Erin Doherty: ‘Being a visible gay woman is really important to me. I want people to know that’

After playing Princess Anne on two seasons of The Crown, Erin Doherty realised that people assumed she had a similar — if not quite as regal — background.

Nina Gold, who scouted Doherty for The Crown, had long thought that “playing a whole different kind of social class is one of the most difficult things to do convincingly”, she says, until “Erin really blew that theory of mine”.

The actress, who is 29, actually grew up in Crawley, a town in south England, with her father originally from Co Donegal. But it took some time to “not be seen as this upper-class actor”, she says. When she read the script for Chloe, a tense six-part noir about a working-class con woman, she signed up immediately.

In the limited series, which comes to Amazon Prime Video on Friday, she plays Becky, an office temp worker who becomes obsessed with the life and death of Chloe (Poppy Gilbert), a wealthy and glamorous redhead she used to know. To investigate what happened to Chloe, Becky poses as Sasha, who speaks with the right upper crust accent and wears the right designer clothes to be accepted by Chloe’s friends. Like the narrator in Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, the spectre of Chloe becomes a fixation whose reality, it turns out, Becky knew nothing about.

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Doherty plays Becky’s escape from a drab life caring for her mother, who suffers from early onset dementia, into a seemingly better life as Sasha with equal parts guilt and relish.

Becky, a compulsive liar with a severe Instagram addiction from southwest England, is the “polar opposite to Anne”, Doherty says. After her role on The Crown, period pieces about blue bloods kept landing in her inbox, but Chloe is Doherty’s first television role since playing the princess.

Growing up in Crawley, “I was always like, ‘Right. How am I going to get out, then?’” Doherty says. Her acting ambitions were sparked by films such as Kramer vs. Kramer, which her father showed her when she was a child. He made her a syllabus of classic films, and encouraged her to study performers such as Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro.

On weekends, her father would ferry her between drama club and soccer practice. “Women’s football is massive now,” she says, but it didn’t feel like a career option at the time. She recalled former England captain Faye White presenting an award at her football club. The teenage Doherty was star-struck, but was dismayed when White explained that playing professional football wasn’t her full-time job. Doherty decided to pursue acting instead.

When she left school, Doherty auditioned for a number of drama schools, and didn’t get into any of them. After an acting foundation year, she was accepted into the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, whose alumni include Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and Doherty’s The Crown co-star Olivia Colman. But “I didn’t really know anything about the legacy”, she says.

Prestigious London theatre schools, like the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, seemed “massively intimidating”, she says. “There was a vibe I felt hugely uncomfortable with.” Nestled in a leafy suburb, the Bristol Old Vic was like a school inside a big house. Its cosier atmosphere suited her better.

Although Doherty had spent countless weekends and summer holidays performing, when she was 19 it suddenly struck her that she had never seen a play. “So, I booked my ticket,” she says, to see a play by Mike Bartlett at the National Theatre.

“Where I came from, it wasn’t a casual thing,” Doherty says. But at the theatre, “there were people there in jeans and a T-shirt”. Since then, “there’s something about plays and theatre that just shakes me a different way”, she says. In September, Doherty will play Abigail Williams in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the National.

“We’re all dealing with whether or not we feel worthy of things, like me going into the theatre,” Doherty says. British class anxiety, which Doherty says she still experiences, is at the heart of Chloe.

Alice Seabright, the show’s creator and writer, spent part of her childhood in France, and says she was interested by how, “In the UK, people are just so attuned to where people are from and people’s backgrounds.” As Becky hides her real accent and background, her deception exposes the “world she’s entering as being full of fictions — also full of lies”, Seabright says.

With her tendency toward self-loathing, Becky might be dismissed as unlikeable. When she was casting the role, Seabright remembered something film-maker Mike Nichols once said: Go with the person your character becomes by the end of the film. “There’s a warm energy to Erin that is the opposite of who Becky is when you meet her,” she says. “But it’s who she is underneath.” After casting Doherty in The Crown, Gold also chose Doherty for a role in the upcoming period feature Firebrand.

Doherty is drawn to material with a serious side. “I really, really care about why people’s stories need to be told,” she says. “Whenever I go home, my dad is always like, ‘Are you going to do anything funny?’” She developed this quiet intensity at drama school, she says, where she was “very, very serious” about her studies. “I was the person who didn’t go out at all,” she says. “I didn’t have a relationship. I didn’t really have many friends. The friends that I had were people who I admired.”

Chloe also explores the intensity of female friendship. Doherty never had many friends growing up, she says. But in a coffee shop overlooking the River Thames, she is effervescent company with an impish sense of humour; it is difficult to imagine her as a loner.

“I love people, but I think I get overwhelmed by how much of an impact they can have on your life,” she says. Her last best friend was in primary school, and when they were then sent to different subsequent schools, “I remember being really, really heartbroken by it,” Doherty says. “Honestly, I’ve not had a best friend since.”

Through the characters of Becky and Chloe, Seabright interrogates what happens when young women put one another on a pedestal, and feel “like that person is throwing back an image of you that makes you feel bad about yourself”, she says.

To viewers who grew up online, that dynamic might feel familiar. “The image of someone can loom over your life, even if you’ve never met them, or very rarely meet them,” Seabright says.

Doherty describes the parasocial relationship between Becky and Chloe, conducted via Becky’s obsessive scrolling of Chloe’s social media, as relatable, and says she understood how an obsession can swallow you. “I think it’s really easy to become hooked on things, on people, on outlooks,” she says, despite people having “an inner world that is so different” from what they present to the world. With a relatively modest (for a Crown actor) 113,000 followers on Instagram, Doherty’s fans likely have their own parasocial relationships with her. She is ambivalent about social media.

“There are things that I do want to be a part of,” she says. “Being a visible gay woman is really important to me, and I really want people to know that.” Doherty met her girlfriend, actress Sophie Melville, while they were doing a play together called The Divide in 2017. Two years into their relationship, Doherty posted a photo of the pair holding hands on the red carpet to Instagram.

She finds that public aspect of being an actor “jarring”, she says. Dressing up for red carpet events is “like a little ticket”, she says. “As long as you’re wearing that outfit, you’re allowed to be here.” But the person inside the designer outfit still wonders what’s going on, Doherty says: “The extravagance of it is quite unnerving.”

However much her job requires Doherty to shape-shift and enter rooms that might be more familiar to Sasha than Becky, you can still hear the actress’s hometown in her lively, frank way of speaking.

“Thankfully, my accent is one that people feel at ease around,” she says. — This article originally appeared in The New York Times.