Scottish actress Freya Mavor is best known as Mini McGuinness in E4’s Skins. Ahead of her episode tonight, she spoke to IdeasMag about dealing with rejection, crying on cue, and why she thinks of Mini as her little sister...
I overheard two girls talking about the Skins audition on a bus.
I’d always been a fan, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity, so I travelled down to Bristol from Edinburgh for the open audition. It was like some horrible gruelling X Factor-esque experience, with a massive queue of eccentric adolescents dressed up in almost-Halloween costumes. People had brought their friends and family along but I went on my own because I wanted to see it as going for a job. I think they were looking for people who were low key and natural.
A massive part of being an actor is rejection. You can have as much talent as you want, but if you don’t fit in with the other people aesthetically, [you won’t get the part]. So when something does come through it’s amazing because you think, “Oh I’m not shit, I can do this”. I get freaked out about what I’m going to do next and my mum always says “If you want to do this then you’ve got to think about it in the long term – as a career.” It’s not, “What am I going to get in the next couple of months?” but, “What am I going to be doing with the rest of my life?”
After a year of doing Skins you become more at ease in front of the camera, you start to understand the tricks of the job, but at the beginning the pressure and people’s expectations are quite daunting. When you read a scene and it says, “Mini breaks down crying and everyone’s watching her”, you’ve got this big scene lodged in your mind and you’re so panicked.
Last year there was one scene where I was supposed to break down and I just couldn’t do it. We were filming outside, people had flocked to watch it and there were these young kids shouting things at me like “Oi blondie, pull your dress up”. I was trying to get upset and I couldn’t – I was just getting really angry. Then about two days later we had to do a scene, which was sad but didn’t necessarily say, “she cried” and I spent the whole afternoon sobbing.
In my episode, which is out today, I do a lot of crying. It’s a sad storyline for Mini this year and I was very wrapped up in it. Mini’s different from myself (well I hope so) – she’s incredibly possessive and manipulative and can be quite bitchy at times, but she’s insanely vulnerable, almost shockingly so, she’s hiding all these repressed feelings due to her dysfunctional family and her best friend dying and on top of that she has something else – which you’ll see if you watch tonight.
I didn’t see Mini as a representation of myself, but as a little sister. Whenever anything happened to her I would get annoyed or angry, as if she was part of my family but wasn’t me. After upsetting scenes I’d go off into the bathroom and I’d always do this thing, where I’d look at myself in the mirror and say, “It’s okay now”. Or if I had to do a horrible scene I’d get angry with myself and be like, “What the f**k are you doing?” It helped distance myself from the character, while remaining intimate and close.
Freya Mavor was talking to Rachel Segal Hamilton.
Episode 5 of Skins 6 is on E4 tonight at 10pm. Watch a trailer here.
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