Raison d’être

Linn Branson meets Miranda Raison, star of acclaimed BBC spy drama Spooks

Above: Miranda Raison

Sitting waiting for the actress Miranda Raison in a colourful café a short distance from her Brixton home, I take the opportunity to read through some of her press cuttings. One particular feature names her as ‘one to watch’. The accompanying photograph shows the 26-year-old star of BBC’s Spooks wearing a £2,000 Jenny Packham gown. Professionally made-up, with her trademark shoulder-length fair hair, she is unsmiling and looks rather austere.

“I wanted a change,” she explains, ordering a frothy latte and running her fingers through the newly-mown crop. “I’ve always had long hair, but I went into the hairdressers’ with a picture of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and said I wanted something like that. That was thought a bit too extreme, so we settled on this length. It’s so much easier to look after and I just chop it myself when I feel it’s getting too long.”

With a few TV commercials and parts in Heartbeat, Emmerdale, Holby City and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries on her CV, it was her arrival last year in the hit BBC series that started to garner her odd looks in the street.

“I still don’t get recognised by name. It’s more van drivers who see me and call out ‘Spooks!’ as I’m passing, or the half-glances I’ll get from people who aren’t quite sure.” Does she find it embarrassing? “I’m getting used to it,” she responds, with a wry laugh. “It’s okay. It’s quite funny sometimes.”

The new look may well leave her free from recognition – for a while at least. We meet just as she’s in the middle of shooting the new series of Spooks. It’s her second, the show’s fifth, and the one which will see her character (Jo Portman, an aspiring journalist who is recruited into the MI5 team) come into her own. “She – Jo – made a lot of mistakes at the beginning, but now her character has been developed. I’m really pleased with how it’s going. Before I got the part Spooks was one of the things I had watched and genuinely enjoyed on TV.”

One of five siblings (her father Nick is a jazz pianist; mother Caroline used to be a newsreader on Anglia TV), while the family are supportive, they also keep her grounded.

“They’ve seen me advertising everything from mobile phones to pizzas, wearing dodgy make-up and in some really bad plays, so I get plenty of teasing. People think that having two younger sisters that they’d kind of look up to me, but there’s none of that at all! If anything, it’s my brother who’s the revered one, being a musician.” (Ed Raison is the bass guitarist with Stonewall Jackson.)

Although for a young actress she has worked fairly consistently since leaving drama school in 2000, she confesses she has found it a lot harder than she had imagined. “I did have quite a rude awakening when I started going out for auditions and found that everyone else there wanted that part every bit as much as I did. It was a bit of an ego crush, but I think it probably did me a lot of good when I got turned down for parts. Until then I had had it easy. I breezed into drama school, breezed through three years of training. Then got an agent straight away. So I couldn’t work out why anyone couldn’t possibly want me. You just don’t think anyone is as ambitious as you are.”

In the last 18 months she has completed two film roles. A part in Woody Allen’s tennis saga Match Point gave her the opportunity to work with the Hollywood great. Is she a fan? “Oh, very much so. It was an amazing project to work on, although it wasn’t easy. The way he works – which is basically that he doesn’t give out scripts; you only get the bit your character is involved in – that’s quite difficult. On my first day I walked into a room where two of my co-stars, Penelope Wilton and Brian Cox, were sitting. Only then did I find out that they were playing my parents.”

Opening later this year is Land Of The Blind, a political satire in which she plays the daughter of Ralph Fiennes. “He was really nice,” she enthuses about her co-star. “I’d heard he was quite intense, but I found him very funny and great to work with. Some actors can be a little patronising or keep themselves distant from everyone. But Ralph really wanted to talk about things and about the relationship between our characters, and was very giving in that way.”

In the meantime, the coming months will be taken up with looking for her next role. One project she is hoping will finally get off the ground is Heaven and Earth, a period feature film set in 1830s’ Cape Town which is to star Oscar winner Rachel Weisz. Having done a few stage plays (including playing Desdemona in Othello, and starring in Pains Of Youth at BAC), does she prefer television and film to theatre?

She pauses. “Well, I’m happy to explore them all. I haven’t done a play for about two years and I’m slightly nervous about that because I know when I do get back on stage I shall have bad stage fright and be quite rusty. But then with television, perhaps more than film, you don’t always get a lot of time for rehearsal or have the chance to play around with the script, so rarely do I feel I have done my absolute best.”

So it seems there’s much more to come from this exciting young actress, which can only be good news for us.