“It’s just so mad” - Scottish actress Marli Siu on starring in two films at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival

Marli Siu appears in both Run and Our Ladies at this year's Glasgow Film Festival, which kicks off on 26 February.

It’s October 2019 and Marli Siu is having something of a moment. Sitting in the bar of a Leicester Square cinema, the Scottish actress is about to attend her second London Film Festival premiere in less than 24 hours. The previous evening she had the first screening in the world of Our Ladies, Michael Caton-Jones’s long-gestating adaptation of Alan Warner’s cult novel, The Sopranos, in which she stars as spiky choir girl Kylah and arrives on screen in a blaze of leopard print, belting out a cover version of the Buzzcocks’ Ever Fallen in Love With Someone (You Shouldn’t Have Fallen in Love With). Shortly after our interview she’ll do the red carpet thing again for the UK premiere of Run, the new film from Scott Graham, the Bafta-nominated filmmaker behind Shell and Iona whose new film casts Siu as a pregnant teenager newly dumped by the son of the film’s protagonist. Both are pivotal lead roles in major new Scottish productions and both showcase an actress coming into her own in exciting ways.

“It’s just so mad,” she says, draping her leather jacket over the back of the chair. “The coincidence of these screenings happening back-to-back, it’s such an honour.”

 It’s a double bill that’s being repeated at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival and one of the things Siu, who’s from Forres near Inverness, loved about making them was the chance to play girls that she recognised from growing up in a small Scottish town but had never really seen on screen before. In the 1990s-set Our Ladies, for instance, the fact that the raucous, hormonally charged, vodka-swilling gang of Catholic choir girls get excited about sneaking off and going shopping while on a day trip from Fort William to Edinburgh (where they’re attending a singing competition) is a detail that might seem frivolous, but is huge for the characters. “I could totally relate to the fact that they’re excited because there’s an HMV and a Top Shop,” she says. “You don’t have those in Forres.”

 Likewise, the Fraserburgh setting of Run – which is about an hour so from where Siu grew up – is depicted in the film as a trap for its 30-something protagonist, Finnie (Mark Stanley), an ex-boy-racer whose regret-filled life has taken on the mournful quality of the Bruce Springsteen songs that partly inspired Graham to write it (the title is a reference to Springsteen’s Born to Run). But it’s not a trap for Siu’s character, Kelly, whose pregnancy at 17 to Finnie’s son Kid (played by Anders Hayward) is something Siu didn’t want to play as tragic. “She’s not bothered that she’s pregnant and she’s young. She’s bothered that Kid has dumped her, because she loves him. For her it’s natural to fall in love and get pregnant. That’s what her parents did. She’s happy.

 “I’m just glad there are girls like this on screen,” she continues, referring to both films. “I don’t want people to look at them and be judgemental, like they just don’t have any better opportunities.”

 A lack of this kind of representation on screen is actually one reason Siu wasn’t sure if acting was even feasible for someone like her when she was in high school. Her mum is from Edinburgh, her dad was born in Hong Kong, and though she cheerfully admits that dance movie Step Up 2: The Streets is the film that made her want to become an actor as a teenager (primarily so she could maybe one day play a street dancer in a film), even after she began attending a youth drama group in nearby Elgin as a kid, she worried that her Scottishness might be a barrier to ever having a career. “Because I wasn’t English, I’d be like, why would they cast a Scottish actor to play an English character? I just assumed all the characters would be English or American and I thought I would just have to get a really good English accent because I just never really saw Scottish girls in movies.”

 That didn’t stop her studying drama and English at Napier University in Edinburgh, but she’s grateful that she’s had two big opportunities like this so early in her career. Her Our Ladies director, for one, has a good eye for talent, having given early lead roles to Leonardo DiCaprio (in This Boy’s Life) and, more recently, Black Panther star Letitia Wright (in Urban Hymn). But she was also desperate to work with Scott Graham too, having grown-up on his films. “When I went into that audition it was a bit surreal for me because I loved Shell so much. His movies, and those kind of movies, were always what I wanted to make and will hopefully continue to make.”

 Next up, though, is a role as a Ukranian hacker in the big new TV adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider teen spy novels. And after that, well, who knows? Siu is based in London now and is concentrating on working here, but she’d like to work in the US (she loves the films of indie director Derek Cianfrance, especially A Place Beyond the Pines). And while she’s not been to LA yet, she was in New York for the premiere of Run at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca film festival.

 Did she meet the man?

 “Robert De Niro? I was at dinner that he hosts. He was talking to someone on my table. He brushed past me but I just sat looking at him. So no, I didn’t get the chance to talk to him.”

   Our Ladies is at Glasgow Film Festival on 28 & 29 February and opens nationwide on 24 April; Run is at GFF on 1 & 2 March, opening on 13 March