“Can I be X Factor? I’ll tell you who’s going to win.” Daniela Nardini picks up the list of this year’s Bafta Scotland nominations and scans the names on it, her own included. As she hums and haws her way through the categories, though, it’s quickly apparent Cheryl Cole has nothing to worry about. “Acting In Film. Probably Peter Capaldi,” she tells me. Why? “Because I haven’t seen either of the others.” Ah.
Still, that’s a choice. She doesn’t quite get that far when it comes to the category for Acting In TV – Male. “I choose Robert Carlyle because I like him.” Then she starts reconsidering. “I like Bill Paterson too,” she says, “and I like David Tennant. But Doctor Who and The Unloved? They don’t go together. How can you compare them?” So her choice is? “I don’t know.”
When it comes to her own category, though, Acting In TV – Female, where Nardini is nominated for her role in Annie Griffin’s one-off comedy drama New Town, she is on firmer ground. And the winner is … “Lindsay Duncan. I’d give it to her. I mean, she played Margaret Thatcher. She’s great.”
Now here’s the question. Is such self-deprecation the mark of a pessimist or a realist? We’ve been chatting for half an hour now on the pleasures and pitfalls – mostly pitfalls – of the acting life and I’m swinging towards the latter. In the bar of the Hotel Du Vin in Glasgow, her afternoon cappuccino is now just smuts of chocolate and froth on the table. And yet Nardini doesn’t strike me as a cup-half-empty type of person. What we have here is an intelligent, capable woman who is all too clear-eyed on the difficulties that go along with her chosen profession. Ambition vies with frustration within her, and this afternoon the latter appears to be winning.
Don’t get her wrong. She loves what she does. She loves that she’s been nominated (she has already won one Bafta Scotland award, and lost one too). She’s thrilled that New Town, which was rather lost on BBC Four when it aired, is getting some recognition. But she’s not sure how much impact awards have on acting careers, especially during such conservative times for drama on the small and big screen, when executives are reluctant to spend money. Unless, maybe, it’s an Academy Award. “If you win an Oscar, I’m sure it’s going to help pump up your wages,” she says.
Creative hunger
Unfortunately Hollywood hasn’t come calling of late. And maybe not too many others have either. Nardini, of course, made her name as the hedonistic Anna in the twentysomething lawyer drama This Life more than a decade ago. Check out her page on the Internet Movie Database, though, and the sparseness of TV and film roles in recent years is apparent. Part of this is through choice. She moved back to Scotland a couple of years ago with her partner, who’s a chef. She’s a mother now, of a two-year-old girl called Claudia, so the idea of spending six months in, say, Manchester filming when she lives in Glasgow isn’t appealing.
Then again she spent this summer working in London at the Donmar Warehouse playing alongside Rachel Weisz in a stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire because it was something she really wanted to do. Generally, she says, you get better lines to say on stage than on the screen, not that she’d want to devote herself entirely to the stage. “I like a good mix,” she says. “That was three months, and that’s enough for me. Ideally that would be once a year and then a nice telly and then a little film. Can you sort it for me?” I tell her I’ll see what I can do.
What her time at the Donmar offered her was the chance to be creative, work with good material and be stimulated. “It’s that hunger to be creative, really. And that’s why people fall in love with acting. That’s why they get the bug and decide to devote their life to a frustrating, head-butting pursuit.”
She hasn’t got to the point, though, where she thinks to hell with it, let’s do something else, has she? “Quite often I go, ‘I can’t be bothered with this.’ I was up for a nice part just a few weeks ago and I thought, ‘God, that could really work. I could fly up and down to it. It’s in London, there are really good actors involved, it’s a good script.’ And it didn’t work out. I know who’s got the part and we’re so different. Someone went, ‘Yeah, that’s a better balance.’ And you kind of think, ‘Oh God, this is so tough.’ Because I thought I’d get it. I walked out of the meeting and they were literally going, ‘That was fantastic.’”
Does any of this sound like self-pity? It shouldn’t. None of it is said with bitterness. If anything Nardini is amusing company. She’s simply honest about her situation. “I do think – I’ll get in trouble for this – there are more options out there for men,” she says. “Scottish men in particular seem to be quite popular in Hollywood. It’s not the same for women, especially older women. Well, I’m not going to call myself an older woman, but I’m not 25.”
Nardini talks about Rachel Weisz and the way she’s been able to mix and match her roles, arthouse movies and blockbuster fluff. “She’s got good taste. She knows what she wants to do. She knows what’s going to keep her in designer shoes. That’s kind of ideal, but it’s not happened to me. When you look at these people, there are relatively few of them who are really in charge of getting these scripts coming in and going, ‘Yeah. No. Yeah.’ Rachel says she didn’t work for a year, and I thought, ‘It wasn’t because there was nothing – it was through choice.’”
Meagre choice
Of course it’s lack of choice that is Nardini’s problem. She’s a jobbing actor who would simply like more jobs. More theatre for a start. She was approached a while back to consider Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and, though it didn’t happen, the idea appeals. On television she’d do anything Annie Griffin writes, she says. What else? “I’d love to do a really good period piece. Jane Austen. I don’t think I spring to mind [as an obvious choice].”
The spectre of This Life, she thinks, may still be shaping her career. She’s still too associated with the character of Anna. “In a way you’re grateful, but you’re also kind of backpedalling a bit. ‘No, I can do other things.’ And the only way you can quite often do something different is in theatre because they’re just not going to cast me in certain ways in television because of the way I look – strong and tall. They don’t see me as the delicate, helpless type.”
That’s probably because she’s neither of those things. She’s just chafing at the limitations that surround her. But she has a plan. Inspired by her Donmar experience, she thinks there might be a very good part for her in the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo. And now she’s thinking it’s up to her to get it off the ground. She can be quite lazy and complaining. Now, perhaps, she thinks it’s time to be proactive. “Lots of people do it,” she insists. “I think you do have to take a bit of control even if it doesn’t work out.”
What does Daniela Nardini want? To do what she’s good at.
The Bafta Scotland Awards will take place at the Glasgow Science Centre on November 8. For the full list of nominees, visit www.baftascotland.co.uk.
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