There's something about Maimie: The Musketeers' actress is the new name to watch

PUBLISHED: 00:01, 12 January 2014 | UPDATED: 00:01, 12 January 2014

With a breakthrough role in the BBC’s swashbuckling drama The Musketeers, MAIMIE McCOY is a name to watch in 2014. But her route to stardom has been far from straightforward

'Milady is a dark and evil character and I could see that I wasn’t the most obvious choice, but the secret to playing her is finding her vulnerable side. I knew I could tap into her complexities’

Acting is a precarious profession and not one for the faint-hearted. But don’t take my word for it – ask Maimie McCoy. Three years ago she sat down and counted the number of days she had spent performing in the previous 12 months. ‘The total was seven,’ she says, throwing her head in her hands. ‘And you know, I really was thinking that maybe it was time to call it a day.’

Fast forward to 2014, however, and Maimie’s fortunes have done an about turn. After more than a decade of bit-part roles in everything from Waking the Dead to Casualty and The Bill to Taggart, her career is in the ascendant. As we meet, she has just finished a solid seven months of filming for BBC One’s eagerly awaited new primetime drama The Musketeers, and back at home, her suitcase is half packed for an upcoming trip to Los Angeles to do the ‘meet the agents thing’.

The turning point for Maimie came just over a year ago with her acclaimed performance in Victoria Wood’s one-off drama Loving Miss Hatto – the strange-but-true tale of a concert pianist whose burgeoning talent was thwarted by stage fright, but who, guided by her opportunist husband, went on to almost pull off the biggest hoax in classical music history. Her role as the young Joyce Hatto placed her amid a stellar cast that included Alfred Molina, Francesca Annis and Rory Kinnear.

To add to the challenge, Maimie was told the part was hers less than a fortnight before filming began. ‘I know it had been offered elsewhere before me,’ she says candidly. ‘So when I got it, it was brilliant but also terrifying and I was a nervous wreck for the whole shoot. Fortunately, Joyce was a nervous wreck too, so I was able to channel my neurotic thoughts into her.’

'Milady is bold and brazen and that is not me. But that’s the fun bit – becoming someone else'

You don’t have to spend long in Maimie’s company to realise that the role of Joyce was an ideal showcase for the actress’s understated talents. With her hypnotic green eyes and high-gloss hair she exudes composure, but her fingernails, bitten to the quick, are a giveaway. ‘My dad calls me Stubs,’ she grins. On screen, she captured Joyce’s gauche bashfulness with exquisite perfection. In person she is less earnest and more quirkily playful.

Her latest incarnation is as Milady de Winter, the bewitching but glacially ruthless spy in the BBC’s ten-part reworking of Alexandre Dumas’s classic adventure tale. The Musketeers script required her to swap Joyce’s tea dresses for thigh-high boots and a corset, ‘and that was terrifying, going on the set with my hair up and my cleavage out and nowhere to hide’, she says. ‘Milady is bold and brazen and that is not me. But that’s the fun bit – becoming someone else.’

The Musketeers, which also stars Luke Pasqualino (of Skins and The Borgias fame), Tom Burke (Great Expectations and The Hour) and Santiago Cabrera (Merlin and Heroes), is set on the streets of 17th-century Paris, but the series has been filmed in Prague and it helped Maimie that there was a familiar face among the cast. Milady’s on-screen sidekick is the conniving Cardinal Richelieu played by Peter Capaldi who knows Maimie of old.

Maimie with Peter Capaldi in The Musketeers

Like most up-and-coming actresses she has done her fair share of waitressing jobs – one of which was in the North London juice bar where the former Malcolm Tucker and now Dr Who lead is a regular. ‘He plays these fearsome characters but I used to serve him every day, so I knew he wasn’t scary,’ she says. ‘When we met at rehearsals, he came straight over and said how lovely it was to see me. He is the sweetest man.’

Maimie found the writer of Hatto, Victoria Wood, ‘formidable’ (and was astonished and touched to receive a personal thank-you from her after Hatto wrapped), and is in awe of actors such as Rory Kinnear (recent joint London Evening Standard best actor winner for his National Theatre performance in Othello), who played her screen husband in Hatto and seemed to exude self-assurance. ‘He was great fun and very confident. Working with someone like him makes you realise that you have to grab your chances.’

When auditioning for the role of Milady, she was surprised to find herself thinking ‘this is mine’. The producers made an initial offer to another actress ‘but I had this feeling that they would come back to me, and they did. Milady is a dark and evil character and I could see that I wasn’t the most obvious choice, but the secret to playing her is finding her vulnerable side. I knew I could tap into her complexities.’

Now 34, Maimie grew up in Northallerton, Yorkshire, a small market town where, thanks to some colourful family connections, she was able to gain an early glimpse of a glittering world beyond. Her parents Eugene and Barbara ran The Tontine, an award-winning country hotel and restaurant, while her Uncle John owned The Kirk – a Middlesbrough club that, in its heyday, attracted performers such as Stevie Wonder, Georgie Fame and Rod Stewart. Chris Rea is a family friend, as are Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay and Albert Roux, and for a while in the mid-1990s her father became a minor celebrity himself as a regular guest judge on MasterChef.

Maimie was used to well-known people dropping by. She recalls the afternoon Brigitte Nielsen – the Danish actress and ex-wife of Sylvester Stallone – landed by helicopter in their back garden. After checking in, Brigitte called down to Maimie, who was sitting on reception but about to go out clubbing. ‘She needed a razor to shave her legs and when I took one to her and she saw me all dolled up, she almost came out with me, but ended up drinking with the locals instead.’

Maimie (her big brother Rory ‘couldn’t pronounce my name Mary when he was little so he called me “Mare-me” and it stuck’) went to the local comprehensive and to tap, ballet and jazz dancing classes with her younger brother Eugene.

Home was a stable block next to the hotel. ‘My mates thought we were rich, but I had to share a bedroom with my brothers until I was 12.’ Her grandmother and uncle lived with them and, as both her parents are part of large Catholic families, there was always someone coming or going. ‘We were like a big commune and I suppose we came across as quite bohemian, but we worked nonstop.’

Her summer-holiday memories are of grafting in the hotel laundry and kitchen before making an annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. ‘My uncle ran coach trips and we went along because it was our only chance of a break.’

Maimie wears DRESS, Vivienne Westwood. EARRINGS, Atelier-Mayer

Maimie was a happy child, but she was also shy. ‘I think that can happen in big families – it’s not always easy to get your voice heard. And there was a middle-child dynamic – I was always placating everybody. So on the one hand, I felt protected, but on the other, I had that feeling of being slightly overshadowed.’ The dancing classes helped – ‘they were my mum’s way of getting me to come out of my shell’ – and by the time she left school, she was leaning towards a career in performing arts.

But her dream of enrolling at the Arts Educational Schools London, where alumni include Catherine Zeta Jones, Martin Clunes and the Strallen sisters, was a nonstarter – ‘there was no way my parents could afford the fees’. Instead, she secured a drama place at the then University of North London (now London Metropolitan University). ‘On the first day, they sat us down and said, “If anybody wants to be in the musical Cats you are in the wrong place,” and I thought, “Oh s***”, because Cats was exactly my thing.’

To her credit, she stuck with the course and threw herself into the wacky workshops. ‘We’d have classes where you had to walk the length of a room imagining your legs were twigs and you had birds’ wings tickling your feet. Sounds mad but it does force you to get up in front of people and be something you are not.’ On graduating, she assumed agents would be waiting in the wings, ‘forgetting that they don’t trawl most of the major universities for talent, let alone the minor ones’.

'It was terrifying going on the set with my hair up, cleavage out and nowhere to hide'

The brutal truth about acting is that 92 per cent of performers are out of work at any one time, and, according to the actor and author Michael Simkins, ‘what that figure doesn’t reveal is that the same eight per cent tend to work while the same 92 per cent never get a look-in’.

Maimie worked as an extra and wrote to zillions of casting directors. Sheer persistence got her in front of filmmaker Richard Curtis for an audition for Love Actually. ‘It was for Martine McCutcheon’s role and they told me that I wasn’t going to get it because they were going for an all-star cast. But it was good experience for me.’

She picked up various TV parts, including a lead role in a BBC Three drama called Personal Affairs, in which she played a moneyed Chelsea girl who was ‘horribly brattish but great fun’. But the 2009 series never became the springboard she had hoped it would be.

Maimie set up a parallel career in the world she comes from – she’s on the books of a couple of catering companies. ‘We do private events – all my acting mates do it.’ The waitressing work has taken her inside Kensington Palace and Windsor Castle, where she has observed the Queen and Prince Philip at drinks receptions and once almost tipped a glass of orange juice over Princess Anne. ‘Luckily, I drenched myself.’

Maimie with her brother Eugene, also an actor

Three years ago, she diversified into baking and, with a friend, set up a bespoke tea-party service offering finger sandwiches, lavender shortbread stacks and delicate pastries for baby showers and those who wanted an alternative to the ladies-who-lunch scene. ‘It’s ideal because I can fit it in around auditions and film work.’

Maimie’s brother Rory followed his parents into the restaurant business, while Eugene is an actor starring in the sellout production of American Psycho at London’s Almeida Theatre. Maimie has straddled both worlds but she’s not sure how long she can continue.

She and her actor fiancé James Buller, 43 – he guest-starred as Clara’s father in last month’s Dr Who Christmas special – have been together for seven years and living together for five. She met him in the same juice bar where she got to know Peter Capaldi. They are hoping to marry next spring because, she admits, they are getting broody. ‘Life feels brilliant because everything I’ve been working towards is coming together but, biologically, it feels that time is running out, and I do want children.’

Like many women, Maimie felt she needed to get her career straight before embarking on motherhood. ‘But all my friends who’ve had babies seem to be working more than ever,’ she says. She reasons that her acting icons – Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert and Laura Linney – have combined work with having families, as has her heroine Mary Berry. ‘I adore her religieuses [choux pastries] but what I really love is that she is having a ball at 78. We all start out thinking we have to crack it in our 20s, but life is a long game.’

So while Maimie is prepared to get on that plane to LA and hopes the BBC will commission a second series of The Musketeers, she won’t put her career obsessively first for ever. ‘I’ve got this feeling that being a mother is something I am going to be good at, so I want to get on with it.’

The Musketeers starts this month on BBC One

REAL FOR MCCOY

READING Stoner by John Williams – it’s a lost American classic charting the disappointments and failures in a man’s life. The prose is gorgeous – I cried from page one.

FAVOURITE BEAUTY PRODUCT Dr Hauschka Cleansing Clay Mask – my skin has been horrid lately and this product is its new friend.

LISTENING TO Pure Bathing Culture have a sound that’s all their own and are my current obsession. I saw them live in a tiny venue recently.

WATCHING I’m loving Michael Portillo’s Great Continental Railway Journeys [right]. I’m a bit of a train buff, and he’s a great presenter.

CAN’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT Sunglasses and a woolly hat – which is a bit of a contradiction, I know, but I hate the cold and can’t bear squinting.

SECRET AMBITION I’d love to dance on film. I’ve taken up tap dancing classes again. I’m a bit rusty, but it would only take a few months to get up to scratch.

SAVING UP FOR A wedding and a loft conversion. That probably sounds middle class and boring, but it’s the stage I’m at right now.

MOST LIKE TO BE STUCK IN A LIFT WITH Jon Hamm [right] because he’s so good looking and he makes me laugh.

Stylist: Alex Reid at Frank Agency. Hair: Heath Massi at Frank Agency. Make-up: Harriet Hadfield using Laura Mercier.

KATCHING MY I

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Saturday, 18 January 2014