It’s going to be quite a year for Bella Maclean. After breaking out in Netflix’s Sex Education last year, her name will be on everyone’s lips this fall as one of the stars of the highly anticipated Jilly Cooper adaptation Rivals. But before that there is the small matter of her National Theater debut.
We meet a few days before London Tide’s opening night, and she is remarkably calm. “Strangely enough, I had a great time during my national debut,” she says. Her mother, on the other hand, did not – and after two sleepless nights she snuck out to a preview, much to her daughter’s chagrin. “I feel guilty for being ungrateful for her being there… all you want is a supportive parent.”
We are in a small room several floors up, in the labyrinthine concrete corridors of the National Theater on London’s South Bank, looking out over the Thames. It is an appropriate position as we discuss this new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, a story related to the ebb and flow of the great waterway that runs through London.
Writer Ben Power has filtered the hefty tome – it runs to more than 800 pages – into just over three hours of stage time, focusing on a story about social inequality that, despite being written in the 1860s, is far too has to say about the London of the United States. Today.
It’s something Maclean, looking elegant in a dark striped suit, has thought about a lot, and refers to an essay Power sent the cast about how Dickens’ London is our London. “The housing crisis, food poverty, the postcode lottery of opportunity would have been familiar to him,” she reads from her iPad.
‘Just as the city consumes, it saves, so Dickens believes, and our play believes, that the city can save us. In fact, he believes that the community and connections the city makes possible may be the only hope we have to save each other.”
After reading more, she breaks off, “Isn’t that great? It relies on such a clear connection between then and now. We have just come out of the pandemic, and there is a cost of living crisis and homelessness is high. If Dickens were standing here today, he would think that not much has changed.
“But I love the idea of hope and so many people in the city – from all walks of life – and we are connected because we live in this place. We can choose to use it as a community or fight against it.”
She plays Bella Wilfer, promised to the richest man in London, who then dies before they even meet, leaving her without prospects and forced to live with her poverty-stricken family. ‘She is really volatile, so open-hearted, stubborn and feisty. If you were to immediately judge her, you’d probably say, “brat.”
But she is more than that: Maclean also describes her as “spirited and feisty, full of life and colour” and in the spirited conversations with her family she was able to draw on her experiences, especially with her older twin sisters. “I thought, ‘That’s my family.’ My family is energetic and loud; for me it’s about shouting to be seen.”
Maclean, with bright, sparkling eyes and always quick to laugh, struggles with how best to answer some questions. It’s her first solo interview and she wants to choose the right words. “My brain is so sloppy, I jump around so much.”
And yet she takes it all in stride, as she does on the opening night of London Tide just days after we meet, where she shines on the Lyttleton stage, radiant and charismatic, taking the audience on Bella’s journey of redemption from stroppy teen to empathetic heroine. The piece has music by PJ Harvey, and Maclean has been praised for her singing as well as her performance.
Since this is her first interview, there is little information available about her, and much of what is there is wrong. Those ‘Everything you need to know about Bella Maclean’ pieces don’t seem to know much either. Most peg her as 23. “I don’t know where anyone got that from, even people in the cast keep saying that after reading it online. I’m 26.”
Maclean tells me she grew up in New York, where her parents lived for work, until they moved to East Sussex at the age of 10. She went to London for drama school at the age of 18 and has remained there ever since. ‘after having spent some time in the east.
She was in all the school plays “from day dot” – but it was playing Jean Valjean on “16 or 17” that really got her going. She laughs: “It’s funny because we thought it was the best thing ever and we took it so seriously, but on second thought….”
Still, the role made her think, “There is no greater feeling than this,” and a teacher told her that if she wanted to do something, she had to commit to it. So she applied to study drama and won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Before the end of her senior year, Maclean got a role in the musical Spring Awakening at the Almeida. Initially the pandemic put it on hold, but they eventually continued the show between lockdowns.
Her first TV role came in the BBC longrunner Silent Witness – her burgeoning career was almost derailed by an uncontrollable bout of giggling in a bleak scene – and the following year came Sex Education in which she played Jem, a character who helped with the Troubles from her father. farm. “There was pressure, but I didn’t have a lead, so there wasn’t a lot of pressure. It was a great storyline in a show that had been going on for ages. She was just a sweet character, she loved nature and horses.”
For the role, Maclean told her agent she could drive (as many actors do to polish their Spotlight profile). “That was a mistake,” she laughs. “I remember getting on a horse, galloping, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to fall off and break my back and this is going to be the end of a very short career.’ I was meant to be brilliant at horse riding. They edited me brilliantly.”
If Sex Education was a gentle introduction to blockbuster TV, her next show will almost certainly take her to the next level: Disney+’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals. Set in the world of independent television in 1986, it features drama, excess, sex and the evil antics of the social elite.
Maclean plays the daughter of Aiden Turner’s Declan and Victoria Smurfit’s Maud. With a tender heart and a strong will, it is up to her to keep the family together. The actor lights up when the show comes up in conversation.
“It’s so fun to talk about it,” she says of what appears to have been riotous, campy fun, even though she hasn’t seen a single completed episode yet. “The actors are pissing inside pissing. Nobody takes themselves seriously. But it also has courage. It was so joyful to wear those 80s clothes, and the sets were just ridiculous. Even eating the classic picnic food from the eighties. It was so much fun.”
Its 1980s feel may not extend to the views of the time, and Disney has promised it will be told through a 2024 lens. “If you want to make it, you gotta make it as it is, otherwise it would Jilly Cooper isn’t. But you can eliminate some comments that don’t really exist in today’s society. You can take away the more misogynistic characters.
“There is a lot of heart in the show and the characters have empathy. These are not brutal, misogynistic caricatures. The female characters have more status than they otherwise would have. It’s still cool and campy. It will be all that…’
Some of Jilly Cooper’s books focus on women’s bodies: get thin, find a man. “Yes, it’s not,” Maclean says firmly. “A lot of that is being taken away. It’s not that. There are comments about that. You get the best of Jilly Cooper.”
And the actor didn’t really realize what a big deal starring in a Jilly Cooper adaptation would be until she told her mother. “It’s a real cult classic that people read under their covers. It’s so moving.” It’s clear that Bella Maclean, along with the show, is on the verge of becoming something big itself.
London Tide is at the National Theater until June 22; nationaltheatre.org.uk