by It’s coming to quite a year for Bella Maclean. After breaking out last year in Netflix’s Sex Education, this autumn her name will be on everyone’s lips as one of the stars of the highly anticipated Jilly Cooper adaptation of Rivals. But before that, his debut at the National Theater is a small matter.
We meet a few days before London Tide’s opening night, and she is incredibly calm. “I was really excited about my National debut,” she says. Her mother, on the other hand, was not – and after two sleepless nights she went into a preview, much to the chagrin of her daughter’s friend. “I feel guilty about being unpleasant for being there… you just need a supportive parent.”
We are in a small room, several floors up in the labyrinthine, concrete corridors of the National Theater on London’s South Bank, looking out over the Thames. It’s an appropriate attitude when we discuss this new adaptation of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, a story connected to the trolleys and currents of the great waterway that runs through London.
Writer Ben Power has distilled the big time – it runs to over 800 pages – down to just over three hours of screen time focusing on a story of social inequality that has a lot to say about it. Celtic London despite being written in the 1860s. today.
It’s something Maclean, looking elegant in a dark striped suit, is thinking a lot about, and he points to an essay Power sent to the team about how Dickens’s London is our London. “It introduced the housing crisis, food poverty, the postcode lottery,” she reads from her iPad.
“Just as the city consumes as it redeems, Dickens believes, and according to our play, the city can save us. In fact, he believes that the community and the connections that the city allows may be the only hope we have to save each other.”
After reading more, she blurts out, “Isn’t that great? It draws such a clear connection between then and now. We’ve just come out of the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis is there and the homelessness is on the rise… If Dickens were standing here now, he might not have changed much.
“But I love the idea of hope and so many people in the city – from all walks of life – and we’re connected because we live in this place. We can choose to use it as a community or fight against it.”
She plays Bella Wilfer, betrothed to the richest man in London who then dies before they even meet, leaving her with no prospects, stuck with her poverty-stricken family. “She is extremely volatile, so accurate and full of opinions and by heart. If you were to judge her immediately, you’d probably say brat.”
But she is more than that – Maclean also describes her as “wild and cheerful, full of life and colour” and in the spirited exchanges with her family she could draw on her experience, especially her twin older sisters . “I was thinking, ‘That’s my family.’ My family is energetic and loud; to me it is about to see a cry.”
MacLean, who has bright sparkling eyes and is always quick to laugh, struggles with the best way to answer some of the questions. This is her first solo interview and she is trying to pick the right words. “My brain is so disconnected, I’ll jump around.”
And yet, she embraces that in her work, as she does at London Tide’s opening night a few days after we meet, where she shines on the Lyttleton stage, luminous and energetic, engulfing the audience. in Bella’s liberating journey from stroppy teenager to. a caring heroine. Music by PJ Harvey is in the play, and Maclean has earned praise for her singing as well as her performance.
Since this is her first interview, very little information is available about her, and much of what is out there is wrong. The ‘Everything you need to know about Bella Maclean’ pieces, as it turns out, you don’t know much either. Most of them are down to 23. “I don’t know where anyone got it from, even people in the team are saying that after reading it online. I’m 26.”
Maclean’s tells me she grew up in New York, where her parents lived for work, until they moved to East Sussex when she was 10. She went to London at 18 for drama school and stayed since then, currently visiting West London. ” after spending time in the east.
She was in all the school plays “from day one” – but it was playing Jean Valjean at “16 or 17” that gave her the bug. She laughed, “It’s funny because we thought it was the best thing ever and we took it so seriously, but on reflection…”
However, that role made her think “there is no greater feeling than this” and a teacher told her that if she wanted to act she had to do it. So she applied to study drama, winning a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Before the end of his final year, Maclean took part in the musical Spring Awakening at the Almeida. At first the pandemic put it on hold, although they ended up putting the show on green locks in between.
Her first TV role came in the long-running BBC Silent Witness – her junior career was almost derailed by an uncontrollable bout of giggles in a dark scene – and the following year came Sex Education in which she played Jem, a character who helps out on her father’s life. a farm “There was pressure, but I wasn’t leading so it wasn’t huge pressure. It was a beautiful story in a show that had been running for a long time. She was just a beautiful character, she loved nature and horses.”
For the role, Maclean told her agent she could ride (as many actors do to clear their Spotlight profile). “It was a mistake,” she cried. “I remember getting on a horse, singing, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to fall off and break my back and I’m going to end a very short career.’ I was meant to be great at riding. They edited me really well.”
If Sex Education was a gentle introduction to blockbuster television, the next show is sure to take it to the next level: the Disney+ adaptation of the Jilly Cooper novel Rivals. Set in the world of independent television in 1986, there is drama, excess, sex and the unsavory antics of the social elite.
Maclean plays the daughter of Aiden Turner’s Declan and Victoria Smurfit’s Maud – she’s strong-willed and has a strong heart and it’s up to her to keep the family together. The actor lights up when the show comes up in conversation.
“It’s so nice to talk about it,” she says of the apparently riotous, campy sport — though she hasn’t seen any of the finished episodes yet. “The actors are taking the piss inside the piss. No one is taking themselves seriously. But he also has the grit. It was such a joy to be in those clothes in the eighties, and the sets were just ridiculous. Even eating that classic eighties picnic food. It was so much fun.”
The attitude of the eighties may not be included with the attitude of our time and Disney promised that it will be told through the lens of 2024. “If you’re going to do it you have to do it as it is, if it wasn’t Jilly Cooper it would be there. But you can take away some of the views that don’t land in today’s society. You can remove the more misogynistic characters.
“The show has a lot of heart and the characters have empathy. Not brutish, misogynistic caricatures. The female characters have more status than they would have otherwise. It’s still rompy and campy. That will be all…”
In some of Jilly Cooper’s books, the focus is on women’s bodies – get thin, get your man. “Yeah, it’s not like that,” says Maclean firmly. “A lot of that is achieved. It’s not that. There are opinions about that. You get the best bits of Jilly Cooper.”
And the actress did not really understand what the adaptation of Jilly Cooper would be until she told her mother. “It’s a true culture classic that people read under their covers. It’s so exciting.” It is clear that Bella Maclean, along with the show, is about to make a big impression on herself.
London Tide runs at the National Theater until June 22; nationaltheatre.org.uk
