Kate Dickie: ‘I genuinely believe that the witch is there’

Before the release of Andrea Arnold's Red Road in 2006, Kate Dickie had been a tolerably busy actor in Scottish theatre and mainstream telly. When the acclaimed picture, largely set in the Glaswegian estate of the title, made it into competition at Cannes, she didn't know to be excited.

“I didn’t know anything,” she says. “In competition? What’s that mean? People were saying ‘You’re not on IMDB?’ What’s that?”

Dickie arrived to discover a vast red carpet, looming steps and a thousand blasting flashbulbs.

“I was terrified. I got there and suddenly realised: this is not what I was expecting. I had a panic attack and refused to leave my room. Andrea and her partner had their arms around my waist and I was hanging on to the door. ‘I’m not going to come! I’ll just stay here.’ I was in tears. We got there in the end.”

Throaty cackle

Dickie is a chatty woman with a throaty cackle. She couldn't be lovelier. She still seems surprised that anybody would want to interview her. Yet she has done well since Arnold kicked her on to La Croisette. She appeared in Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Paul Wright's superb For Those in Peril. Like so many recent interviewees in this paper, she had a key role (as the neurotic Lady Lysa Arryn) in Game of Thrones.

"It's a funny thing," she says. "I don't get recognised for anything. I go about my normal life. But for Game of Thrones I suddenly do. And I was only in five or six scenes. It is just so massive. And my character was a treat to play."

It is not altogether surprising that Dickie got recognised. She has a wonderfully distinctive face with sharp features and penetrating eyes. Those looks are used to great effect in Robert Eggers's magnificent new folk horror, The Witch.

The picture, already a critical smash on the festival circuit, stars Dickie and Ralph Ineson as a pioneer couple in 17th- century New England whose lives curdle when their baby is abducted. They initially suspect wolves, but further outrages point to the presence of a witch in the woods.

I take it we are meant to be unsure as to whether the witch is a manifestation of the homesteaders’ disturbed imaginations. Did Dickie come to a view on that?

“I genuinely believe that the witch is there,” she says. “But I think Rob did like the idea of everyone going away with their own opinion on that. For me I had, for my character, to absolutely believe there is a witch in the woods. It is all to do with how women were perceived then. They were not able to express themselves.”

The Witch is soaked in the suspicion of female intelligence and sexuality that characterised the old religions. This is not the first film in which a young girl passing into puberty – in this case, the eldest daughter, Tomasin – triggers subjective horrors.

“Yeah. My character is reaching the end of all that. She’s probably had her last baby. And Tomasin is just coming into that. She’s a free spirit and she can’t contain it. That disturbs my character.

“This is an era – you think of Salem – when women were burned and drowned for being witches. It was interesting to consider how difficult it was to be a woman in those times.”

Those problems persist. Religions still constrict and confine female freedoms. “Oh, yeah,” Dickie says. “Scotland still has some very strict religions that hold to the Ten Commandments.”

Travelling family

Dickie was born in East Kilbride and raised in various far-flung bits of Scotland. Her dad, a gardener, had “itchy feet”, and the family found itself in Lanarkshire, Perthshire and Ayrshire. She eventually went to drama school in Glasgow and has remained there ever since.

I have heard actors say that a peripatetic childhood can be useful: they learn to adapt as the environment changes. Personae are altered to suit each new home. Dickie thinks this is true.

“I have a big mouth anyway. But I think it helps to develop your big mouth. You’re the new girl and you learn how to fit in quickly. It definitely did hold me in good stead.”

As she tells it, she had "10 or 12 years as a jobbing actor". She served her time on episodes of Taggart and Rab C Nesbitt. She played Electra and Andromache on stage. Red Road, a fierce realist piece, changed everything. Film opened up to her. Yet she has stubbornly refused to move from her home in Glasgow. The idea must have been raised.

“I’ve been tempted a few times,” Dickie says. “But London is so ridiculously expensive. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and I wouldn’t want to get involved in the whole school thing. And I really love Glasgow. It stole my heart. I meant to stay for just three years and I never left.”

• The Witch is on general release

TOIL AND TROUBLE: FIVE GREAT FILM WITCHES

The Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

The deceptively kindly hag with the apple fits the standard model, but it’s as the glamorous Queen Grimhilde that the antagonist really registers. Clearly the sexiest “of them all”.

The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Well, obviously. Margaret Hamilton nailed the role so perfectly that her performance became the standard witch archetype.

Gillian Holroyd in Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

The creators of Bewitched owned up that they modelled their creation on Kim Novak’s performance as a glamorous downtown witch in Richard Quine’s luscious sex comedy.

Mater Suspiriorum in Suspiria (1977)

Dario Argento’s best-known horror film concerns an ancient witch who hides in the lower reaches of a Black Forest dance academy. Star Jessica Harper claims the uncredited actor was a “90-year-old hooker”.

The Grand High Witch in The Witches (1990)

Angelica Huston will take no offence if we say she was born to play the senior witch (inset) in Nic Roeg's adaptation of a classic Roald Dahl novel. As agreeably nasty as all the best of that writer's work.