POP Magazine No18 - Hannah Murray InterviewHANNAH MURRAY is trying to convince me that she’s just an ordinary girl. ‘I’m not famous,’ she says, quite incredulous at the suggestion. ‘I mean, really, I can go out shopping and no one gives me a second glance. Ever. OK, occasionally people come up in the street and say, “Hi, you’re the girl from Skins, aren’t you?” But it’s not on a daily basis. Or even a weekly basis!’
This, I tell her, is rubbish. She’s been on Richard And Judy. What on earth is she talking about?
‘That was a surreal experience,’ she gasps, cringing at the memory. ‘To be honest, the first time I met them was only about a minute before we started recording live, and their “living room” is just a patch of carpet in this massive studio! It’s very odd.’
But what about the NME Awards? Surely being invited to those signifies some level of success? ‘No one knew who I was,’ she says, desperate to underline her anonymity. ‘It was really embarrassing. Honestly, Skins is the first and only thing I’ve ever done and most people don’t have a clue who I am. I knew who Jamie T was, the guy I was presenting to, and I quite like him. But I’m not an NMe kind of girl, I’m afraid. I kept having to ask everybody what they did.’
At the moment, everything feels a bit surreal. Sudden notoriety from playing Cassie, the slightly ethereal skinny one in Skins, has meant this ordinary girl now gets to do the most extraordinary things. She may live with her parents (’I'm just a kid’) and profess to know nothing about fame, stalkers and what it’s like being a MySpace icon, but things bode well for this striking-looking teenager. Like a younger, prettier Sally Thomsett from Man About The House mixed with a bit of Juliette Binoche, a dash of geekiness and a dollop of Sarah Moon, Murray’s peaches-and-cream features and preternatural blondness are almost certain to get her noticed. It’s all down to Skins of course, the Channel 4 teen drama that launched her career and set new standards in creative swearing and wanton drug-piggery. Yes, Cassie’s got problems (an eating disorder, unrequited love, suicide tendencies - all normal teenage stuff), but this is balanced with some serious soul-searching, fabulous lines and an inexplicably magic aura that follows her around like a haze of patchouli. The programme’s strength has been in creating credible, funny and non-patronising characters, and young Hannah has possibly, unwittingly, nabbed the best one of them all.
‘I thought Cassie was a good character, very recognisable,’ she agrees. ‘I think all of them are, really. They’re archetypal without being stereotypical. I can recognise bits of myself and bits of my friends in all of the characters to some extent.’
She’s a troubled soul though, Cassie, isn’t she? Aside from her aversion to eating and fondness for modelling mashed potato, she’s clearly a few knives short of a picnic. ‘I made a conscious decision not to do any research on her eating disorder because it would be too easy to label her anorexic,’ she says seriously. ‘I think there’s a lot more to her than that. With stuff like this, you can read loads of statistics and get too bogged down. Cassie has a problem, but it was something that I didn’t want to generalise about it.’
Then there’s the depression, the self-loathing, the attempted suicide. How on earth do you carry all the baggage around?
‘I don’t think that’s what the show’s about,’ she says firmly. ‘It’s not trying to give people answers, and in no way is it trying to preach to anyone. To make us into role models would actually be quite insulting. Teenagers are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. They don’t want things to be “issue-based” with a helpline phone number flashing up at the end of the show. What they respond to is not being talked down to.’
She’s happy to discuss her character, but the young Bristolian is not so relaxed when it comes to talking about herself. Even more painful for her is the experience of seeing herself on the small screen. ‘Oh it’s horrible,’ she grimaces, ‘I can’t stand it. I’m so neurotic and mad about it I hide under my coat an the floor. I hat hearing my voice and I’m so critical of everything, it’s all rubbish.’
She can blanche all she likes, but most viewers can’t get enough of Cassie. More importantly, they can’t get enough of what she’s wearing either. ‘Wardrobe were very keen for me to use my own clothes, and I do wear a lot of my own things on the show,’ she admits. ‘The thing is, I can’t really wear those things any more because I don’t want people to see me and think I’m still in costume! I wore a pair of white sunglasses once, but now I can’t wear them because I look like a twat. It looks like I’m going out to be recognized and that’s something I really don’t want.’
Those white specs were very on-trend.
‘Oh, I don’t know anything about on-trend. Someone did tell me they were a bit “Kurt Cobain meets Marc Jacobs”. I pretended to know what they were talking about.’
Credit and Thanks to SKINSIS
