Sarah Greene: 'You have to be a little bit mental to be in this job'

The camera loves Sarah Greene, although it is not entirely clear if Sarah Greene loves the camera.

The subject came up on a spectacularly fine day in Dublin the other week when Greene had been confined to a windowless boardroom to promote the second series of Penny Dreadful, in which she makes her debut. Does she look back at her recorded performances? "No," she winces. "It's very hard. I find it quite difficult, like." (You can take the girl out of Cork, but…)

A stage actress of phenomenal ability, Greene graduated from the Gaiety School of Acting and won acclaim in several shows for Druid, Rough Magic, a star turn in the Abbey's Alice in Funderland, and, most recently, her Olivier and Tony Award nominated performance as Slippy Helen, Daniel Radcliffe's gleeful torturer, in Michael Grandage's production of The Cripple of Inishmaan. She is hardly new to the screen – Greene was the idealised Imelda Egan in the screen adaptation of Eden, played a stage of Christina Noble's life in last year's biopic and so memorably scaled Brendan Gleeson's belly in The Guard – yet film remains a particular challenge.

“I move my face so much, because I’m very much expressive,” she says, imitating a critique she has heard before. “I’m told a lot, ‘Stop moving your face’. Because on camera the tiniest movement tells so much and it looks really hammy. It’s all about portraying the thought, instead.” Film has now become the focus of Greene’s career, though.

She has a part in what has been widely referred to as "Bradley Cooper's chef movie" (John Wells' film is actually titled, with somewhat less pith, Adam Jones). And her time in New York, with meetings with Harvey Wienstein and photo shoots with Vogue, has brought her into contact with another realm of stardom. "Oh, I love him!" she trills when I mention Zachary Quinto, another actor with a well-stamped passport between theatre, film and television. "I hung out with him a little bit in New York.")

Missing the boards
"I do miss theatre, I have to say, a lot," she says. "I just wanted to make some money to look after my family, basically. I got to a point where I thought, now I have a choice. I can stay in theatre, or I can challenge myself and give this a go. And I want to challenge myself. I like to scare myself."

For frights she couldn't have chosen better than Penny Dreadful, the horror series created by John Logan for Showtime and Sky Atlantic which is shot in Ireland. Logan, the writer of the most recent Bond movies, Skyfall and Spectre, has a CV that covers historical fantasy (Gladiator, The Last Samurai), biopics (The Aviator) and franchise handling (Star Trek: Nemesis) with a revealing streak in theatre

adaptations: he adapted both Sweeney Todd and Coriolanus for the screen. (There are enough subtle theatre references in Penny Dreadful to provide the basis of a good drinking game.)

Penny Dreadful's mash-up of Victorian horror may seem close to a Comic Con fantasy – characters from Frankenstein rub shoulders with Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jack the Ripper and assorted occultists.

But from its knowing title on, it is the most clever and sincere tribute to horror currently on television, sensitively performed and sumptuously shot. The title sequence, crawling with insects and crucifixes, twisting with scarred torsos and the ethereal Eva Green, knows well the thrills of sexuality and body horror, transformations that come out mostly at night.

“That’s what the show does best,” says Greene. “We study these characters and watch them going through these struggles, whether they be sexual or psychological. There’s something much deeper and darker and more real about John’s characters, I think.” Indeed, Logan, who grew up gay in America and empathised with the outcast monsters of fiction, has spoken of such struggles as the reason for the show.

“Horror isn’t about death,” Logan said last year, “it’s about exaltation and transference and transformation.”

“These creatures are on the outside of our society,” says Greene. “I think a lot of people can relate to their loneliness. Because I think everyone just wants to be loved.”

That can also sound like the life of an actor, I suggest, a little facetiously, but she sees the logic. “I think that’s why he’s got such incredible actors to work on this. We all struggle with our mental health in some form or another, I think. You have to be a little bit mental to be in this job.”

Nothing doing
After Greene held the stage in Phillip McMahon's Alice in Funderland – an immense challenge of music and motion which she pulled off in six-inch silver stilettoes – she didn't work again for 10 months. She remembers giving a talk to incredulous Gaiety School of Acting students later. "Yeah. This is success. Sitting around for 10 months doing nothing. You do go a little bit insane with this. You do doubt yourself and question yourself. You go from massive highs and confidence boosters – when I was in New York I was buzzing around the place – to really doubting yourself and questioning everything about your personality."

What things scare her, I wonder.

“Poverty,” she says, without hesitation. “I’ve been there a few times and it is a scary thing. I’m not really scared of getting work. I gave up worrying about that a long time ago because there’s no point. I’m very much about living in the moment and taking each day as it comes.

I absolutely love my job and I feel I’ll always find work somewhere.”

That may be why she is remarkable sanguine about the vagaries of film.

Penny Dreadful, in which she plays Hecate, the bloodthirsty daughter of Helen McCrory’s spiritualist Evelyn Poole, is the biggest operation she’s been involved with yet. She treads carefully around revealing plot points or lines of dialogue. “You don’t want to piss off Showtime and Sky,” she says lightly. She also plays down any expectations of “something big” from her. “It might not happen, lads,” she smiles. Yet there are other ways to have power over your own career.

“Your choices are very important,” she says. “The only thing you have as actors are your choices; the option to say no to something. You don’t want to take on a really bad job and be terrible in something.

Especially in film, because if you’re bad in it, you’re bad in it forever.”

Naked fright
Surprisingly, Greene appears naked in Penny Dreadful and it is a frightful sight. She and her sisters appear as "night comers", ghoulish witches with bald heads and scrawny bodies in one of the show's typically effective riffs on attraction and sexual anxiety.

“Eight hours in make-up is what that took,” she nods. “It’s a body piece up to here, so it cuts right through my nipples.” Um. Ouch? “But then you’re covered. So I’m wearing a silicone bikini, basically.”

It's a refreshing change of pace from Game of Thrones or Vikings, other mainstream entertainments shot partly in Ireland that skew porny. "I hate gratuitous nudity in shows," agrees Greene. "It's very daunting because you feel you have to do it – that if you don't you're not going to get the job. And you don't need to." For any actor at the mercy of an industry, that's a becoming bravery. Some horrors are better avoided.