Why haven’t you heard of Michelle Duncan?
The Perth actress has played alongside James McAvoy in Atonement (2007), Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and even David Tennant in cult TV show Doctor Who.
And now, Ian Rankin fans will recognise Michelle as Maggie Blantyre, the long-suffering wife of Detective Sergeant Rebus’ former boss in the new BBC series, Rebus.
Yet even though she’s rubbed shoulders with Hollywood royalty and British royalty alike (more on that later), 46-year-old Michelle has managed to keep a fairly low profile.
“There are two Scottish actors from Scone,” Michelle smiles. “One of us [Joanna Vanderham] is famous, and one is not. I’m the not-famous one!
The question is, why? And the answer, Michelle bravely shares, is that she was afraid.
“One of the reasons I have such a little career is that I once suffered from crippling stage fright,” she explains.
“My career was going really well. I had just done Atonement, and I was going up for these huge, huge parts,” she says. “Big jobs that would’ve been life-changing.
“I went up for the lead role of Sophie in Mamma Mia (2008) and they saw me three times, but of course I was a complete unknown. I was second or third choice. It was devastating.
“Then in 2007, I was playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice at The Globe Theatre,” she continues.
“And five minutes before I was meant to go on, I ran away as fast as I could.
“Everything was going well and I was on an upward trajectory, and then I ran away and decided I couldn’t be an actress anymore.
“It was terrifying.”
But why run, when everything was going so well?
‘It’s hard as a young woman to take your space’
For Michelle, the issue was filling the space – vocally, first as foremost, as she worried her “light voice” wouldn’t travel throughout the entire Globe theatre.
But it was her artistic director at the time, Dominic Dromgoole, who helped her realise that she was also afraid to step into the limelight she’d earned.
“I just felt at the time that I didn’t have the power that I needed,” explains Michelle.
“And he said: ‘Or maybe you were scared of the power you actually did have.’
“It’s really hard as a young woman to take your space, and I tend to play women who don’t take up much space. Like my character in Rebus is very much in the shadows.”
But although she has a knack for playing shrinking violets, former Perth Academy head girl Michelle reveals she’s nothing like her Rebus character in real life.
“Maggie’s had a very hard life. She’s lonely and quite troubled.
“But I have too many friends,” the 46-year-old jokes good-naturedly. “I need to shed some!”
‘My grandfather was the Scott Street butcher’
Michelle says many of those friendships were made at Perth Academy, with “lots” lasting the test of time even after she moved away from her hometown of Scone.
Growing up, she remembers “loving school” – but she was no stranger to a party either.
“I just have such happy memories of being home and carrying my massive lever arch folder up and down that big hill to Perth Academy, and getting blown around in the wind,” she smiles.
“We used to go up Kinnoull Hill all the time for parties too,” she continues, then adds: “I think it was probably quite dangerous!”
As a child, she remembers her grandfather – who owned Duncan and Sons butcher shop on Scott Street – supplying sausages to Perth Theatre for the annual pantomime.
“They used to do this thing where they would take ‘intestines’ out of people,” laughs Michelle. “He’d provide the link sausages.”
And her own lifelong love of performance began with the Fair City Singers and Perth Youth Theatre.
It was at youth theatre that well known Scottish actor Walter Carr imparted on Michelle the advice which would carry her through the rest of her career.
“I did a show at Perth Theatre called Our Day Out in 1995,” she recalls. “And I went to Jordan with a show called Peace Child.
“I just loved performing. And Walter had told me once, when I was about 10: ‘You’ve got to want it so hard that it kind of hurts’.”
And she did.
‘Royal approval’ from classmate Wills
After school, Michelle went on to study acting at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, and then pursued a masters in English and classics closer to home, at St Andrews University in 2002 – the same year that Prince William was studying there.
“He was very nice, he was very much among us,” she recalls. “Although my boyfriend at the time said he was apparently looking at my bottom at the bar!
“My mum said I should get a tattoo that said: ‘By Royal Approval’. I didn’t, but I thought that was quite good, considering she’d never encouraged me to get a tattoo before then!”
Michelle couldn’t have imagined then that she would soon be playing her royal classmate’s late mother in made-for-television movie Whatever Love Means.
Playing Diana was ‘poisoned chalice’
However, in the days long before The Crown, in 2005, she admits that playing Diana, Princess of Wales, was a “poisoned chalice”.
The film was received poorly, a blow that Michelle admits she took to heart along with her co-stars Laurence Fox and Olivia Poulet.
“It wasn’t cool to play someone in the royal family back then,” she explains. “Now, everybody wants to because of The Crown, but it was a bit of a poisoned chalice.”
And though her years of experience in the industry have taught her to grow a thick skin, Michelle admits one particular review of her Diana performance still stings.
“One of the reviews said I was wearing the worst wig anyone had ever seen,” she grimaces. “And it was my real hair.
“I was more devastated about that than the bad reception, because I’d had hair down to my bum and chopped it all off into this terrible haircut!”
Shooting Atonement was ‘another world’
Since then, Michelle has grown her hair long – and carved out a career in blockbusters, including the notable role of nurse Fiona MacGuire in sweeping wartime epic Atonement (2007).
“Atonement was incredible,” she says. “I worked on it for about a month, I played a nurse. And the amount of research that was done, and training we were given, was incredible.
“We did first aid training, but in the style of that period. You feel like you’re actually living in another world. That’s what I like best about it. It’s really, it’s quite moving.”
Also moving? Her legs, over and over, during the film’s epic Dunkirk crowd scenes.
“There’s the really famous one-take scene where James McAvoy is on the beach,” she explains.
“And there’s another really long shot where Romola Garai (Briony) and I run down to get men who’ve been injured at the hospital.
“Just filming that kind of scene takes so long because the camera’s following you and there’s just so much that can go wrong. So you end up doing it again and again and again!”
‘Rami Malek threw a table at me’
Michelle also hit the big screen in 2018 as antagonistic journalist Shelley Stern in the explosive Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Her fondest memory from that set is, bizarrely, having a table thrown at her by leading man Rami Malek.
“Rami was absolutely amazing. So, so lovely. And completely in character the whole time,” Michelle reveals.
“We ended up improvising our main scene, so that lots of it wasn’t scripted. And in one of the takes, I was saying horrible things about [Mercury’s] sexuality.
“The director, Bryan Singer, was egging me on, saying: ‘Just push him as far as you can’, and Rami ended up throwing the table at me.”
Older, wiser and ready for her spotlight
As well as box office giants, Michelle has played Harry Potter star Rupert Grint’s love interest in Driving Lessons (2006) and has featured in 2015 thriller Iona.
Now, with nearly three decades of experience in the industry, and enough savvy to know that “a lot of it is about how famous you already are”, Michelle is finally ready to step into her spotlight.
And she’s relishing the thought of the women she might play now that she’s got enough years at her back to leave the wide-eyed ingenues and wallflowers behind.
“The women I tend to play now are far more interesting than the women I played as a younger actress,” she observes. “So I feel like I may be an actor who is more interesting as I get older.
“I hope that as I get older, I start to play woman who are less in the shadows and more in the light.”
All episodes of Rebus are available to stream on BBC iPlayer and will continue to air every Friday at 10pm on BBC Scotland and on Saturdays at 9.25pm on BBC One.
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