The star of Channel 4’s punk comedy on playing reluctant singer Amina, performing with Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire and taking an ice-cold dip with Fiona Shaw
Actor Anjana Vasan, 35, was born in Chennai, India, and moved to Singapore when she was four. In 2011, she relocated to Cardiff to study at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and has since appeared at the Globe, the National and in the lead role in an acclaimed 2019 production of A Doll’s House at the Lyric. Best known for her Bafta-nominated performance as the PhD student turned punk singer Amina in We Are Lady Parts, Nida Manzoor’s Channel 4 comedy series about an all-female Muslim band, this year she also appeared as assassin-in-training Pam in the final season of Killing Eve. Next she will star as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida theatre, London, alongside Paul Mescal.
Is it true that, in an effort to channel a punk ethos, you ate a flower in your audition for We Are Lady Parts?
I hope that audition tape never sees the light of day! When I got the audition, I initially thought I wasn’t right for the role, as it’s for someone cool to play a punk. Then I realised that the character was the nerd who loved folk music. I was the oddball with the cool girls – that I can play. We had to dance and lip-sync to a track and at a certain point I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to bite the head off a flower.
