'She does what she has to survive'
Erin Doherty would sooner be the Queen of Crime than a real-life royal
Disney
- Rosie Millard
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If Erin Doherty wanted to show off her versatility, she couldn’t have picked a better follow-up. From playing Princess Anne in The Crown to thieving Mary Carr in A Thousand Blows, she has gone from cut-glass to criminal class in a single stride.
Carr earned her place in history as the daring helmswoman of a feared squad of female thieves in London’s docklands in the late 1800s known as the Forty Elephants, and Doherty is scathing about why their legacy is not better known. “I just can’t fathom that we haven’t told their stories up until now. If this was an all-male gang, would we know about them more? What these women did was genuinely impressive, not that I am glamorising criminal activity.”
Compared to Princess Anne, the role of Carr presented Doherty with quite a different accent to master, to say the least. “Yeah, she’s straight down the line,” says the 32-year-old of her rough-hewn character. “She’s not a villain in any way. She was just doing what she had to do to survive.”
Carr, like the Princess Royal, would often be found in trousers – only in Carr’s case, they were kitted out with giant pockets in order to hide her loot. She was certainly smart.
“I thought of her like a snake, constantly in the reeds, low to the ground, sensing what other people are doing before she makes her move,” says Doherty.
It’s surely no coincidence that Carr and her all-female gang have been brought to light by Steven Knight, whose previous dramatic engagement with the criminal underclass gave us Peaky Blinders. A Thousand Blows is not, however, Blinders in skirts.
Mary's gender is secondary, and that is so refreshing
Erin Doherty
“It’s a tribute to Steven’s brilliant writing that he never puts Mary, or any of the women in her gang, in a ‘female’ pigeonhole,” says Doherty. “He never sees them as anything other than ordinary, decent criminals. Their gender is secondary, and that’s so refreshing.”
Carr says at one point: “I’m beyond men.” “It’s like Mary is saying, ‘Let’s all forget about our genders or what’s in between our legs, it doesn’t matter,’” says Doherty. “What do you need to do in order to survive? What do you need to do to be the best you can be? Go and do that. That’s what matters.
“That’s what’s so amazing about this drama. We are still fighting for female roles that don’t centre around a romantic relationship of any kind. It’s really rare to be given a character to play who isn’t talking about a significant other. And that’s not necessarily always a man. As a gay woman, I would also count playing a woman who’s in relationships with other women. There’s more to life than relationships.”
Doherty frequently laughs during our interview. She appears to be revelling in bringing this tough, remarkable woman to life in a big, splashy period drama that combines East End trickery, bare-knuckle fighting and the odd chase in a horse-drawn carriage. What’s more, Mary Carr has agency. She might sport Dickensian-style bonnets and skirts, but she’s no doomed Nancy, and she’s certainly no Miss Havisham.
Erin Doherty as Princess Anne in The Crown.
Even though she has already achieved enormous critical acclaim, Doherty’s life could have gone another way entirely. Indeed, she was once scouted by Chelsea for a potential career as a professional footballer.
Given the recent success of the Lionesses, it’s just as well the acting lark paid off, I tell her. “I know!” she snorts. “But I loved acting so much, I just didn’t have the heart to entertain the notion of failure. I think the fact that I just didn’t even think about doing anything else eventually paid off. My dad kept saying I should probably go to university, as a backup, and I was like, I don’t want to have a ‘backup’.”
School in her home town of Crawley in West Sussex wasn’t a good place. “I hated it. I lived for the weekends, because that was when I got to go to drama club. I just lived in my little bubble, waiting to perform. I always knew I was going to try for acting, and school never felt connected to it in any way.”
She giggles again. “I was quite bad. I got kicked off my English Literature course because I didn’t read the books. Not that I’m promoting bunking off. It’s just that I had found a thing which gave me so much joy and fulfilment. I didn’t want to think about anything else.”
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So, which will it be: the neglected streets in Mary Carr’s life, or the indulged world of Princess Anne? “Well, my overarching feeling when I was playing Princess Anne was that these people felt so lonely. Whereas with this show, and these people, they are so intertwined. And in a way, there’s a beauty in the camaraderie. Whereas up there, with the Royals, you are on your own, even within your own family, which is so sad. Honestly, I wouldn’t think twice about it. The East End, one hundred per cent.”
Authors
Rosie Millard
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