Gemma Whelan interview: ‘They said I wouldn’t work before I was 30 – they were right’

The Game of Thrones star is TV drama’s in-demand actress – but, as she tells Helen Brown, that hasn’t always been the case

“I’ve got a good line in stern faces,” grins Gemma Whelan. If you saw her as the ruthless warrior Yara Greyjoy in Game of Thrones or as Karen Matthews (who was convicted of faking the abduction of her own daughter, Shannon, in 2008) in the BBC drama The Moorside (2017) or – more recently – playing belligerent senior police officers in The Tower and DI Ray, then you’ll have seen the stock of forbidding frowns and grimly set jawlines she’s describing. 
But, today, the 43-year-old actress is all goofy larks in a tropical shirt and safari shorts – “A bit too Dora the Explorer?” – in a south-east ­London café. Over rooibos tea with milk and honey, she’s giddy about her new role as a “manipulative tabloid journalist who’ll do anything for a scoop” in the second series of Sky Max’s Funny Woman, which stars Gemma Arterton as a pioneering female stand-up comedian in the 1960s. 
You’ll see a lot of Whelan this autumn – she’s returning to ITV1 for a third series of The Tower and a second of DI Ray, before Funny Woman returns with her devious hack – though she’s cautious about saying too much about the new series, as she was once hauled over the coals (“as nicely as possible”) for posting on social media about being cast in Game of Thrones. Indeed, when I ask about her character in Funny Woman, she defers to the character notes in her script.
Whelan herself started out, in her late 20s, as a stand-up comedian, winning the 2010 Funny Women Variety Award. She appeared on Radio 4 in 2017 in the character of Chastity Butterworth – a pompous Victorian lady who blurts out rude confessions. She tells me that comedy was “always a means to an end, a way to get noticed”. (Many viewers, of course, will recognise her from Ben Elton’s Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow.) She was warned by a drama teacher on her postgraduate acting course that her career wouldn’t take off until after she had turned 30. “He said: ‘You’re a character actor – don’t expect to work before you’re 30.’ Of course, I thought I’d prove him wrong.” She shrugs. “But he was right.” 
Born in Leeds and raised in the Midlands, Whelan is the daughter of a corporate-communications man­ager father and a Canadian-born English-teacher mother. “They met doing amateur dramatics at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham,” she says. “The show was called Desire Under the Elms.” Whelan says she always “burned” to be a performer. “I begged for a ballet kit when I was three. I still have vivid memories of unwrapping it all at the end of my parents’ bed and yanking on my little Nora Batty tights, folding the crossover cardy over my tubby little tummy.” While she became the class clown at her private school – “I was in the headmistress’s office all the time” – Whelan honed her discipline in the dance studio. 
“I did ballet, tap, modern, the lot. I mucked about there, too, until my teacher figured out that praising me got better results than telling me off. I blossomed under the gaze of her nurturing admiration.” She ended up at the National Youth Ballet, but ultimately learnt she “didn’t have the right body shape for dance”. 
Whelan doesn’t want to discuss it today, but she was hospitalised for anorexia in her teens. She told the Daily Mail in 2020: “I can’t exactly say why it started. It could have been to do with control. What I remember most vividly is that first day I was in hospital and a nurse said to me, ‘Most people don’t recover from this.’ I was very ill, but that shocked me. It felt like a challenge. I thought, ‘Well, I am going to.’ I was lucky I had that mindset, plus incredible support.”
She gives a shout-out to her “wonderful, loving” parents, but notes that as a Gen-Xer, she and her actor and psychotherapist husband, Gerry Howell, are raising their own children (Freddie, 2, and Frances, 6) differently. “My parents grew up after the Second World War, in quite a Victorian atmosphere,” she says. “For them, it was ‘children are seen and not heard’. For us, it was the silent treatment.” Whelan remembers her mother’s “long blink and then the terrifying week of quiet resentment” after any misdemeanour. “The silence was terrifying. Then, after a week she’d be back. But there was never a conversation.”
Whelan is focusing on keeping the communication going with her own children: “I don’t think ‘shut up and go to your room’ is always the best tactic.” She’s clear that doesn’t mean she doesn’t “lose it” sometimes: “But when I do, I’ll apologise and try to explain why that happened. I don’t think my parents ever apologised… No parents did back then, it just wasn’t in the zeitgeist in the 1980s, was it? I don’t want my kids to be rude, but I don’t want them to be scared of me.” 
Whelan’s parents are huge fans of her work. Although she tells me that her mother didn’t believe she was on screen during some scenes in The Moorside. “She thought the filmmakers were using documentary footage when it was me all along,” she exclaims. Looking back on that programme, Whelan says she hopes it was part of true crime’s journey from “sensationalising trauma to helping viewers understand why terrible things happen”.
The Moorside told the story of how nine-year-old Shannon ­Matthews was reported missing in February 2008 and became the subject of a major missing-persons investigation, only for it to transpire that her own mother, Karen, had been complicit in a plan (concocted by family friend Michael Donovan) to hide the child and cash in on donations from the public. After Shannon was found, both Matthews and Donovan were sentenced to eight years in prison for kidnapping, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice. 
While stressing that she is no apologist for Matthews’s behaviour, Whelan believes the drama “did a great job of exploring who she was and her socio­economic circumstances. It gave the nuance of her lack of education, and how the lack of care she herself experienced growing up fed into her making decisions she thought were really logical and clever, but were obviously devastating. She thought, I can pretend my daughter is gone while keeping her safe and getting loads of reward money. Genius! And utterly appalling.”
These days, programme makers might have serious conversations about casting the privately educated Whelan as a working-class character such as Matthews. I ask if that was an issue at the time and she shakes her head. “It didn’t cross my mind that I shouldn’t do it,” she says. “I did my research. I watched all the footage. I listened. I worked really hard to get it right. I know the line on ‘nothing about us without us’, but I also think that exploring other lives is what actors do. At the time, it wasn’t even a question, was it? I mean, I’ve played a lot of gay characters and I’m not gay. I’ve played a fantasy warrior aristocrat [in Game of Thrones] and I’m not one of those, either. I’m not a Tudor monarch, but I played Queen Elizabeth in Horrible Histories…” 
As Whelan finishes her tea, she says she’s modelling her career on that of Olivia Colman – another comic/character actor who found fame later in life. “Although we have both worked with David Mitchell, he has never introduced us,” sighs Whelan. “I did once see Olivia with her children in a gift shop. I tried to hold the door open for her, but ended up tripping over myself,” she laughs. 
I ask if pratfalls are her go-to when presented with her heroes. Famously, when she met Morgan Freeman on The Graham Norton Show, she ended up addressing his genitals, asking the Hollywood A-lister’s groin if it had left the hob on. “Oh, God! Don’t remind me,” she chuckles. “Morgan was just so magnetic, and I was pregnant… But, no, I’ve never addressed Olivia Colman’s boobs.” She panics. “Please don’t make that the headline. But also…” She grins. The naughty schoolgirl in her suddenly unsuppressed. “One day, I will speak to Olivia Colman’s boobs! Career goals, right?”
DI Ray and The Tower will return on ITV1 this autumn, and Funny Woman returns on Sky Max on Sept 6