'I'm a good girl but I go for the bad boy': Actress Kierston Wareing on why she is loving her latest role 

A genuine Essex girl who’s specialised in downtrodden single mums and gangster’s molls, now actress
Kierston Wareing is kicking ass as a feisty cop in the BBC’s major new crime thriller – and she’s loving every minute of it 

'There's a fight scene where I did my own stunt. When you see blood on my face - that's real,' says Kierston

I've met Kierston Wareing once before. It was 2007 and she had just finished filming Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World for Channel 4. She came to London from her home in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex to do an interview in a grubby café and she said that she didn’t mind making the journey because, truth be told, she didn’t have much on. In fact, she told me, if this job didn’t lead to anything she was already enrolled in a course to train to be a legal secretary. She’d had it with acting.

Things have changed a bit since then: ‘It hasn’t stopped,’ says Kierston, 33. ‘Last year I didn’t have a social life!’ It’s a Free World won her a Bafta nomination, and that led to a slew of roles including a gangster’s wife in Sky’s The Take, a battered single mum in Andrea Arnold’s film Fish Tank, and a part in the BBC’s Royal Television Society
Award-winning Five Daughters. We’ve struggled to fit in our photo shoot: Kierston is in the middle of filming her fourth production so far this year.

But we’re here to talk about one that’s already wrapped – BBC2’s major new crime thriller The Shadow Line, which puts her in the exalted company of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Eccleston, Antony Sher and Rafe Spall. It’s a bold, complex conspiracy piece, and it marks a new direction for Kierston.

‘I get a lot of single mum roles – It’s a Free World turned out well, so people thought, “She can be a single mum, Kierston can do that. Or live in a council house – she can do that.”’ The Shadow Line is a detective drama, and it’s very different. Kierston plays Lia Honey, a sassy detective heading up a labyrinthine murder case alongside Ejiofor’s Jonah Gabriel, so suddenly the perennial single mother is transformed into the action hero.

Kierston with co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor in new detective drama The Shadow Line

‘It’s because Hugo [Blick, the director] had faith in me being able to do something different. There’s a fight scene where I did my own stunt. I ran up a wall and flipped over, all by myself. I had no intention of doing it. But in the end we got there; the stunt people showed me how, and Hugo said, “Go on, just go for it.” That’s all me.’

She’s getting animated now. ‘And also, at the end, when you see blood on my face – that’s real. I get hit in the face with a gun, and it did accidentally draw blood. So if it looks authentic, it is. I love doing all that sort of stuff.’

Whether they’re on the right or the wrong side of the law, Kierston’s women tend to be feisty, forceful and tough. Part of her screen appeal is that there’s always a hint of the bad girl about her.

‘I get bored very easily. I do like excitement. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very good, I’m a loyal person and I would never treat anyone badly – what goes around comes around. But I do go for the bad boy. I haven’t outgrown that. That sort of gangstery figure – I’d be attracted to that in real life.’

‘For more than ten years I did nothing, apart from appear twice in The Bill’

Recently she has been seeing not a gangster but a builder from East London called Serk. He asked her out and they’ve been together for a year, though she still lives alone. Unfortunately for her, his first exposure to her work was not a sophisticated chunk of noir like The Shadow Line but Bonded By Blood, one of a pair of Essex-based gangster flicks that she made when she wasn’t sure where her next job was coming from.

‘He saw Bonded By Blood and went, “Oh my God.” I’m in it just briefly, but it’s one of those Essex films with me with my top off. I wish he’d seen something that showcased my acting a bit more.’

Kierston was born in Romford and, just as she wants to take her CV to the next level, she is also hankering after a move away from her home county. ‘Am I proud of my roots? I’ve got to say I am, haven’t I? But truthfully I want to get out as quickly as I can.’

Kierston Wareing: 'For more than ten years I did nothing apart from appear twice in The Bill'

If Kierston has mixed feelings about Essex, it’s understandable: her childhood wasn’t always happy. She remembers family life fondly: she and her younger brother grew up with their mum and dad – a professional carer and an advertising man – in a house on the Leigh-on-Sea seafront. From the age of seven Kierston won drama contests and excelled in her Lamda speech and drama exams. But away from home it was a different story.

She went to an all-girls senior school, St Bernard’s. It was the same one Helen Mirren attended, but rather than helping Kierston’s budding vocation, it nearly killed it off altogether. Elocution lessons had been part of her acting classes, and once she went to secondary school, her ‘posh’ voice got her noticed, but not in a good way.

‘They mocked me for my voice. I was verbally bullied and then punched and hit. Someone tried to push me under a car. Then she broke my nose.’

At 14 she left St Bernard’s for another school, this one mixed. ‘I completely changed. My voice changed [she reverted to her current Essex accent], I dropped out of acting for two years; I was bunking off a lot, being a rebel. I tried to set fire to the toilets. I would rip up homework in front of the teachers’ faces. Basically I got expelled. It was only when, at 16, I went to a private tutor for uncontrollable children that I calmed down.’

She managed one GCSE, but, she says, ‘I only wanted to do my acting.’ So at 17, she headed to London to the Pollyanna Training Theatre for three years. Then she left London to try her luck in New York for three years, studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. It led to very little for the best part of a decade. She got jobs in music videos – one with P Diddy, one for Oasis – what she describes as ‘bits and pieces’ but nothing more. Homesick, she got on a plane to the UK. Back in Leigh-on-Sea she couldn’t even get a job with an extras agency. ‘The agency I’m with now turned me down. We laugh about it. For more than ten years I did nothing, apart from appear twice in The Bill. That was my finest hour.’

To make ends meet she waitressed, handed out fliers, worked at Essex call centres and, irony of ironies, she even set up a business offering ‘vajazzle’ – an intimate waxing technique – years before the ITV reality show The Only Way is Essex made it infamous countrywide.

‘I was doing vajazzle five years ahead of its time! Heart shapes, your boyfriend’s name for Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, weddings. But it was in a really cheap location – York Road market in Southend – so it didn’t take off. I could have made a fortune now. At the time everyone thought I was nuts.’

And then, just as she had enrolled on that legal secretary course, Ken Loach came calling, and she’s been working ever since. She may have been a late starter but she has been going at a canter for the past four years. It has left little time for a life back in Essex. ‘I’ve just bought a puppy. He’s a golden retriever called Marley – after the film Marley and Me, which made me cry. When I’m not working, I get up, I take him for a walk, friends come round, Mum comes round, we’ll have a chat. Then a glass of wine in the evening, and listening to music – hip-hop, R’n’B and grime – I love that more than TV and film. If I didn’t have acting my life would be quite boring – too boring for me.’

Her other distraction is the shopping mall. ‘I go mad. I’ll go and have a look for something specific but I’ll never walk away without a purchase. I’ll clear up in places like Topshop. Suddenly I’ve got all these bags. And half the stuff I don’t know if I even like. I think I’ve got a problem – actually maybe all women have got a problem like that!’

Her favourite label is Chanel, but she’s just as happy in a tracksuit. ‘It depends on my mood. Some days I go for figure-hugging; others I might be a hippie. The next I might be a chav, like today!’

If this is how a chav dresses, we should add, bring on chav chic – she looks great
curled up on the sofa in leggings, Uggs and a huge puffy jacket.

Besides, the marvel with Kierston is that she has time to go shopping at all. ‘I still haven’t really had a chance to reflect,’ she says. ‘I haven’t been out of work to sit and panic about what’s coming next. I’m just so grateful. And loving every minute of it.’

The Shadow Line is on BBC2, Thursdays at 9pm