The Olivier Award-winning actress on making the jump from the West End to primetime TV in BBC One’s new period drama, Miss Austen
Patsy Ferran and her sister like to share a joke: that they are people who were born at the wrong time. “We only have to go into an art gallery to see ourselves in the faces of a lot of 18th-century portraits of women,” she says. “We look quite old-fashioned. Perhaps it’s the small mouth and chin, the big eyes and the soft jaw. All my life people have told me I have a face for period drama.”…
Ferran and I are talking over Zoom. She’s currently in rehearsal for the West End transfer of Reb ecca Frecknall’s Almeida production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she plays Blanche DuBois opposite Normal People star-turned-Hollywood heartthrob Paul Mescal (the production sold out in a record-breaking two hours).
Zoom is often a barrier when it comes to interviews, but not with Ferran, who is a live wire, keen to talk and physically expressive, her hands darting around like sparrows. “I don’t tend to have my own words handy,” she says apologetically and unnecessarily. “I express myself physically because I lack the word I need in that moment.”…