Jodie Whitaker: 'I just love to act'

'Instead of living in a little bubble in London ... you see that people in the world are working with things you can't even get your head around.'

Some actors struggle for years to get a foot in the door. But for the British actress Jodie Whittaker success seems to have come with relative ease. Shortly after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2005, Whittaker was nominated for Best Newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards for her debut role in Roger Michell's Venus, in which she plays a youngster who captures the imagination of an older actor played by Peter O'Toole.
And she hasn't looked back since. "I have always been an idiot and an attention seeker and needed a job that didn't sack you for those two things," she says of becoming an actress. "I went to drama school because I thought I wasn't very good. It was the best decision I ever made. I went backpacking, finished school, did a year travelling. I was certain that I wanted to do drama school and was prepared for however long it took to get in. I was very rational. I was patient and I was aware that this was for the rest of my life."
All experience is good experience for an aspiring actress. Whittaker's year travelling came in handy for her most recent film White Wedding, a race-relations/romantic comedy, which is this year's official selection for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar from South Africa, where it was a box office sensation. In the film, Whittaker plays an English girl who decides to travel around South Africa after reaching a relationship impasse. "At the time, I wasn't hugely aware of South African cinema, a lot of which draws on the tremendous atrocities that happened there only 15 years ago and the terrible poverty," she says. "This is a film which is absolutely a celebration of South Africa and South Africans and looks at all of the presumptions we have about it in a humorous way."
In her first scene, Whittaker looks like a deer caught in the headlights, but upon closer inspection is a classically pretty English-rose type. Most importantly, though, she hits all the right notes in her performances. "I have no idea why people like what I do," she says. "In terms of ambition, I have always wanted to challenge myself and enjoy my job. I'm sure there are loads of jobs people have hated me on."
Her highest-profile film to date has been the British boarding school drama, St Trinian's and its sequel. And she seems to have enough of the schoolgirl rebel in her to match the movie. "I'm 27 and I still mess around with my mates," she says. "On holiday we pretend to be different people. I have never grown up." Her other film work includes the Nazi drama Good, alongside Viggo Mortensen, Nick Moran's The Kid, and the Ireland-set Perrier's Bounty with Jim Broadbent, Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson.
In Britain she is such a regular on television that The Independent joked in a recent profile that viewers were likely to see more of Whittaker over the holidays than they were going to hear about the financial crisis. Indeed. She could be seen alongside Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton in the BBC drama Cranford, in the banking drama Wired, playing the role of Izzy Huett in a BBC adaptation of Tess of the D' Urbervilles, and in Channel Four's The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, which is based on a true story of a British photography student fatally wounded in Gaza in 2003 by the Israeli Defense Forces. Hurndall was filmed for six weeks in Jordan, partly inside Palestinian refuge camps.
"It was very emotional. Instead of living in a little bubble in London, worrying if you are going to get another acting job you see that people in the world are working with things you can't even get your head around," she says. Still, Whittaker doesn't seem to need too much of a nudge to keep things in perspective. "I just want to do good work and I don't want to miss any stages out," she says. "I want to experience everything along the way and I want to do this for the rest of my life. I really love acting. I can't be more profound about it."