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And there’s a pride in both cities.” Grainger’s accent, a little softer in person than it is in Strike, gets slightly stronger. A strong cultural heritage and a strong cultural identity. There’s a similar musical and literary heritage. “I think Dublin and Manchester are so easily transferrable, because Dubliners and Mancunians do have a similar vibe. They had to decide whether to shoot it in Dublin and pretend it was Manchester, or shoot it in Dublin, and let it be Dublin. “Well, yes.” She got a phone call from Hyde saying that funding wasn’t quite working out in the UK. And I’ve never had chance to portray that on screen.”īut the film is set in Dublin. You are my friends, you are people I know.

“I knew all of the references to locations in Manchester. I’m from Manchester, it’s set in Manchester, and it’s very rare that you have a chance to be part of a project that is so close to your roots.” She felt as if she already knew Laura and Tyler. The two of them seem particularly devoted to Animals, an adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s cult novel, which Sophie Hyde, the director, sent to her to scope out her interest. We are in a hotel room in central London, and Grainger has just returned from a long lunch with Shawkat. Grainger as Robin Ellacott and Tom Burke as Cormoran Strike in The Strike. I remember a Skype meeting once, with some director, and he asked: ‘Can you do contemporary?’ I was like: I’m not speaking to you from the 1900s right now.” She gestures towards her outfit – jeans and an off-the-shoulder top. “Then it was like, you can be the posh lead. And then someone was like: ‘Oh, she can do RP!’” She says this in a fancy accent. “For most of my teenage years I was the northern best friend.

I don’t know if that’s just the fashion of the industry right now, or how people see me.” For a long time, Grainger was the go-to girl for a corset or a bonnet: she was Lady Chatterley she did The Borgias she appeared in Anna Karenina, Bel Ami and Jane Eyre.

CB STRIKE CAST TV

“It’s amazing now how all of the scripts I’m being sent are contemporary TV or independent film, it’s not period drama. Recently, she has been playing the private-investigator-in-training Robin Ellacott in the BBC’s wildly popular Strike series, which has adapted the Robert Galbraith (AKA JK Rowling) thrillers for Sunday-night primetime, and she is also starring as Anna Paquin’s lover in Tell It to the Bees, a 1950s-set slice of magical realism. She is composed yet slightly reserved, and has the air of someone suited to being in the company of adults from an early age. “I’m still in touch with people from that first job. Grainger, who grew up in Manchester, started acting when she was five, in the BBC’s All Quiet on the Preston Front. “So on set were my best friends, their babies, and we were filming a scene about the choice between having a baby or not, and turning 30.” The director, she says, was excited about the synchronicity. “And they have an argument about joining the baby club or not.” Two of Grainger’s best friends, and their own babies, had flown out to visit her. She and her co-star Alia Shawkat, who plays the more hedonistic Tyler, were filming a scene in which they visit Laura’s baby niece for the first time, nursing bone-crushing hangovers. “It was this weird day,” Grainger recalls of her 30th. “It’s – what are you doing with your life?” Though the film is set against the sort of dedicated partying that is outrageously fun, until it isn’t, Animals is also a subtle, unsettling look at the expectations placed on women by themselves, their friends, their families and lovers, as well as the world around them. “I think there is a pressure on people,” Grainger says about reaching that age. In Animals, she plays Laura, a 32-year-old writer trying to balance the odd pressure of how she feels she should be behaving, and how she wants to behave. Holliday Grainger turned 30 last year in Dublin, while shooting her new film.

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