INTERVIEW:She enjoyed a lucrative career as a model in New York, but Monaghan native Caitriona Balfe was happy to leave it all behind for an acting career in LA, she tells PATRICK FREYNE
SO I’M A LAWYER who works for the CIA and I’ve hired Sylvester Stallone, who is an expert at designing and finding flaws in maximum-security prisons,” says Caitriona Balfe, describing what sounds like a bizarre fever dream.
“Go on,” I say, feeling like a psychoanalyst.
“And I’m there in a room with Sylvester Stallone, 50 Cent, Vincent D’Onofrio – who’s one of my all time favourite actors because I love Full Metal Jacket – and . . .” She cracks up laughing (so do I – she has a very infectious laugh). “And it’s definitely one of the most surreal moments of my life so far. This is actually my life now.”
Balfe has recently made the move from being Ireland’s most successful international model to being a Hollywood actress. She’s already featured in a small role in JJ Abrams’s Super 8, and she’s one of the stars of the Bryan Singer-produced web TV sci-fi series H+, which launched on YouTube this week. As for the aforementioned scene, it’s from the action flick The Tomb, which also features Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Stallone and Schwarzenegger!” says Balfe, laughing in disbelief) and which will be released in 2013.
Born in Monaghan, one of seven children of a Garda sergeant, she was pitched headlong into the world of modelling at the age of 19 when studying theatre at DIT in Dublin.
“I was with a few people from my college and we were collecting money for multiple sclerosis at the Swan Centre in Rathmines. Derek Daniels from Assets approached me and asked if I would come in and see them. Then I worked a little bit in Dublin part-time, and a scout said, ‘Come to Paris,’ eight months later.”
She spent most of the past decade as a model. “The thing about modelling is that while I was very lucky and it afforded me some great experiences in life, it’s a very limited job and a very limited experience,” she says.
“You’re kind of put in this box. Some people love that and get great satisfaction and fulfilment out of it. It was never something that I wanted to do. It was never a dream of mine and I found it very stifling and limiting. I get very frustrated at not fulfilling my potential.”
She stresses that for some young girls, modelling is more than simply stifling. In 2009, her friend and fellow model Sara Ziff produced a documentary called Picture Me, in which Balfe features and which documented some of the seedier sides of the industry. Ziff subsequently established the Model Alliance. Balfe is on its board.
“The industry is very unregulated, and what we’re trying to do with the Model Alliance is to make it a better and safer place for young girls to work. Girls as young as 14 or 15 are sent off on their own to strange cities without the language. I was lucky I didn’t start until I was older. You’re literally sent off with a map to traipse around a city you don’t know, and you can find yourself in these terrible situations. Now, when you’re doing well they always look after you better, but it takes a bit of time to get to that point, and generally you’re older and wiser then anyway.
“It’s an industry that permeates everything. People see advertisements in the newspapers and in magazines. It’s everywhere. There’s a responsibility to make it safe and fair. It’s crazy that there are labour laws that protect 90 per cent of the workforce but have no correlation for models at all.”
Balfe lost hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to her when the Italian agency Paolo Tomei went bust in 2003. “I love that that information is out there,” she says. I point out that I got the information from an article she wrote herself for the Model Alliance and she laughs. “Yeah, I got absolutely shafted by an agency some years ago, but that often happens and there are no legal avenues to pursue as a model because in many countries the job doesn’t have a legal definition. It’s very hard to get any sort of protection.”
It’s no surprise then to find that Balfe has no regrets about leaving modelling behind three years ago for the relatively safe, unionised and defined worlds of film and television.
“I moved from New York to LA and enrolled in an acting class,” she says. “For a year I didn’t work. I was very fortunate to have money saved from my modelling and I just sort of studied. Then about a year and a half ago a friend of mine, an agent, said, ‘Do you mind if I send you out on this thing?’ And it was an audition for Super 8, and I loved it. Then H+ came next.”
In H+ she plays Breanna Sheehan, a shadowy scientist who works for an Irish biotech company. This would be a tribute to the sterling work of Enterprise Ireland if the company didn’t then go on to develop a special internet implant which malfunctions and kills a third of the human race.
“When I read the script I instantly rang my elder sister Deirdre, who I thought was in bioengineering but apparently what she does is more pharmaceutical,” she says, laughing. “She was a bit insulted that I didn’t understand what she actually did. I loved the script but I’m so not a sci-fi fan. I didn’t even know what an OS was. I was like, ‘Oh, operating system!’ I was completely oblivious. I have to give a whole presentation in one of the episodes and that was fun, I can tell you.”
And soon after signing up to H+ she got the full science-fiction treatment when she went to the ultra-geeky San Diego Comic Con in 2011 to promote the show. It was, I imagine, quite different from Paris Fashion Week.
“I’d never been anywhere like that in my life. There were lots of Trekkie costumes. The people-watching was amazing. It was really good fun. I particularly loved where they had the comic book artists painting and drawing. That was so fascinating to me.”
She loves film, particularly, she says, the work of John Cassavetes and the early films of Martin Scorsese. As well as H+ and The Tomb, she’s also due to feature in a movie called Crush alongside Sarah Bolger (“She is awesome. We’re both playing American, so couldn’t talk to each other on set in case the Irish came out”) and a short film by Drake Doremus. And she also likes to write. “I say that I don’t know much about sci-fi when I’ve actually just co-written a sci-fi script, which I’m shopping around at the moment.”
She says she loves film sets, from the “family atmosphere” of the H+ set in Chile to her enjoyable experience with those grand dames of action heroism, Schwarzenegger and Stallone, in New Orleans while filming The Tomb (“They were just so generous and funny”). For her, there’s no comparison between this brave new world and the one she’s left behind.
“In acting you really get to funnel the work of all these amazingly talented people into an amazing cathartic experience. I have one acting teacher who says that acting is the time in your life when you can tell the truth beyond anything else.” She laughs.
“I know I’m being really actor-y now. The thing is, I wanted to do this all my life so any time I’m on set I have a Cheshire Cat grin on my face, I’m so happy.”
Watch H+ online at youtube.com/ HplusDigitalSeries.
H+ will run for 48 episodes with the final instalments debuting in January
