KATIE McGRATH is tired, with justification. “We’re on night shoots at the minute,” she tells me in a southern Irish lilt far removed from the regal tones we hear in Merlin, the new retelling of the youthful exploits of the mythical wizard and the characters around him. “Yesterday I was horse riding. Then I was running around a castle in a big cloak, being all stealthy. Some days I get to do sword fighting, some days I’m doing court scenes ...”
She doesn’t sound as exhausted as she undoubtedly is, though – she talks with tremendous speed and intensity, breaking into giggles throughout our conversation. It’s difficult to tell whether she’s wired on sleepless adrenaline (her dream right now, she tells me, is of a day when she doesn’t have to get up at 5am), or if it’s the excitement of taking up one of the main roles in a show the BBC has invested heavily in that makes her talk in such a way. Probably both.
“When I was reading for it, my agent downplayed how big it was, and because I live in Dublin I’m kind of separated from it all. So when I came in and got it everyone in the agency was coming up to me and giving me hugs and slowly it started to dawn on me that this was probably a bigger thing than I’d thought it was. So it hasn’t been a shock – it’s been a slow realisation.”
There hasn’t been anything slow about Katie’s ascent, however. Many people would expect the Wicklow-born actress to have had a lifetime of drama classes, vocal coaching and auditions. It’s oddly appropriate, then, that it has been her own fairytale to fall into a job that is beyond the hopes and dreams of any number of actors.
“I worked crew,” she says simply. “I did history in college, then floated around and did so many different odd jobs and ended up working crew on The Tudors, and while I was on that a few directors and producers said I should give acting a try, so I sent photographs round all the agents in Ireland.
“Being an actress was kind of like when you’re a kid and you want to run away and join the circus – something you really want to do but then you grew up and got a proper job. It was a dream, but I didn’t think it would ever be reality, and yet here I am!”
Here she is indeed. Katie plays Morgana in Merlin, a role that will raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with Arthurian legend and its many interpretations. Throughout the centuries, Morgana has been portrayed (and this may qualify as a spoiler, depending on the route Merlin’s writers take) in various ways. As a fairy transformed into a human; as a megalomaniacal enchantress; as a would-be usurper of King Arthur’s throne; or as a figure of primal, Celtic magic facing down a new world of Christian order. Very much in the spirit of the character’s multifaceted nature, the writers have fashioned their own Morgana for Katie to inhabit.
“I play the first lady of Camelot, who’s got sort of a dark secret,” she says mischievously. “Everyone knows about Arthur and Guinevere and Merlin and Morgana and where they end up, but the show is more about how they get there.”
In Merlin’s first episode, screened last month, we encountered Morgana, (said to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, so naturally they hired an Irish girl) the adopted daughter of King Uther, Arthur’s father, who had led his kingdom through a battle against the forces of sorcery and witchcraft 20 years earlier, ruthlessly purging its practitioners.
“I play his ward. I’m pretty much his daughter, I’ve been brought up as his daughter – and not to fear the consequences. We have a great father-daughter banter as well, which is fun. It’s a very modern relationship, she’s a very modern woman and character, as well as being in the period, but especially with her relationship with Uther it’s very much a modern father-daughter relationship, where she’s a bit mouthy and he’s a bit indulgent! But he’s still definitely the father and she’s definitely the daughter.”
So, did she do much research into the legends of Morgana when she got the role?
“I started to do quite a bit of reading around. I was quite familiar with it all. It didn’t hinder, but it didn’t help either, because we’re doing kind of a re-imagining of, or a prequel to, what we all know. It was good to know where she ended up, but at the same time, because it happens before the legend, it doesn’t have any bearing on it, it doesn’t affect the character as much as you think it would. You’ve got it in the back of your mind that you’re playing this person who’s going to become, you know, this big sorceress, but then you remember that in a way you’re playing a completely different person. It all hasn’t happened yet. As a person you never know where you’ve ended up – does that make sense?” she laughs. “So it didn’t particularly help, but I found it really interesting.”
The same applies to other actresses’ portrayals of Morgana. “It’s hard not to have seen Helen Mirren in Excalibur, and Helena Bonham Carter [in the 1998 TV movie Merlin], but at the same time you don’t want to create something that’s already been done, because I’m neither of them,” she says. “You kind of want to make it your own, so hopefully somebody some day will be asking another actress if they’ve looked at Katie McGrath’s portrayal.”
Thinking about the role and reading around it could not, of course, have prepared Katie for the actual experience of shooting it. When I mention that the first episode seemed to be set in a very sunny mediaeval Britain, she tells me how Merlin is actually shot in France. “In the first episode, most of all those exteriors, all the big shots, were shot at a castle about 40 minutes north of Paris. They look sunny, but it was absolutely freezing when we shot that; really quite bitterly cold!”
What came as a relief, though, was the balance between fun and professionalism she found on set with the crew and other actors. “We’ve been together so long and we know each other so well, it is a laugh every day. It’s the best job in the world.
“You’ve got people like Richard Wilson and Anthony Head and they show you how it’s supposed to be; these utterly professional actors who come in and get it out, but they’re still lovely and nice and sweet, and that’s what you’re aiming to be, this fantastically professional actor who can still have a good time and be nice to everyone. And then you’ve got people like Bradley James and Colin Morgan and Angel Coulby and we’re all at the same level, so we’re all going along together. We’ve been filming for so long, we’ve kind of only got each other and the crew. It’s nice to have that core family – it’s a very strange family, but a family nonetheless!”
Despite being so enthusiastic about her fellow players, Katie is defiantly humble when it comes to what she believes provides much of the show’s quality. “We have such fantastic scripts,” she says, “a lot of the work is done for us before we even get there. I mean, the writers have been so clever in what they’ve done in that every episode has something for a five-year-old, something for a 15-year-old and something for a 45-year-old, you know what I mean? Which is nice, because it’s nice to do a show where I don’t have to worry about my entire family watching it.”
Early mornings and late nights aside, the one thing that got to Katie during work on The Tudors and now on Merlin – mediaeval clothing. “I’m like ‘aw man, just put me in jeans and a T-shirt so I don’t have to spend two hours in hair and make-up every morning!’” she laughs, before quickly pointing out that she doesn’t mind really, and how happy she is to be working on the show – a point she makes repeatedly, as if it were a punctuation mark. She is clearly grateful for the chances she has been given and is determined to make the most of them.
Given how recently she entered acting, is her success a bit of a surprise to her family, then?
“They’re fantastic. I don’t come from a family of actors, so it’s all slightly new and slightly strange for everyone, so they’re all really excited. I got so many texts from all my cousins. It’s so nice to think they’re all back in Ireland and they’d all taken the time to sit down and to watch it, which was really quite sweet.”
Merlin will obviously be occupying Katie for quite some time, but does she have any dream projects she would love to do? “I just want to do good work. If it’s shot in Hungary, if it’s shot in Russia, if it’s shot in America, if it’s shot in England, you just want to do something you can stand up and say I’m proud of it. That’s why I have no problem putting my hand on my heart and telling anyone that they should watch Merlin because it’s a fantastic show.”