The actor famous for playing Gerri Kellman on starring opposite Mark Rylance on the London stage, her recent emergency operation, and her thoughts on the US election
When J Smith-Cameron tells me that she wishes we’d been able to meet in a bar rather than a rehearsal room near Waterloo station – we’re on a sofa beside a galley kitchen, listening to the sighs of a cranky immersion heater – I’m caught between believing her, and assuming she’s just playing the trouper. If it takes one to know one, she does indeed strike me as a martini kind of a woman; like Gerri Kellman, the character she played with such brilliance in the TV show Succession, I can just picture her biting decisively on an olive in the low-lit gloom of a Manhattan hotel. But this Thursday evening, she also looks tired, a bit fuzzy at her edges. It’s 6.15pm, and she has been rehearsing Seán O’Casey’s voluble play, Juno and the Paycock, all day. In her shoes – she’s wearing trainers, with a black jumpsuit – I’d already be on my way to a hot bath, an episode of something schlocky and an early night…