Actor Tamara Lawrance: ‘Less and less do I relish playing hyper-disturbed characters’

The award-winning actor, best known for her roles in The Silent Twins and Time, on learning from her characters, writing poetry and trying to live in the moment

As an actor, Tamara Lawrance, 29, has a rare intensity, a centred stillness. In person, the Londoner comes across as warm and exuberantly quick-witted. Her career took off, in 2017, as Viola in Twelfth Night at the National Theatre and as Prince Harry’s girlfriend in BBC Two’s King Charles III. In 2022, she and co-star Letitia Wright both won a British independent film award for their outstanding performances in The Silent Twins. More recently, she starred in Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing BBC drama Time, playing a mother who killed her baby, and is about to return to the stage in The Comeuppance, by the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, about a high school reunion – a funny, smart and profound take on a post-pandemic world.

You’re playing Ursula – how do you see her?
Ursula is coming to terms with a change of identity. She has been diagnosed with diabetes over lockdown and is partially sighted. One of the play’s themes is how people deal with who they were alongside who they are now. She is the host, the anchor, the person who wants to relive her youth. Characters always teach me something about myself. Less and less do I relish playing hyper-disturbed characters… I don’t want to kill anyone for a bit!