on the festival circuit. Scanlan has a healthy attitude to the general absurdity of prizes – “you can’t quite put the model of sport on to the arts, this sort of runners and riders … it’s not a sport, because it’s about how it hits the heart, and the senses, and that is subjective” – but if the renewed focus on the film means than more people see it, then great.
Scanlan grew up in north Wales, where her parents ran a hotel. She had discovered acting at school and went to the University of Cambridge – not her first choice, she says, but she was rejected from everywhere else – because of its drama opportunities In 1980, she was one of her college’s. What was that like? “It was,” she says, pausing while she searches for the word, “frankly, an ordeal. I had a few feminist teachers when I was at school who were really influential on me.
Scanlan did join Footlights, the university’s comedy theatre club, but soon left it for a more serious drama club. “Don’t think I’m not aware of the levels of privilege we’re talking about here,” she glaughs. That choice of drama over comedy at that moment proved fairly momentous in terms of her career, which is to say that it stalled it.
Scanlan seems to have very little vanity, particularly in her work. In After Love, especially, her face is raw and close up; there is one moment when she stands in the mirror in her underwear and surveys her body, grabbing her flesh. “The age on the face, and rolls of fat and stretch marks, that’s telling the story about this woman’s experience,” she says. “I do think that our lives are in our bodies, our experiences, and therefore, whatever that is, I try not to be judgmental about it myself.