The Olympia Theatre in Dublin is packed and buzzing for a Saturday matinee performance of 2:22 – A Ghost Story. The audience is a noisy bunch, here for a good time, attracted by the show’s strong word-of-mouth appeal. The hugely entertaining play has enthralled audiences in the West End of London, in Hollywood and in Australia. “Sh*t just got real,” someone in the row behind me says as the dramatic denouement is about to be revealed. It’s not a remark you normally hear at the theatre. At the end, “Shhh, please don’t tell” is projected in big letters on the stage. Protecting the plot twist is the kind of communal conspiracy that satisfied audiences around the world have been happy to go along with.
Laura Whitmore, the Irish television presenter who’s one of the stars of 2:22, knew nothing about the show when she first went to see it, in London. “And that’s the best way to go to it,” she says. We’re sitting in Maureen’s Bar, at the back of the theatre, an hour before she’s due onstage with her three castmates for a preshow warm-up. “It basically involves having a bit of a rave.”
Whitmore is wearing a black denim boiler suit; a gorgeous sapphire-and-ruby ring flashes from her finger. “I bought it for myself when I had my daughter,” she says later. We talk about 2:22’s thrilling plot twist. She says it brings people back for a second and even third viewing, so that they can reflect more closely on the action and dissect the play for clues. After the show Whitmore sometimes meets friends in a nearby pub; she loves eavesdropping on excited audience members as they discuss what they’ve just seen.
In 2022, when the former MTV and Love Island presenter made her West End debut in the play, which was written by Danny Robins, she played Jenny, a new mother convinced that the sprawling home she and her husband, Sam, are renovating in a recently gentrified part of London is haunted. “It was amazing to be doing it in the Criterion Theatre. I’d come out after the show and Piccadilly Circus was right there. Real bucket-list stuff,” she says. In this Dublin run, Whitmore sparkles as Lauren, a heavy-drinking psychiatrist, whose builder boyfriend, Ben, is played by Jay McGuiness, formerly of the pop band The Wanted. “Lauren was the role I wanted to play when I first auditioned for the part, so I’m delighted,” she says.
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The cast has always been unashamedly starry. Lily Allen, who won a Laurence Olivier award for her performance, played Jenny in a previous run. Donna Air and Stacey Dooley are currently starring as Lauren and Jenny in the West End version.
Whitmore is delighted to be back home. She grew up in Bray, Co Wicklow, the daughter of a single mother, and studied at Dublin City University. She moved the whole family from London to Dublin for eight weeks to do the show and says getting to spend that chunk of time here was a big part of the appeal. Her husband, the Scottish comedian Iain Stirling, is working remotely from their Dublin base, writing and recording voiceovers for Love Island – he is the voice of the reality TV show’s UK and US versions. The couple’s three-year-old daughter, who has so far been mostly based in London, is going through what sounds like a sort of national immersion therapy, including Irish-dancing lessons. “We’re having the best time. She’s fully immersed. She’s more Irish than me now,” says Whitmore, laughing.
She describes parenting as “another full-time job on top of my full-time job, but it’s also the best thing I’ve ever done”. A grafter with what she calls the “Whitmore work ethic” handed down by her working-class parents, she feels more efficient since becoming a mother. “It’s made me wonder what the hell I was doing beforehand. The amount of stuff I get done in a day now, like, before 10am ... It’s also made me not afraid to say no to things I don’t want to do.”
Although some might be surprised by Whitmore’s acting career – she wrote and starred in a short film, Sadhbh, a few years ago – she sees it as a natural progression from television. James Corden and Drew Barrymore are examples of performers who straddle both, she says. “I’ve always loved drama.” As a teenager studying journalism at DCU she auditioned for Totally Frank, a Channel 4 series about a girl band, narrowly missing out on the part. “My mum was delighted, because it meant I finished my degree, but I was devastated at the time.”
Whitmore, who is a qualified drama teacher, was a member of the drama society at DCU, playing Lady Macbeth in “the Scottish play” – she has the thespian superstition of not mentioning the name of that Shakespeare play in a theatre – and when she first moved to London, as a younger woman, she took a Shakespeare course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. More recently she toured the UK in Not Dead Enough, a play that also came to Dublin for a week at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.
“I love storytelling,” she says. “And I’ve always loved the stage. When I studied abroad in Boston as part of my degree I joined the drama club and ended up doing a play over there. I’m always drawn to actors. They’re my people ... and it’s why I love live telly. I’m an adrenaline junkie.” She also has family history at the Olympia: “My auntie and my brother both worked here in the past, so it’s gas.”
Whitmore was on a work placement at Newstalk at the end of her degree when she was one of 3,000 people who entered a contest to become the new face of MTV. To her shock she was chosen. The job meant moving to London for a year in 2008. She never left the city, and spent seven years with the music station.
Since then she has worked solidly, with presenter credits on programmes such as Love Island, Celebrity Juice and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! She’s had her own chatshow, Laura Whitmore’s Breakfast Show, on ITV and a popular slot on BBC Radio 5 Live. Last year she acted in her first feature film, an indie production called A Mother for an Hour, which also stars Frances Barber and Asia Argento; it’s due out next year. She has made acclaimed documentaries, most recently about incel culture, with more to come. “I’ve just had something else commissioned today which I’m excited about,” she says. At the tail end of the pandemic she published her self-help book, No One Can Change Your Life Except for You.
She and Stirling also present a true-crime podcast, called Murder They Wrote, which has a steadily growing audience on BBC Sounds. The couple will do their first live podcast event at Electric Picnic this month.
Before we met, Whitmore’s representative asked that there be no questions about her role in Strictly Come Dancing, but we end up waltzing around the topic anyway. For those not up to speed on the controversy surrounding the normally wholesome BBC TV series, two of its professional dancers, Giovanni Pernice and Graziano Di Prima, recently left the show amid allegations that they had mistreated their celebrity dance partners Amanda Abbington and Zara McDermott.
Abbington has described Pernice’s behaviour in the practice room as “unnecessary, abusive, cruel and mean”. He has denied the claims, via his Instagram account, saying he rejects “any suggestion of abusive or threatening behaviour”. Di Prima says on Instagram, “I deeply regret the events that led to my departure from Strictly. My intense passion and determination to win might have affected my training regime. Respecting the BBC HR process, I understand it’s best for the show that I step away.”
Whitmore appeared on Strictly in 2016, when she was paired with Pernice. Two years later she wrote about that experience on HuffPost. “I was placed with a dance partner I was extremely uncomfortable with – and in the end I felt broken. I cried every day. And I really was broken, both mentally and physically, by the end. To the outside world I tried to suck it up and smile, and I did that to the best of my ability, but it affected me deeply. My friends and family knew that I was struggling. And they were there for me. The media, however, saw me as blond bait in a sequinned dress.”
Have things got any better for women in the public eye since her career began? “I think we’re louder now, and we’re pulling people up on things now,” she says. “I do think it’s changing slightly. I hope. And even the stuff I’m not going to talk to you about now, because it’s under review, that’s all coming out now, the stuff I tried to speak about eight years ago.”
Was she not listened to then? “Or [I was] gaslit to make it seem normalised.” She is reluctant when we meet to say any more while the BBC is investigating the allegations, but she does say “it’s a shame that it has to come out in such a victim-shaming way, which it always does. And being the first person to speak up about anything is always hard.”
The professional dancers’ alleged behaviour, and whether and when to talk about it, are issues that Whitmore has clearly been wrestling with. A few days after we talk, she broaches the topic in an Instagram story.
“I was trying not to comment on recent press speculation until the BBC review is complete but feel there is a lot of misinformation in the press,” she writes. “I want to help and show support by setting the record straight.
“I was asked to speak to the BBC along with six people that I know of (who deserve anonymity as they don’t want to be dragged through the press), about inappropriate behaviour they experienced similar to mine with the same individual. I initially raised concerns back in 2016. I thought my experience was specific to me but I’ve since learned I was wrong. The aim of this is to show a pattern of behaviour that I believe needs to stop.
“My evidence is to support other people’s experience. It’s a shame it takes this for someone to be heard. I am not looking for anything just an acceptance that what happened to me in the rehearsal rooms during my time on BBC Strictly was wrong and that it won’t happen to anyone else again,” she writes in her Instagram story.
“I’ve tried to speak up in the correct way. I know the BBC and all outlets continue to do their best to be better, but for that to happen we must speak up.”
After Abbington’s claims, a spokesman for Pernice said the dancer had been co-operating fully with the BBC’s investigation and urged people to wait for the review’s conclusion, which the dancer believes will exonerate him. In the meantime, the BBC has said it will “strengthen welfare and support” on Strictly Come Dancing, including by providing chaperones who will be present “at all times” during training-room rehearsals.
Whitmore, who says after her Instagram story that she does not want to make any more comments about Strictly, has long been vocal about the way women who choose jobs in the public eye are treated. She has talked about the impact of fictitious newspaper reports about her love life and about enduring upskirting by paparazzi, a practice that is now illegal in Britain and Ireland.
“I will not put up with bullsh*t any more,” Whitmore told a newspaper in 2022. “At the start of your career you want to get along with everyone and don’t want to question things. Once you have a child you are questioning things, to make it better for the next generation. Once I accepted people would take pictures up my skirt; now I think, ‘Why the f**k didn’t I speak out?’”
Prurient treatment by tabloid media has abated somewhat since she left Love Island, two years ago, but it clearly still stings. “There’s an expectation when you work in reality TV that you are a reality star. But I’m doing a hosting job. Also, as a woman I was treated differently on the show ... That culture is still there. A lot of it was about how you look and what you wear and being sexualised. When men host similar shows they are not having to put up with that.”
Whitmore will turn 40 next year. How does she feel about that milestone? “Growing old is such a privilege,” she says. “There’s so much pressure on women to look a certain way, but I don’t give a sh*t. I’m more comfortable now than I was in my 20s, and I wish I felt in my 20s the way I feel now. I’ve had friends I’ve lost, who don’t have the privilege of growing old. So I feel thankful. That’s how I feel.”
Her role models are women such as the late Iris Apfel, the colourful New York fashion influencer who continued to be celebrated for her maximalist approach to style right into her 90s. Whitmore is also a fan of veteran actors such as Jennifer Coolidge, Joanna Lumley and Laura Dern – “iconic women”, she says. Their careers make her optimistic about what lies ahead for her as an actor and presenter. “They make me really hopeful that my sell-by date isn’t 40. I’m starting my acting career now ... I’m not the girl from MTV any more, and I’m okay with that.”
2:22 – A Ghost Story is at the 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, August 11th
