Broadcasting: Karla Crome
Misfits, Carnival Row and Am I Being Unreasonable? star Karla Crome opens up about her complicated relationship with her hair, her love of complex characters and her desire for more nuance.
It’s October 2012. I’m wearing New Look denim shorts with 100 denier tights underneath. My hair is straightened to an inch of its life, my eyebrows are non-existent and I’m still clinging on to my cracked pot of Dream Matte Mousse. I am yet to learn how to use eyeliner in a way that doesn’t make me look like I’m auditioning to play Jack Sparrow and I am sipping my warm Echo Falls (through a straw) as I pose for a photo that will end up on my Facebook page in an album called ‘freshas, Leeds first few weeks :p’. The next day I will be hungover from our #madnightout, my flatmates and I will drag our duvets into the communal ‘living room’ (two rock hard sofas with fairy lights strewn over them), heat up some Uncle Ben’s microwaveable rice in a mug, order a Dominos instead, and decide which new show to start. Today, it’s E4 comedy-drama Misfits, and there are two new characters joining us in series four: Jess, the smart, sardonic misfit with X-Ray vision, played by Karla Crome, and Finn, played by Nathan McMullen.
Twelve years later and I am sat opposite Karla in Somerset House, a week before she starts shooting the next series of Daisy May Cooper’s Am I Being Unreasonable? She plays Lucy, an interfering mum who is introduced to us in the pilot of the first series as ‘a bit of a c*nt’. Which Karla herself is far from. Her career is brilliant and varied across stage and screen - as well as leading roles in Misfits, The Level (ITV), and Prisoner’s Wives (BBC), Karla most recently starred opposite Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne in Carnival Row (Amazon), and she will next be seen in Toxic Town (Netflix) and Lazarus (Amazon). She is also developing her own series as a writer.
Karla is very generous with her time and her conversation. We discuss what drives her creatively and personally, her mixed race heritage - her mother is Black Caribbean and her father white English, her relationship with success and fame, as well as how she hopes to speak to her children about identity.
“The Execs on the show said they wanted me to have a weave. It’s sad because deep down I wanted them to say that. I felt and sometimes still feel more presentable and professional with smoother, straighter hair. But the message is a really damaging one; it’s saying that, regardless of the narrative or the story, your natural appearance is just not good enough.”
You’ve worked with so many talented people, and you’re about to start filming on the second series of Am I Being Unreasonable? What’s it like working with Daisy?
Working with Daisy is so brilliant. She improvises a lot. We do have a script but we’re given so much freedom to play with it. I think she gets a lot of joy out of making people laugh. There’s this particular scene where she has diarrhoea, and the camera wasn’t even on her but she kept making these ludicrous fart noises. It makes being on set so much fun.
Before we started recording, you said ‘back when I was focused on acting’ - does that mean you now identify more as a writer than an actor, or is it more complicated than that?
I always wanted to be an actor, and I am very happy with my acting career. It has offered me far more than I could ever have hoped for, but the thing about acting is that success is so often equated with being recognisable in the public eye. I remember going to the dentist once and she asked what I did. I said, ‘I’m an actor’. She asked if I’d been doing it long and what I’d been in. She hadn’t heard of a few of the shows and she looked at me with a pitiful look and said, ‘it’s a hard job isn’t it’. I thought that was so interesting; because she hadn’t seen me in anything, she presumed I was struggling. I have a suspicion that if people don’t recognise you as an actor, they don’t think you’ve had a successful career. It’s funny - I’m not going to the dentist and asking them whose molars they’ve pulled out!
As a writer, people aren’t really keeping tabs on who’s written what, unless it’s a really recognisable soap or you work in the industry. So I think the way I introduce myself depends on who I’m talking to. Writing came after acting for me, but I’m definitely both of those things now and I love the variety that offers me. The writing world treats me with more respect, whereas there’s an assumption that you can’t be successful as an actor if you aren’t famous.
Does social media play a part in that? I feel like there is so much pressure on everyone, but particularly those in the public eye, to demonstrate a life that is full of ‘success’ and ‘happiness’.
Definitely. I deleted my social media accounts in 2018 and only reactivated them at Christmas because my mum kept nagging me to get some freebies. She was like, ‘come on, you can get a free carpet!’. Honestly, I’d skin a turd for a fiver (!) but in order to engage with that side of social media you have to curate your entire life with the aim of it being aesthetically pleasing enough for brands to want to work with you. I can’t do that. The reason I came off it in the first place was because I found it deeply distressing. I was constantly comparing myself. I remember seeing some images of a friend on a hen do. It was a similar time to when I was getting married and I thought, ‘oh no, she has more friends than me’. It’s that sinking feeling you get just from looking at someone else that is so damaging. For me, anyway. I don’t think it’s good for us. It’s a false intimacy. I also feel like there is no room for nuance on social media. And there’s even less room for people to say, ‘I don’t know’.
Do you think being mixed race makes you more conscious of nuance, because you’re inherently aware of what it means to occupy multiple spaces?
It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, actually. I grew up in North London, on the Hertfordshire commuter belt. The primary school I went to was relatively white, so I guess I spent my formative years seeing myself through the prism of whiteness, occupying a space in which I was a minority. It was only when I went to high school and entered more of a diverse space that I started to really engage with my ethnicity in a way I hadn’t before.
It was around then that I started becoming conscious of my hair. My mum didn’t really know how to do hair. She used to brush it with a Eurocentric comb and that was that. To her credit, she always encouraged me to be independent, to pack my own lunch and do my own hair. But I just didn’t know how to take care of it, so I was bullied for it looking ‘messy’. I wasn’t just a target for white people, but the other black kids in my school used to call me names too. I hated it. I remember my dad seeing how upset I was and telling me to just chop it off. But I wanted to keep it. For me, it’s such a part of my female identity. I wanted it, but I wanted it to be ‘right’. So many of those nasty comments came from boys as well. It made me feel really unattractive. I think those feelings can stay with you. You can work on them, but they never really go away. I definitely still have a complicated relationship with my hair.
As an actor, your appearance is so intrinsic to the roles you play. Have your feelings about your hair impacted your work?
I remember doing a CBS show in the US called Under The Dome. I’d always had a weave in my hair on Misfits, and I remember asking the hair designer on this show whether there was the possibility of natural hair or braids. It was an adaptation of a Steven King novel and the concept was that everyone was trapped underneath a dome that falls from the sky, so how anybody would be getting their hands on a blowdryer and a relaxer kit is beyond me! But the Execs on the show said they wanted me to have a weave. It’s sad because deep down I wanted them to say that. I felt and sometimes still feel more presentable and professional with smoother, straighter hair. But the message is a really damaging one; it’s saying that, regardless of the narrative or the story, your natural appearance is just not good enough.
I just booked my eldest son’s fourth birthday party, and my friend and I were laughing because he was so adamant that he didn’t want anyone to sing to him because it’s embarrassing. We thought it was funny at the time, but it got me thinking about my own relationship with being seen. As an actor, it is gratifying for me for people to watch what I do and enjoy it. But outside of that, I think I just want to blend in. We were on holiday recently and I had these new shoes on. My partner and my son were like, ‘they’re nice’, and I immediately took them off! I definitely have a thing about not wanting to stand out, but when your hair literally defies gravity, that’s pretty difficult.
You have two children, the eldest is four and the youngest is one. How do you hope to speak about race and heritage with them?
I am working that one out. I definitely want them to socialise and spend time with people from different backgrounds. I don’t want them to be afraid when they are confronted with a face or a point of view that is different to theirs. I want them to feel like they can ask questions - I want to encourage discussion and openness to difference. I want them to be welcoming.
I think perhaps it will be different for both of them. Our eldest is olive-skinned with curly hair, but the youngest has blue eyes and blonde hair. I hate this word, but he could definitely ‘pass’. It’s interesting to me because he won’t experience the world in the same way I have. Will he be privy to certain conversations that I haven’t been? My partner is white, and I remember him telling me this story. He’d hired a removals van, and he was sitting next to the driver when something came on the news. The guy turned to him and said, ‘if these black people don’t like it, then why don’t they go back to where they came from?’. His presumption was that Adam, as a white man, would automatically agree with him. He wouldn’t have said it if I was in the car, but it scares me that he was so confident in his belief that Adam would have the same opinion as him. Knowing that people say stuff like that is frightening.
What stories are you interested in telling, both as a writer and an actor?
I’m interested in the complexities of people and people’s flaws. Shows like I Hate Suzie that are full of nuance and complexity appeal to me. There’s nothing I wouldn’t watch in terms of genre, as long as there’s a human story at the heart of it. I remember when I got one of my first TV roles - I was playing a pig-rearing farmer in Yorkshire. I was so happy that my casting had nothing to do with my race or the way I looked. It felt freeing to start my career like that. It still does in a lot of ways, but I do also want to explore what it means to be Black and British through the characters I write or the roles I play. I want to talk about my version of what that is. I get a lot of inspiration from other people’s experiences, and I think we need more stories about the nuance of being mixed race. Stories can be incredibly far-reaching.
Loved this.