Caitríona Balfe is the luminous star of Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-tipped Belfast. She talks about how modelling almost broke her, bonding on set with Judi Dench and her childhood during the Troubles
Caitríona Balfe can remember the exact moment she realised she was done with being a model. It was the mid-2000s and Balfe was 27-ish, she thinks. It had been almost a decade since she’d been scouted in a Dublin supermarket while rattling a tin for a multiple sclerosis charity. She had done pretty well, walking in runway shows for Louis Vuitton and Chanel, flitting between Paris, Milan and New York. Balfe and her friends called themselves “the blue-collar models” – they weren’t the 0.1% of supermodels, the household names, but the next rung down.
Now, though, Balfe was in Dallas, doing a well-paid but soulless shoot for a catalogue. After each set-up, a producer would ping a little bell to indicate they needed to fast-change to the next outfit. At her age, in that youth-fixated business, Balfe knew the clock was ticking. She’d handled just about as much blunt rejection as she could take for one lifetime. “The shows were fun and exciting, but with catalogues, you’re just standing there like a clothes horse – literally,” says Balfe. “And you know, ‘This is not what I want to be doing with my life.’
