Clare Perkins is loud in the way only an actor with perfect timing can afford to be: she never leaves a gap for a reply. After thirty years of supporting parts, Medusa Deluxe finally gave her the space, and she filled it.
Fi1m perspective
Cleve, the stylist Clare Perkins plays in Medusa Deluxe (2023), has a speech early on about what goes into a single head of hair: hours of it, unpaid and unnoticed. Perkins delivers it in a rising stream, reaching the end of a sentence, breathing, and starting the next before anyone can get a word in. It is a grievance, a boast and a confession all at once, and it tells you everything about a woman who has been in the trade long enough to consider herself owed. We laughed harder than we had at anything for weeks, and the reason was the timing. She never leaves a gap, so everyone else has to wait for her.
She has been doing this for thirty years, mostly in other people's films. Ken Loach's Ladybird Ladybird (1994) and Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies (1996) came early, and she has said the improvised way of working on Saul Dibb's Bullet Boy (2004) mattered to her. Between them came the long soap years, as Denise Boulter in Family Affairs and Ava Hartman in EastEnders from 1997. The theatre took over from the 2010s, at the National, the Royal Court and the Young Vic, and then the screen came back for her all at once: Censor (2021), The Outlaws (2021), Medusa Deluxe, Silo (2023).
The parts she is given are nearly always the outspoken one: the activist, the rival, the woman who says the thing. The danger is that the type arrives before the person. In Stephen Merchant's The Outlaws, Myrna and Darren Boyd's John are handed the political argument and told to have it, and the writing does not always give her more than a position to play. Perkins plays it with more patience than the scripts always earn, and it is her patience, not the lines, that turns Myrna from a placard into someone you would want on your side. Medusa Deluxe suits her better, because Thomas Hardiman asks nothing of Cleve except to be herself at full volume for ninety minutes, and Perkins does it without repeating a note.
Start with Medusa Deluxe. The murder is the least interesting thing in the building and she is the most, and at home she is exactly as loud. What she has not yet had is a film that belongs to her from the first shot to the last. On the evidence of Cleve, she would not run out of things to say.
Biography
Clare Perkins is an English actress. Born in London on 18 August 1965, she trained at Rose Bruford College.
She is known for her film roles in Secrets & Lies (1996) and Medusa Deluxe (2023), in which she played Cleve. Perkins has also appeared in television series including EastEnders (as Ava Hartman), Holby City, Silo (as Carla McLain), The Wheel of Time, The Crown, Censor (2021), Bodies (2023) and The Outlaws (2021).
