Directors are queueing up to work with the Welsh actor about to hit the big time in her first lead role, in acclaimed psychological thriller Saint Maud
When Morfydd Clark was 16 years old, she crashed out of school. “After my GCSEs I just couldn’t go back,” she says. “I tried for a term but didn’t do any work and my mum said: ‘Why don’t you just drop out? There’s no point in being there if you’re going to be like this.’ So I spent a month in my pyjamas in my bedroom with the heating on, eating chocolates, and then she said: ‘Right, you’ve got to do something. You like acting, don’t you?’”
The reality was that Clark had barely done any acting since she was 13, when she had tottered around in high heels as a “hilariously sexualised” Mrs Dai Bread Two in a production at her south Wales secondary school of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. But she obediently trotted along to auditions for the National Youth Theatres of both Wales and Great Britain, adding the Welsh National Youth Opera because she also liked singing. “I got into all of them, which was really not what I expected at all,” she says, “and that was when my life started to become really happy.”
