Back to school

Wimbledon resident and rising star Amara Karan is set to hit the big screen in two Hollywood films this autumn, but her feet are still firmly on the ground says Anwar Brett

Above: Amara Karan photographed at Wimbledon High School by Vicky Dawe

One moment you’re a drama school student harbouring modest ambitions of gaining some experience on the stage, the next you are starring in a major movie directed by one of Hollywood’s most distinctive directors.

If this sounds like the stuff that dreams are made off then Wimbledon resident Amara Karan has had precious little time to pinch herself, for straight after appearing in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited she landed a role as a posh schoolgirl in St Trinian’s. And the fact that these films, completed so soon after she entered the business, are coming out within a month of each other means she has had an astonishingly successful introduction to the often precarious world of acting.

"It’s all to do with timing," she says with a smile. "I managed to sign up with a really great agent in London while I was still at drama school. Just three weeks after leaving she said I had an audition for a film starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman, and directed by Wes Anderson. I thought ‘oh my gosh a horror film, how exciting! This is really, really great.’

"Then I looked him up and realised it was Wes Craven I was thinking of and that Wes Anderson had made The Royal Tenenbaums. I did a lot of research on him and opened my eyes to his body of work. Coming quite late into this business, I have a lot of catching up to do in terms of the great work that’s gone before me in film history. So it’s been a very steep learning curve this year."

Watch the trailer for The Darjeeling Limited (02:22)

Said with admirable understatement, but the twentysomething actress has proved herself no slouch when it comes to education, having moved on from Wimbledon High School (the location for our photo shoot and former school of Dame Margaret Rutherford) – "I really loved it there," she beams – to reading for a degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. And from there to the world of banking, where she worked for a while in mergers and acquisitions in the City.

"In my heart of hearts I’d wanted to act for a really long time," she explains. "But I think it was only when I was working as a banker, when I was doing such long hours, that I was forced to acknowledge what I really loved.

"Your spare time is so precious because there’s so little of it. That’s when I thought this was my vocation. Banking was a really great experience, it was really challenging and I really wanted to do something that would challenge me, but I absolutely loved acting and didn’t feel whole without it."

Her current profession is not without its challenges of course, but she has not been found wanting so far. Ask Karan to cite some acting heroes and the name of Judi Dench comes quickly to mind, but after a pause she remembers a watershed moment in her youth.

"I would have to say it was people like Gurinder Chadha and Meera Syal," she nods, "when I was younger they did a film together called Bhaji On The Beach. As a little girl I saw this and my eyes popped out of my head, that was one of the things that made me go ‘oh my God, what are they doing? What am I seeing’?

"These are British Asians who are acting, in a film that’s actually really good. Nobody tapped me on the shoulder and told me about this phenomenon before. I think I have to say that was a massively exciting, inspiring film from my point of view, being a girl from an Asian background."

While here Asian heritage hails back to Sri Lanka, Amara Karan is an SW19 girl through and through. Her eyes dance with delight as she notes favourite haunts in the area. "Maison St Cassien in Wimbledon, in the village, is definitely a favourite, I go there a lot with my friends. And I like Ely’s very much too."

There is a pleasing openness to Karan, a sense of wonder still at the new things she is experiencing as an actress, from the grind of shooting a movie to the often gruelling process of promoting it. Even when Wimbledon High School unexpectedly asked her, on the day of the shoot, to return in a month’s time to open their new theatre (named after the late Margaret Rutherford), Karan accepted without hesitation. Perhaps this enthusiasm lies in the contrast to her previous career, a job that one might tentatively suggest should protect her from the parlous state of a typical rookie actor’s finances.

"I was in corporate finance not personal finance," she says with a sigh, "so I’m not particularly prudent with my money. But I do think that I have quite an entrepreneurial streak, probably from having worked in banking. I approach my work as a business, I think I have got that from investment banking, working in a very professional environment."

Had things turned out a little differently, had the acting bug not bitten so deeply, then the world of banking may not have lost Amara Karan’s talents. She might even have found a more logical route into her current business through her old career.

"While I was a banker I did think ‘maybe, when I get the opportunity to specialise more, I’ll specialise more in media and then maybe I can get a position one day on the board of a film company and produce movies’. So there was definitely a pull while I was working there."

That her entry into the world of cinema has proved so much more unlikely even than that scenario suggests that anything is possible. She remains unstarry and genuinely thrilled by the way things have turned out but she is also savvy enough to know that with two big movies under her belt a standard has been set for what is to come. This puts her in a position of strength in the choices she makes from here on in a career that can only see interest in her rising.

"I would really love to do a variety of things, I’m not sure how it’s going to develop, but the future is very exciting for me. I don’t know what it holds, but I’ve had a really great start."