The 32-year-old actor has made a career playing formidable women; often enigmatic characters projecting a certain toughness, a sense of gradually fraying invulnerability. She was a young Princess Anne in The Crown. An unhinged internet stalker in the BBC’s Chloe. And, most recently, the notorious gang leader in Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s new seriesA Thousand Blows. Yet, for all of her onscreen power, Doherty cowered when confronted by her baby-faced co-star Owen Cooper on the set of Netflix’s harrowing four-part murder drama Adolescence. “It wasn’t acting,” she admits. “He was genuinely making me jump.”
Doherty is a masterful shapeshifter and, increasingly, one of the brightest screen and stage stars of her generation. Whether she’s a swaggering Victorian or a senior royal, the actor, raised in Crawley, West Sussex, vanishes entirely inside her characters, leaving behind performances so persuasive that she can steal scenes from the likes of Olivia Colman. Each role she takes on is teeming with the signature energy of the individual she inhabits. In front of the camera, she conducts herself with relentless focus; neck long, gaze stern, with a discerning look in her eye that challenges her castmates to keep up. “I love my job,” Doherty admits of her exhaustingly crammed schedule, which currently consists of two theatre performances a day with press junket calls and podcast appearances in between. “When you’re 80, you don’t want to look back and be like ‘I wish I’d done that.’” she says. “So, if they’ll have me, I’ll keep going. Why would I stop?”
She appears in Adolescence (co-written by Boiling Point star Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne) as clinical psychologist Briony Ariston, who’s tasked with understanding the mental state of Jamie Miller (Cooper) after he’s accused of killing a girl from his school. Filmed in one continuous shot, each episode makes for compelling (if unrelentingly distressing) viewing. First appearing as a crying, vulnerable young boy, Jamie doesn’t appear capable of the horrendous crime with which he’s been charged, until sickening evidence appears to suggest he might be. “It’s so intense,” Doherty acknowledges. “When the trailer dropped, all of my family were like ‘Oh my God, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to watch this.’ It’s so heavy, but so important.”
We chat on Zoom as sun streams through the window of Doherty’s north London home on the UK’s first unexpectedly sunny week of the year. Curled up on a dark green suede sofa in a grey cardigan, she’s unhesitatingly friendly and chipper; there’s none of her customary onscreen severity. She rushes to ask me how my morning has gone before offering any details of her own. As I talk, she nods encouragingly, eyes brighter than the weather. “I’m really enjoying myself at the minute,” she grins, throwing her sleek chestnut hair over one shoulder and taking a large swig of water.
Before long, though, our conversation inevitably turns to serious matters. The current affairs context into which Adolescence is emerging is bleak. A few days after we speak, in an incident scarily pertinent to the themes explored in the show, the springtime mood will be collectively disturbed by the trial of 26-year-old Kyle Clifford, who listened to a podcast by the self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate the day prior to raping his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, before murdering her and her sister, Hannah, with a crossbow and stabbing their mother Carol to death.
Jamie and his classmates prove similarly susceptible to online radicalisation by incel subcultures in Adolescence and engage with influencers of Tate’s ilk – a pastime the National Police Chiefs’ Council warned could lead to violence against women and girls when they declared the issue a “national emergency” last year. “For me, the real kind of tidal wave was just social media,” says Doherty of the rise of misogyny among schoolboys. “I took a step back from it quite early on because I was able, luckily, to recognise how addictive and how all-consuming that world can be. And so, it does terrify me,” she adds. “I’ve got an 11-year-old brother. He looks at my social media profiles and goes, ‘Woah you’ve got so many followers.’ I always tell him, ‘Those people aren’t real. I have no idea who they are.’ I – actually as Erin – probably have about three friends. Online fame doesn’t equate to power.”
Despite her 109,000 Instagram followers, Doherty says she’d much rather be off-grid, and only moved back to London from slightly leafier Sussex so she could audition for more plays. Until the end of April, she stars alongside The Split’s Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan in the throuple comedy Unicorn at the Garrick. The play received tepid reviews but Doherty never saw them. “I literally never read anything,” she says. “So, all I can know is that I’m really chuffed to be part of putting anything out there that is going to challenge our concept of relationships and love. We grow up with such a fixed concept of relationships being between two people,” she adds. “All this play is doing is asking people to just rethink it. No one’s asking anyone to open up their relationship or anything.”
Harrowing: Erin Doherty and Owen Cooper as Briony Ariston and Jamie Miller in ‘Adolescence’ (Netflix)
Throuple content or otherwise, West End plays filled with recognisable TV and film actors have proved controversial of late, with producers accused of “stunt-casting” to up ticket prices. Most recently, Cate Blanchett starring in Thomas Ostermeier’s new production of Chekhov’s The Seagull alongside Doherty’s The Crown castmate Emma Corrin caused a notable stir. “Every producer has to have an eye on ticket sales,” says Doherty. “If someone like Cate Blanchett is going to put bums on seats, why would you not?” she adds, admitting she’d like to see the play herself. “It’s not like an entire cast of Cate Blanchetts,” Doherty reasons. “When an actor is a phenomenal creative in their own right, who are we to stop them turning down Steven Spielberg to come to London to do a play? I think that’s phenomenal. We have to keep the doors open so we get to witness incredible actors do their thing live.”
Doherty brings a theatre-grade performance to the small screen in Adolescence. Her character is steely as she questions Jamie about his attitudes towards women, while he shouts back his answers and pounds the table between them with his fists. Only when the never-pausing cameras follow her into the nearby corridor does she betray her terror with shaking hands, quickly regulating her short anxious breathing before walking fearlessly back into the room. “I was in my element,” says Doherty, who trained at Bristol Old Vic theatre school. “I think [continuous shot filming] is a really exciting format. I hope it’s played with more in the future because it gives actors such a gorgeous opportunity to let go and surrender to the moment. It breeds a very organic, raw, sensation,” she explains. “It was freeing.”
Graham asked Doherty to be part of the project after he worked with her on A Thousand Blows, in which she stars as Mary Carr, the leader of a real-life 1880s gang, The Forty Elephants. It’s a turn that may come to be viewed as her defining, breakthrough moment. As Nick Hilton wrote in The Independent, “A Thousand Blows belongs to Doherty. She is shifty, inscrutable and yet quietly honourable … a pleasingly amoral, complex hero.” Preparation for playing Mary included historical research and pickpocketing training sessions: “Ultimately, you’ve just gotta have the balls to stick your hand in and divert the person’s attention,” Doherty says. “We got to practise in big group boxing scenes and the directors would be, like, ‘Just see if we can catch you doing anything.’ I ended up nicking one of the supporting artist’s biscuits,” she laughs. “Obviously, they were saving them for later. So, I had to try to really quickly hide them from the camera because those were not period biscuits.”
Squaring up: Doherty and Stephen Graham in Steven Knight’s ‘A Thousand Blows’ (Disney+)
While crime may not be her calling, Doherty always knew that acting was. She almost became a professional footballer but opted to go to theatre school after being scouted by Chelsea as a teenager. Although her midfield days are behind her, she admits she still has recurring dreams of the pitch. “I love it and I miss it,” she says. “But it only took me about 10 minutes to choose being an actor. Even when I was 14, it just felt necessary, like I wouldn’t stay sane if I didn’t do it.”
Having recently played a psychologist, a gang leader and a sexual interloper, Doherty is seemingly determined to keep everyone guessing. “I’d love to do a musical,” she says, achieving her goal of surprising me. “It’s such a specific genre that it would need to have the right creatives on board. But that would definitely pique my interest. The minute that people start to think of me as one thing, I want to run the other way. If people start to think of me more as Mary Carr, then I’ll abandon ship whenever I can.”
‘Adolescence’ is available now on Netflix
