lt may seem as though actress PERDITA WEEKS was always set on a career in the spotlight, given her 25 years’on the small screen (shes only 30, mind). But as HFM meets the younger sister of British TV treasure Honeysuckle, it becomes clear that her trajectory has had a lot more to do with fate. Here, she talks about why she’s embarking on an exciting new adventure.

“You can’t have a five-year plan as an actress – I have no idea where I’ll be next week”

“I DIDN’T REALLY DECIDE ON BEING AN ACTRESS,” Perdita Weeks explains over a black Americano at her regular culinary haunt, Counter, in Vauxhall, southwest London, a stone’s throw from the home she shares with her younger brother, Rollo. “My older sister [Honeysuckle Weeks, 36] is an actress and she got spotted by a children’s agent when she was about 12, and the same agent took on my brother and I [aged around four and five), because she thought we were cute and she could make money off of us,” she laughs. “And we enjoyed it and kept going!” While Honeysuckle is best known for her 13-year stint in Foyle’s War, Perdita’s recent roles have included TV dramas Titanic, The Tudors and The Great Fire, Now, as the star of Sky Atlantic drama Penny Dreadful, in which she plays new character Catriona Hartdegan, a scholar and swordswoman with knowledge of everything supernatural, Perdita is about to go stellar, too. “I get to do a lot of jumping off banisters and killing people so it’s really fun!” she jokes. She landed the role after sending in her audition via a tape she recorded herself. “You’re meant to get someone else to read with you but no actors live in Vauxhall. None! They all live in Finsbury Park, Highgate and Archway so I just taped the other lines on my phone and then read the scene with myself,” she reveals. Based in Dublin (which she describes as her “happy place”) during filming, Perdita made a name for herself as the poster girl for recycling on set. “Tm a recyeling obsessive,” she grins. “People on sets can be unbearably wasteful in general, as there are so many paper and coffee cups. 1 just couldn’t bear seeing all those cups going in the normal trash to become landfill. I started putting big notes all over the kitchen saying “please recyele”. I’d be in costume with my arm in the bin and washing up people’s dirty plastic cups while making a really obvious point of it.”

If Perdita has something in droves, it’s spirit and environmental awareness. A vegetarian for the past three years, she’s now veering towards veganism. “Its for ethical reasons. I follow Peta and my mum’s vegetarian. I’ve always loved animals,” she tells us. Growing up in West Sussex, the daughter of advertising-copywriter parents, Perdita attended Roedean boarding school while maintaining a double life acting in TV shows like children’s drama Goggle Eyes. Such a background could lead one to believe that Perdita embodies the former child star stereotype, but nothing about her suggests entitlement or over-privilege. In person, she’s both likeable and unassuming, revealing that she swears by Boots’ No7 beauty products and Bio-Oil for her face and likes to shop for second-hand clothing at Oxfam.

When we ask about Rollo, 29, she lights up, telling us proudly about his new career path. “He’s opening a fast food place in Brixton called FFC. I’m telling my brother he needs to have a good vegetarian and vegan option at his restaurant because everyone’s going that way,” she beams. “When you’re an actor, you’re always in hospitality so it made sense. If you’re not working all the time, it’s an easy business to go into.”

Most actors never talk about the bouts of unemployment that are part and parcel of the industry but Perdita (or ‘Perdy’, as her friends call her) is extremely candid about the realities of showbiz. “We both used to work at a restaurant called Pix and all the waiters were a bunch of actors, musicians and models. It’s perfect because it’s very social and you meet a lot of people, so you literally sit there studying all these different characters. It’s a great side gig for an actor.” 

Still, acting wasn’t the life Perdita first envisioned for herself. Originally, she had her sights set on becoming an art curator and studied history of art at London’s prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art. “I was only there for the first year as I ended up being cast in a film. I played the young Beatrix Potter in Mrs Potter but my part didn’t end up being used in the film,” she tells us. “I missed an exam at the end of my first year and they said I couldn’t retake it. They were nice about it, but, as they had been aware I was an actor, they asked if I was fully committed to the course and when it came to it, I just thought acting was a career I already had and it was money I was already making over paying to be at university. In this day and age, you’ve just got to go for it. I figure education will always be there and I can always go back to  it. Experience is everything — look at Lord Sugar!”

“I’ve got a tough skin because I’ve been doing this for a long time”

Having had a step up thanks to her sister’s childhood agent, the legendary Sylvia Young, who’s represented the likes of Billie Piper and Emma Bunton, we ask if she ever felt in Honeysuckle’s shadow. “I would say so, because everywhere I went, she’d already been,” she admits. “She was so successful and incredibly clever. She went to Oxford and I didn’t get in, but, you know, it’s not a bad thing to have a good example go before you and there was enough of an age gap that there wasn’t any direct rivalry between us. She was always my big sister who I looked up to and d love to work with her. We always say one day we’ll write a script together because we both enjoy writing. It’s great to have something to have control of, because as an actor, you’re quite out of control. I’ve got a very tough skin because I’ve been doing this for a long time. Rejection is simply part of it. It can be heart-breaking when you don’t get something you really want but there’s always the next time. Although, my sister has a 100 per cent hit rate for everything. She gets everything she goes for, it’s incredibly frustrating!” she laughs. “You just can’t have a five-year plan as an actor. I have no idea where I’m going to be next week — I could be in Toronto, South Africa or Paris and I love that. If I ever have kids, that will become a con as opposed to a pro, but for the moment, I love being an aunt to Honeysuckle’s five-year-old son, Wade. He’s great and if I need a little fix, he’s there. He’s really clever, too, but maybe I’m biased.”

“I love being 30. I’ve left all that self-consciousness and doubt behind”

She assures us, however, that acting in TV films such as Ghosts: Shadowy Third and The Prince and the Pauper (she even had a small role in Spice World while growing up didn’t make her childhood different from anyone else’s. “The teachers were so good about it and I loved being able to escape school. Plus, no one was watching anything that I was acting in so it was just accepted. Honeysuckle was in a programme for ages called The Wild House and we all used to watch it at school, so that was quite funny!” However, she does admit that boarding school had its ups and downs. “It was terrifying,” she begins. “There were no dorms. We had single rooms and that just terrified me — how would I know when to go to breakfast? I got an amazing education there and met my best friend on my first day but I was so pleased to leave. It can feel like institutionalisation after a while. I appreciate now that going to an all-girls school allowed us to be 100 per cent ourselves and just walk around looking horrendous and for it not to matter because we weren’t worrying about being judged by the opposite sex!”

When she’s not working, she’s “mainly” hanging out with her Swedish boyfriend, who works in the health sector and has lived in London for the past ten years. She has a few actor friends like Jenna Coleman and Harry Treadaway, too. “Actors are my favourite type of people because they’re fun to hang out with, tend to be extroverted and are easy to talk to.”

Talking of relationships, it seems the internet has furnished Perdita with a life wholly different from her own. “Its so funny – on Wikipedia, I’m married with twin boys. I keep meaning to change it because every time I have an interview, someone asks me about my kids,” she chuckles. “Its kind of believable because these made-up kids have full names which, weirdly, are ones I could possibly
have chosen: Humphrey Carrington Frederiksen and Rupert Sebastian Frederiksen but that’s not even my
boyfriend’s surname! I first found out when I was a bridesmaid for my best friend who lives in Kuwait, and a couple of people said to her how great I looked considering I’d just had kids two months ago. So I Googled myself, as one does. I don’t know who went to the trouble of going into so much detail but it made me wonder if I was living in two dimensions
or something. T would love twin boys, not right now but one day…”

One day may come sooner than she’s willing to let on considering that after our interview, she’s off to meet her solicitor as she’s buying a house in Sussex with her boyfriend. “It’s going to be our main place because I love open spaces; it’s where my mum lives and is only an hour on the train from London. I think you love London more when it’s somewhere that you visit.”

When we ask what other projects she has coming up, she says she genuinely doesn’t know. “I’d love to do theatre. I didn’t go to drama school because I remember my mum telling me that if I went, I’d end up being in direct competition with my best friends, which is true! And theatre is such a pure form of
acting. I’d even try a musical; I think I’m brave enough now. Once you get to 30, you’re a bit more
like ‘whatever’, What’s the worst that could happen? I remember my first pilot season in LA was a complete disaster — I left shaking and sweating! Now I just think, ‘Get a grip’. It was a baptism of fire but I love auditioning now. I’d love to do something really dramatic like Broadchurch or a comedy. I just want to do everything!”

Perdita is excited to have passed the milestone of 30 and, in her new decade, wants to learn to ride a motorcycle, pick up Italian and finesse her Swedish. “My brother just turned 29 and he’s terrified about leaving his twenties but I genuinely am an adult now and I love it. I’ve left all that self-consciousness and doubt behind. Plus, car insurance is getting a lot cheaper now!”