'This is a really determined single mother': Herself film tackles tale of housing crisis
Clare Dunne in Herself.
Clare Dunne was auditioning in New York a few years ago when she received a distressed phone call from her friend. The working mother of three had become the latest casualty of Ireland’s housing crisis, with notice to leave her rented home and nowhere else available. She told her friend she had no option but to declare herself homeless in a bid to get temporary accommodation.
“It was the beginning of the housing crisis where you'd go on Daft and there was nothing,” says the actor.
“This is a really determined independent single mother working her bloody arse off to get kids to school. But she's been made to feel so like a failure and so ashamed and has to declare herself officially homeless. I just felt angry on her behalf.”
Concerned, Clare took to Google and read about self-building, where she discovered Irish architect Dominic Stevens, who had built and designed a house for himself for €25,000 and put the plans online, assisting others around the world. “I found that very inspiring - and that’s kind of where the flash of the film came to me.”
The result is Herself, a powerful new Irish drama co-written by Dunne (with Malcolm Campbell). She plays the lead role of Sandra, a young Dublin mother of two who feels trapped and at risk in a violent relationship with Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson).
Searching for a better and more secure life, and offered a small plot of land by the woman she cleans for, Sandra endeavours to build her own home.
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd and released by Element Pictures, it’s a deeply moving tale of hope and resilience that showcases the screen acting and writing talents of Dunne, long established as a theatre actor. Following a busy period on stage, she felt a desire to be creative during a period out of work, and started writing.
Early in her career, she wrote and performed her own play in Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre. She gave out flyers in Temple Bar. Her dad became her stage manager. Family and friends worked the box office and helped with music. It was one of the happiest weeks of her life, she remembers.
“I'd had some gaps when I was living in London, when I was working in theatre. And I remember realising that it was those gaps that I found really tough sometimes, because you're in your 20s, you've left drama school, your whole thing is that you want to be an actor. Sure, your 20s are already existential, and financially hard, anyway.
"But when you're an actor, it's like: ‘Oh, my God, I'm not Saoirse Ronan so what am I going to do?’ At that point, I had realised that I just wanted to be happier when I wasn't acting. And I realised that I was a storyteller and that I was going to have to try and find a different way of being a storyteller.”
Dunne has a distinctive birthmark under her eye. In one scene in the film, her character tells her daughter that when she was in God’s pocket, he gave her the mark to distinguish her: “because there’s loads of Sandras in Dublin”.
It’s a personal line in a film that has been, you feel, a game-changer for Dunne. “I wanted to tell stories that actually meant something to me. And when it meant something to you, the buzz you got from it was amazing. I'm amongst a generation that was finding it hard to just survive the rent and the housing thing. I wanted to write something hopeful about maybe,I wonder, can we do it a different way?”
Though this is Dunne’s first screen role, she is a long-established theatre actor who has performed on such acclaimed stages as The Abbey and The National Theatre in London. It was during a heatwave in New York, where she was drying herself off backstage with wet wipes, that she turned around and saw Meryl Streep standing in front of her.
“That was when Meryl walked in for the first time and I was like ‘ah!’” she laughs at the memory. “I met her twice and both times I was in underwear having a baby-wipe shower. It's a very big tradition in New York that great actors come and see you. And the tradition is that they come and they visit the cast members backstage. I think it's really lovely. It's very personal.”
We will next see her in Kin, RTÉ’s upcoming TV series revolving around a Dublin family embroiled in a gangland conflict. “What I would say is that it's a really interesting depiction of that world. And I would say it's very different from anything that's gone before.
“When I first read the script, I completely got absorbed in it because I felt like I was actually in the inner world of characters that are dealing with this level of stress all the time, every day of their lives, and also the moral dilemma of it.”
- Herself opens in cinemas on Friday, September 10
- “Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. I just loved their conversation, and I really loved the middle one, the day in Paris. I rewatched them recently.
- “There was a documentary that really had an effect on my consciousness about the planet, called 2040. It’s basically a vision of the world in 2040. If we just switch all our resources now, and use all the solutions that we actually have right now, to make the world liveable for our children. It's really educational, and inspiring. I think a lot of it chimed with some of the themes in Herself, which is trying to tell your kids a different story of the world as well.”
- “I loved the rock and roll of it all, the fight sequences. I wanted to be Uma and used to do extra modules of stage combat, dreaming of my chance to do the same some day.”
- “Cold War is an epic deep love story with one of the best one-shot sequences of all time when Joanna Kulig dances drunk in a bar.”
- “Soul is funny AND philosophical and a film I can put on with my little niece but I secretly love it because it is so rich with deep ideas and big laughs. It’s got Tina Fey in it too. Bloody love her.”
