In Conversation With Pippa Bennett-Warner
Pippa Bennett-Warner, the London-based actor, who you can catch in Gangs of London and Roadkill talks about how she came into performing, what fascinates her about projects and reflections on the past year.
Pippa was photographed by Jonathan Bailey; Interview and Photo Editing by Alison Engstrom
How have you been navigating this time period from both a creative and mental health standpoint?
I started okay at the beginning because everyone thought it was going to be like two weeks or something, so it was like, oh I am fine, two weeks at home, I can do whatever! I live alone, so the first six weeks I didn’t see anyone I knew and didn’t have any human contact. When you don’t have human contact for that long, I realized that you just take for granted the ability to hug somebody or even shaking someone’s hand, even though that can be very formal and transactional, touching somebody is so important.
Completely. I’d love to learn more about your background! When did you realize you wanted to be a performer?
I started knowing when I was little. My sister went to an all-girls school and she played Oliver in the school production of Oliver. She must thave been ten and I was seven. I remember watching her and thinking it was the coolest thing that my big sister was playing a boy and singing and dancing. That gave me the bug and from there I did musicals because I sang and danced. I did this before I found straight acting when I was 16. For my A-levels I did the tea scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, I played Gwendolen. I completely fell in love with it and how you can transform into a different person and lift text off of a page. I left school and I auditioned for RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and also a few different plays including a Broadway show that was coming over called Caroline, Or Change that was going to be at The National. I got the place at RADA and I also got the job. At the time I was so green and didn’t know what anything was, but I knew RADA was a pretty big deal and a good school but The National, I didn’t have a clue. People said you go to RADA to get jobs at The National so you should do the job, but I wanted to go to school. I ended up doing the job and going to school the following year. I spent about two years doing theater when I graduated from drama school and then segued into telly.
Since you made your debut in theater before transitioning to the tv and film, How do the two differ for you in terms of level of difficulty?
I love theater but they are different skills and they have pros and cons. The great thing about being on the stage is that there is this repetition and you get to do it every single night and have the audience there. On telly, if you make a mistake you can do it again. It’s a different community and culture even though you are doing the same thing but I do approach it in a different way. When I do stage I have to be very physically fit because you are running around for three hours. On telly you have to be disciplined because you are being picked up at 5am and you have to stay until 8pm.
You have an exciting early winter with the release of Roadkill and Gangs of London. When it comes to projects that you are involved with what interested you the most?
As I get older I think it’s definitely the writing first and foremost and then the character and the arc of the character. I think that’s the great part about telly is that you get to play these parts over eight hours and you get to go somewhere with them as opposed to an hour and a half in film. The people involved are also important—on Gangs of London Gareth Evans was at the helm, so you just knew that you were in safe hands because he is the action god. On Roadkill it’s David Hare who is the most wonderful writer and has written the most amazing parts for women in the series. The world is also important because within five or six pages, you know if you like the script or not, I tend to find. With Gangs, I was jus submerged into his first two pages.
Can you talk more about Your character and plot Gangs of London?
I play Shannon Dumani. There are two families that Wallaces and the Dumanis and they run the London underworld. Shannon is one of the daughters in the family; she is in interior designer and she runs her business alongside the Wallace organization. She is a single mother with a son named Danny, who she absolutely adores. At the beginning she is quite sweet, tough, very loyal and daddy’s girl—I always describe her as the quintessential gangsters daughter. She sits in her ivory tower and she does what she is told because her father is quite a scary guy. Over the course of the season you start seeing things about Shannon that weren’t so obvious at the beginning and as an actor, that’s really fun to play.
In August you were part of an ITV miniseries called Unsaid Stories short films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. How important is it for you to combine art with activism?
I see it as me doing my bit, contributing and helping to bring more awareness to things that really need to be talked about. That was such a special project, I worked with Paapa Essiedu, my on-screen brother—we have played brother and sister three times—it was weird because we had to flirt with each other (laughs). I thought the script was really good and that ITV did a great job because they aren’t great at being very representative and they did this collection. Each film on the production side was primarily black. This is the year we have all been waiting for; it’s been so horrid, and so uncomfortable but to move forward and make those positive steps for change, I really feel like this year had to happen.
What have you learned about yourself during this period?
I learned to slow down, I am not sure about you but BC, before corona, I was constantly rushing, having to get somewhere, blah blah, but now I let myself take a bit more time and to sit with things longer. You can’t go anywhere, fine, but it’s not just about the physicality of going somewhere, it’s about in your head, constantly with a busy head. Now I feel like you can actually slow down, there isn’t this pressure from the outside world to be fast and quick. I learned taking a bit more time is okay.