Interview - Michelle Ryan, actress

Published on Sunday 27 December 2009 11:14

She's ticked off soap stardom and Hollywood. Now Michelle Ryan is tackling a gritty TV hospital drama . . .

It has just gone 11am on a gloomy Glasgow morning and Michelle Ryan – who only got to bed four hours ago – bounces into the hotel bar, a picture of health and vitality, with hair, teeth and eyes in the proper places and all of them shining like new.

The voluptuous figure which the editor of Nuts doubtless dreams may one day grace his front cover – but bad luck, never will – is hidden behind a dress of sophisticated, grown-up purple but she looks fantastic.

Truly, she must be bionic. A word Ryan uses often is "energy". She has loads. In Bionic Woman, the robo-scientists famously intone: "We can rebuild her." But, first day on set for the remake, she must have had the show's producers wondering if she could already out-run a car; that the bodyparts super-upgrade wouldn't be necessary. Five minutes into our chat she's describing some karate moves and I'm starting to feel a bit wabbit.

"I do Krav Maga, which is the self-defence taught to Mossad (the Israeli secret service]. You have to stand in a darkened room with your arms folded across your shoulders and this guy will creep up on you and you have to disarm him. First time, I was fine with the baseball bat because it's big. The gun was OK, once I got over the initial shock. But my agent was really worried about the knife. I told him it was blunt but he was like, 'No, you're only going in there with a rubber one!'"

Straight after our meeting, Ryan, 25, will be hitting the streets of Glasgow in search of confrontation. Let me rephrase that: she'll be finding a class where she can work on her technique legitimately and safely. She's over believing Krav Maga made her indestructible. "I'd walk round Vancouver late at night thinking I could take on anyone. Not very smart, and just as well I'm a fast runner."

So could she immobilise me with her little finger? "Maybe with a punch," she giggles. "One exercise would smash a septum through a skull if full force was used."

Ryan is here to shoot a telly drama. Gregory (Black Watch) Burke's first for the small screen, One Night in Emergency centres on a young couple's hospital nightmare.

• Ryan co-stars with Kevin McKidd in One Night in Emergency

Kevin McKidd is frantically trying to find his wife (Ryan) in wards and corridors that turn ever more creepy and desperate. Much of the filming has been at night, which explains the weird hours she's keeping.

As Peter Forbes, McKidd is mugged, assaulted by a patient, ejected several times by a hulking Eastern European security guard with an eyepatch, dragged into a widower's grief, trapped in the morgue – all before a great twist at the end.

Ryan in Bionic Woman mode would surely cope better than McKidd with all that BBC Scotland film chucks at him, but if anything she has the harder job as Penny: much of the time stuck in her hospital bed, she has to act using only her eyes. They're big and brilliant blue but it's a tall order.

She likes a challenge, though. "I just decided, after all the action roles I've done recently, that I wanted to play someone who wasn't tough and closed-off and, well, not really human. Penny is very vulnerable and that intrigued me."

Hard/soft, tough cookie/victim, fembot/flesh and blood – Ryan would seem to deal in extremes as an actress and this may not be entirely unconnected to the fact that she covers a similar range. One minute she's demonstrating fearsome karate chops, the next she's admitting that while she admires Helen Mirren for her class, Reese Witherspoon for her independent attitude, Eva Mendes for her style and Julia Roberts "because she just sizzles" – her favourite actress, the one she's loved since childhood for Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, is Julie Andrews.

The key extreme for her is girl/woman. Ryan was just 15 when she got her big break in EastEnders and for her the lurid storylines, to say nothing of the lurid tabloid fascination, exaggerated the traditional melodramas of the teen years.

So let's begin our tale in Walford. As Zoe Slater, she sold Puffas down the market – Kat's kid sister, wasn't she? Daughter, actually, only that would emerge later, around the time she got snagged in a love triangle with her boyfriend and his dad "Dirty" Den Watts (come on, keep up) which involved rape, abortion and, oh yes, murder. Ponder that

triple-whammy for a moment; Krav Maga wouldn't be much of a defence. So the trauma was pretend, but Ryan was an innocent London lass from a nice family with a fireman for a dad and her mum a beautician whose favourite things quite possibly included raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

"EastEnders was an incredible time," she says. "Great experience but hard work and really intense. They tell you when you go in that your life will change but I wasn't ready for that amount of scrutiny. Every week back at work the chat would have been about the Sunday papers because there was always a story about one of us. You couldn't do anything without it being written about. You could barely breathe."

The story about Ryan was that in 2002 she was found on a notorious London suicide bridge after a nervous breakdown. "Not true," she insists, "but I can't pretend I coped brilliantly with everything.

What really used to annoy me was the identity thing, when mine would get lost in Zoe's. I'd be like, 'Hang on, I'm acting – that's not me.' When you're a teenager and you're still trying to work out who you are, that can be tough."

Did she ever feel the soap was robbing her of her teens? "No, but it did seem like I was having to get through two adolesences."

Ryan says that, away from Albert Square, she tried to live as quietly as possible, "well under the radar". In hindsight, maybe she was too quiet. A soap veteran told her: "You can enjoy some of the perks of the job, you know." She took to the premiere circuit, allowing others to tell her what to wear, but just felt awkward, gauche. Then she craved the relationship she'd denied herself.

"You realise you want friendship, intimacy, but that became another issue. I'd always been quite shy and, despite what was happening to me on the screen, I still was."

Eventually Zoe took herself off to "Ibeefah" where she perished in a boating accident and Ryan took herself off to Hollywood, more specifically its Canadian annexe Vancouver, for Bionic Woman and the iconic role of Jaime Sommers originally played by Lindsay Wagner and which at one time seemed set to go to Jennifer Aniston.

That's some leap, I say; almost bionic. No it's not, she says. Then: "Gosh, yes, I suppose it is." Ryan is very capable of uttering knowing things but also, still, the odd innocent thing. Anyway, she's grateful to EastEnders for the tremendous start it gave her career. Does she still tune into events down in the square? "No, but I never watched when I was in it."

Maybe she was destined to play someone like Jamie, leaping tall buildings with a single bound. "While I was still at EastEnders I was working with an American dialect coach. Sometimes I think I never really fitted in there, being much taller than everyone else and having this angular, athletic figure."

Certainly it was wasted when she was hunched over her market stall or buckled by misery. "In the States I think they go for my look more."

For Bionic Woman they did. "Often I got asked if I was all real," she adds. "I guess over there so many women aren't." She surprised the producers by deliberating over the role. "They were like, 'What do we have to do to get you to say yes?' but I kept asking questions: 'Where do you see Jaime going? Will she be wearing skin-tight outfits?'" And, when the show went mega – 14 million

was the biggest audience for America's NBC since The West Wing – she astonished them by taking it all in her stride. "That was down to my EastEnders training," she says. "Bionic Woman may have been bigger in terms of budget and expectation, but I was prepared for all the attention."

She loved her character ("Zoe didn't have any backbone, Jaime was a woman") and the stunts. She loved everything about Hollywood and got to meet Whoopi Goldberg, even allowing herself to enjoy the attentions of Hollywood rakes like Owen Wilson. "A few times, actors would get their people to call my people and ask, 'Is Michelle dating anyone?' I like the openness of Americans and their enthusiasm; it's how their shows get made. But I never quite went out with Owen." So, is Ryan still single? "Not quite," she giggles. "I'm dating."

She must have been devastated when Bionic Woman became a casualty of the screenwriters' strike and got cancelled? No, she says: that's Hollywood. "I've read lots of books on the industry; I kind of know how it works." But then: "Well, yes, of course I was. But I try to be philosophical about these things." Maybe this is another legacy from EastEnders: while all around are losing their

heads, make sure you keep yours. Hers has always been a fairly sensible one: after her first big payday she bought a Mini and invested the rest. Still, Bionic Woman has been great for the profile.

"I turn down so much," she says, not meaning to boast. What kind of parts? "Quite a lot of semi-erotic stuff. My reaction is usually, 'Are you kidding me?' There was one American film recently which required lots of nudity but at least it was in context."

She's back in innocent mode with her bafflement at being offered such parts. But because she's been Bionic Woman and Lady Christina de Souza in Doctor Who she has a sexier persona: Lara Croft's wee sister, all real as well. "I guess so. I'm not saying I wouldn't play more daring parts but the scripts have to be good. I could quote you some of the dialogue I've been offered but better not. Really crass."

She has three movies coming next year, two involving Kidulthood's Noel Clarke, one that casts her as a femme fatale who gets to drive "really fast". Ryan reverts to the woman of experience again

when she describes how she could have easily followed the route chosen by many former soap starlets: always stepping out of limos and into gossip columns, reality telly, new single out soon. "It would have been quite easy and good for the ego. But anyone who's known me a long time would tell you that's just not me."

There can't be many one-time "soap stunnas" who are such keen students of acting, and who want to rave about forgotten talents such as Cathy Moriarty from Raging Bull. So, rather than squander her skills, she's determined to improve them with, hopefully, more action roles, a "razzle-dazzle musical set in the 1940s" and further challenges like One Night in Emergency.

She begins a story that's Sweet Michelle, about how she's been trying to talk the director into softening the film's ending, but quickly switches to Empowered Michelle to reveal how their make-believe, in a real hospital, has been played out near casualty teams coping with multiple stabbings – and how, even though she wasn't needed for scenes in the morgue, she's been steeling herself to go down to the basement and watch. "I couldn't not," she says, as she gets up to go.

The girl/woman balance is definitely shifting. "It's only now I'm enjoying the red carpet. I'm wearing what I want and it's fun. Before I was too young, or at least I was in my head. Finally I think it's

caught up with the rest of me and I'm delighted!"

• One Night in Emergency is on 4 January at 9pm

This article first appeared in The Scotsman newspaper on Saturday 26 December