From Red Road to Prometheus, the Scottish actor has quietly amassed one of the most impressive CVs on screen. Our film critic talks to one of his favourite actors
Earlier this year, an Observer reader asked me the question: “Which actor do you think has produced the greatest quality of work across their career?” My answer was Kate Dickie. The Scottish star made a splash in Andrea Arnold’s directorial feature debut, Red Road, in 2006, for which she won a Scottish Bafta, and has gone on to appear in a bewilderingly diverse array of films. These range from Ridley Scott’s sci-fi blockbuster Prometheus (2012) to Robert Eggers’s indie chiller The Witch (2015), Tom Geens’s mysterious, grief-stricken Couple in a Hole (also 2015, for which Dickie won a second Scottish Bafta), and more recently David Lowery’s epic chivalric poem adaptation The Green Knight (2021). In some of these films Dickie takes the lead; in others she plays a supporting role. Crucially, in none of them does she give less than 100%. And as I said in response to the reader’s question: “You can watch three Kate Dickie films back to back and not realise you’re watching the same person.”
“That has actually happened quite a lot,” says Dickie, who is guest of honour next weekend at Screenplay, the Shetland film festival that I have proudly co-curated for more than a decade. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘Oh, I saw a film you were in and I didn’t even realise it was you.’ That’s great because it means that you’re doing your job properly – although it’s maybe not so great for networking. But my whole thing with acting is that I’m here to tell these characters’ stories as best I can, even if they’re not at a great point in their lives. I think I’ve got one of those faces that changes with the characters I play – I’m not a ‘pretty’ person, but I’ve got strong features. And to be honest I generally don’t do a lot of press or interviews or photoshoots because I’m not really bothered about how I look, and I tend to feel that the less you know about me outside of the roles I play the better.”
