Gemma Chan: The Bionic Woman
- 16 JULY 2015
Humans, Channel 4's new drama, is guaranteed to make you feel uneasy as it dissects, digests and sometimes even spews out the troubling issue of our anthropological identity. The series is set in near-future British suburbia, where a domestic army of perfectly life-like robots have been sold into the homes of men and women too busy, lazy or incapacitated (physically or, more often than not, emotionally) to fulfil their household duties. Actress Gemma Chan plays Anita, a highly sophisticated "synth" (as the show's robots are called) who should just cook and clean but soon is sitting at the dining-room table, playing with the children and watching them sleep at night, while their biological mother is away working.
But without doubt Humans' creepiest component is that it isn't science fiction: it's uncomfortably closer to our reality than that. In January this year, luminaries including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Luke Muehlhauser (of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) came together to sign an open letter that didn't just outline the very far-reaching opportunities for artificial intelligence (in short, to out-smart humanity and wipe out disease), but warned, gravely, for its development to be carried out responsibly - because, according to Musk, AI is humanity's "biggest existential threat". The AI ball is already in motion; this summer, an entirely robot-staffed hotel opens in Japan. Whatever this will mean for our species ethically, for Humans, controversial contemporaneity plus transatlantic funding - the American network AMC, responsible for Breaking Bad and Mad Men, is co-producing the show that it will also air this summer - will surely prove high ratings.
Chan plays the leading synth to perfection. Before filming started she, with the rest of the cast of "robots", went to "synth school", where "we stripped back movement to its essentials. The basic language was economy, because every reach or pull or twist would use up battery power, so nothing could be extraneous," she says. Polite, quiet, attentive: this 32-year-old actress gives the impression that everything she does - her career has so far taken in a latex-clad dominatrix in ITV's Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a judge in Richard Ayoade's screen adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Double, and a run at the National inYellow Face - is deeply considered. After all, it was she, not her agent, who found the show while she was reading a newspaper; "it was still in development, but I asked my team to keep tracks on it because the material was so up my street." Months later, after a single meeting, she got the part.
Luckily the Jack at home isn't the same person as the one on TV. That would be way too much to live with
Chan could have done many things. As a child she swam at national level, she learnt ballet, she was (and remains) an accomplished violinist who nearly chose music school over Oxford University, where she read law. To fund her acting beginnings she modelled at London Fashion Weeks, in commercials, "whatever came my way". She picked London's tough Drama Centre for her education in performing arts because she liked the idea of "proving" herself in a testing environment. "It really tries to break you down, and you may or may not get built up before you leave. There is a lot of crying in the toilets..." The willowy actress pauses. "I embraced it." Now her battle is bigger, as she stands up to acting's too-often-discriminating casting process, blinded by Caucasian faces, through the charity Act for Change. She is also a vocal feminist, who is ardent about the need to end Page 3.
All of which makes Chan sound very serious. She isn't. It was in 2011 - on the set of Fresh Meat, a cult offbeat post-teen sitcom - that she met her boyfriend, the comedian Jack Whitehall. Now the two of them, both avid Arsenal football fans, live together in west London, sharing an Arsenal duvet cover, Arsenal cereal bowls and "the same sense of humour, which is really a sense of the absurd". Although, "luckily the Jack at home isn't the same person as the one on TV. That would be way too much to live with."
"Drama school tries to break you down. There's a lot of crying in the toilets"
Humans is on Channel 4 until August 2.