Will her role as 'straight man' to Hugh Grant in the film of Nick Hornby's About A Boy finally shoot Victoria Smurfit to international stardom? She talks to Louise East about film, television, theatre and why babies hate her
In the interests of journalistic integrity, I feel I should disclose a vested interest in Victoria Smurfit, which is this: back in the days when Victoria was Vicky, my mother was her school matron. This has a few implications, not least the fact that should she knock a couple of years off her age, or claim she was the class geek, covered in spots and braces, I could conceivably go back to base and check the facts.
However, in the case of Victoria Smurfit, it also means that even if I discover she has a predilection for eating babies or starring in porn films, it's highly unlikely I would write about it for fear of being banished from the family home as a muckraker. Mum, you see, liked Vicky Smurfit, who was one of those unusual children who managed to please both their classmates and the school matron.
As it turns out, there's no conflict of interest. From the moment she jumps up from a sofa in the Merrion Hotel, Dublin, and sticks out her hand with a grin, it's clear Smurfit pretty much is a nice person, notably lacking in either airs and graces or skeletons in the cupboard. In truth, she could be forgiven the odd air or grace right now, because it seems she's about to become rather a big star. Already a familiar face after several series as Orla in Ballykissangel and her role as James Nesbitt's first girlfriend in Cold Feet, Smurfit has landed a sizeable role in About A Boy, a film that will inevitably be a huge box-office success when it opens later this month.
Inevitable because it's directed by Chris and Paul Weitz, the brothers behind the top-grossing comedy American Pie. Inevitable because it's based on the best-selling novel by Nick Hornby. Inevitable because About A Boy brings together Hugh Grant and the production company Working Title, a combo that has already brought us Four Weddings and A Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary. But most of all, inevitable because About A Boy is a great feel-good movie, and what's more, Smurfit turns in a fine, intelligent performance. As Suzie, a glamorous but worthy single mum, she tangles with Grant's Will, who is pretending to be a single father in order to meet more girls.
"It was great to play someone so desperately earnest," says Smurfit, pulling a po-face. "In a way, I was playing Hugh's straight guy, and I was just trying not to laugh the whole time. He'd ad-lib and throw stuff in and I'd be there thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm glad the camera's not on me', and laughing away . . . He's genuinely funny in a leading man's body."
Smurfit also reckons Grant has really mined a seam of truth with his portrayal of Will, a confirmed bachelor who starts to question his feckless ways when Marcus, an eccentric 12-year-old, comes into his life.
"In About a Boy, I think he found a lot of the truth about men and the strange world they inhabit now. They're desperately trying to hang on to this singledom and yet aren't quite sure why they're not happy."
Smurfit herself gave up on singledom very happily two years ago at the age of 26, when she married Doug Baxter, an Irish advertising and marketing executive who was, like herself, living in London. When asked if marriage suits her, she grins and says: "Oh yeah, it's like having your best pal around all the time," although perhaps the best advertisement for their marriage is the fact she looks vaguely surprised when asked whether Doug was worried about her working with Hugh Grant. "God no, not at all. They met, actually, and got on very well. I don't think that sort of stuff dawns on him at all, it's just part of the job."
Last December, the couple decided to move from Chelsea to Dublin. "When you get married, you start seeing a future with somebody. You start thinking about your own childhood, and you think, if you had children in London, you'd have to have them on a leash. I had an idyllic childhood. I was brought up in Dalkey before it was the home of the stars, when it was a just a very pretty fishing village. We were very much thrown out the door and 'come back when you're hungry'. It was all about playing on the rocks and causing trouble."
If that sounds like a plain and simple life, it's worth remembering her father is Dermot Smurfit, the packaging and paper tycoon. So would Smurfit Snr have liked Smurfit Jnr to join the family business? "Well, I was always called Lady Chairman as a child. But no, he's delighted, he's proud as anything."
When she was 14, the family moved to Berkshire in England. "When I first went over I was going to swim home, it was really that simple. I used to think, 'Mum, when you turn your back I'll have a swimsuit on and then I'm out of here'. Then, like anything, I got used to it, and it's not a bad place."
Acting was always a passion, so after boarding school, she secured a place at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and from there, glided smoothly into a number of satisfying, if hardly earth-shattering roles in film such as The Run of the Country and The Wedding Tackle and TV series such as Ivanhoe and Berkeley Square.
When she landed a role in the Leonardo Di Caprio vehicle, The Beach, the media went mad over Smurfit's supposed big break, although, as her part was rather tiny, the film turned out to be quite literally a big break: three months spent on a beach in Thailand.
So what would she consider the turning point of her career? "I give Ballykissangel a lot of credit because it was a full-on apprenticeship in a sense. It was two years working with some really brilliant people . . . People started to know the name, the face, I got to play a whole load of different things, and go from the sublime to the ridiculous.
"I'm really sad it's been taken off air. I think in a way it's been on so long that people sort of took it as 'Oh bloody BallyK, it's just whimsy'. But the world loved it; it had pathos and it had humour and it had Tony Doyle. What more do you need?"
Smurfit is currently filming in Toronto on (John Woo-produced) Bulletproof Monk, a martial-arts action movie starring Chow Yun-Fat, Seann William Scott (American Pie) and James King, so her film-star credentials already seem to be opening doors.
Although she's hugely enjoying the work - "It's completely different from anything you've seen me in before. I spent six weeks in training to learn how to kick all of your asses" - she doesn't think that she has permanently de-camped to the big screen.
"Now I've done this film and I'm doing another one, people say to me, 'would you ever go back to television?' To me, it's an hilarious concept that there's a snobbery between the pair, because if it's a good script and it's good people, you're always learning and you're always finding out something new, which is surely the point."
However, she admits to a yearning to return to the stage: "I know it's the common cry of the actress - 'Get me back to the theatre, darling' - but I really would love to. Anyone who says 'Oh, I planned my career' is lying. We all aspire to get to the stage where you can plan your career, you know? Instead, you take what's there and a lot of it is television. People in the theatre world think you don't want to do theatre, and I'd love to. I mean, get me on the stage of the Gate Theatre, please."
But before Ireland's theatre directors start dialling, it should be pointed out that Smurfit does have one drawback as an actor. Noticing that most of her scenes in About A Boy seem to involve either children or animals or both, I wonder how she got on, breaking two of acting's greatest taboos?
"For the baby, we used twins, so if one's playing up, you just bring the other one in. Well, at first I tried to blame it on my stripey jumper and said whenever they see that, they go 'Waaaaah', but no, I think it was just me. We did one scene where they just yelled and yelled and yelled. Luckily, it worked for that scene, but my ovaries died within me that day. I was thinking: 'What is it about me?'
"You hand me a child and they hate me. I mean, what do you have to do to kids to make them just randomly hate you?"
About A Boy opens on April 26th