Ria Zmitrowicz interview: ‘It’s scary for emerging artists at the moment - that worries me’

Don’t fret that for the early part of Alistair McDowall’s feverishly anticipated new play, The Glow, Ria Zmitrowicz doesn’t say a word. If you’ve seen her on stage, you’ll know she’s the MVP of any drama, a hand grenade ready to be sent fizzing into the heart of the action. From Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin at the National Theatre to The Doctor and Dance Nation at the Almeida, her characters often have an external wildness or innocence, but tend to be carrying the flame of something far knottier inside.

For a while now, Zmitrowicz, 31, has felt a bit like one of theatre’s best kept secrets – see her in one thing and you’ll want to see her in everything. Over the past decade, she’s been building a respected career on stage and screen, and was named a Bafta Breakthrough Brit in 2018. But this could be the year her talent goes global - as well as playing the lead in McDowall’s play at the Royal Court, she’ll star alongside Leslie Mann, Tim Robbins and Little Simz in Amazon Prime’s star-studded adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s Woman’s Prize-winning novel The Power. (Eddie Marsan plays her dad.)

Speaking to me over Zoom on her lunch break from rehearsals, Zmitrowicz and I talk about The Glow while carefully trying not to blunder into spoilers. “At first I was like, mmm. God. I think I felt intimidated by Ali’s genius,” she tells me about first reading the script. “And then I got on the phone to Vicky [Featherstone, who is directing], and she was like, ‘well, at the heart of it is a woman who is trying to find out who she is’. And I thought, oh that’s something we can all relate to, so that was kind of my hook in.” She felt “a little bit scared of it, and I thought that was a good place to be.” All I can say is she’s been wearing knee pads in rehearsals and anyone who saw McDowall’s X in 2016 (which Zmitrowicz also starred in) will love this ride.

The action begins in a Victorian asylum in 1863; a spiritualist medium (Bafta winner Rakie Ayola) is looking for an exploitable and disposable lost soul to be a conduit for summoning ghostly presences. A nameless, unspeaking woman, played by Zmitrowicz, ends up going home with her and her son for the spooky shenanigans. “I feel like this is a really great play to come to the theatre to see, because it’s such a collaboration with the lights and the sound – the designers Jessica [Hung Han Yun] and Nick [Powell] have been in rehearsals a lot, which is rare,” she says. Her role is a challenge – often mysterious and highly physical. “Once I’m on, I’m pretty much on for the whole thing, so I think it will be an adrenaline rush.”

Although not as prolific as some of his peers, McDowall has something of a cult following; in the playwriting world, he’s Nick Cave or the Pixies. After starring in X, Zmitrowicz had people excitedly tell her they’d never seen it but they’d read it – part of the text famously featured the letter ‘x’ repeated over and over for two pages. For her, X and The Glow had “at the core, just such human emotion and like... what it means to be alive,” she tells me, before doing a face at having said something so deep.

It’s an intriguing thing that some of the actors I’ve encountered who seem most natural and authentic on stage often squirm when they have to talk about themselves. This is Zmitrowicz – her eyes almost pop out of her head when she’s talking about something that excites her, but she doesn’t necessarily relish being the centre of attention when the subject is herself. Born in Spain, she grew up in Surrey and Hampshire and was a member of the National Youth Theatre, before moving to London when she was 18 and began working in a shop. Living with her dad, she said she’d give herself a year to see what happened and got involved with drama and theatre as much as she could, including young companies at the Ovalhouse, Almeida and Hampstead. Her applications to drama school went nowhere: “They didn’t want me – I tried for like four years, and it just didn’t go my way.”

It turned out she didn’t need to – she met the playwright and actor Luke Barnes through the NYT, and ended up starring in his play Chapel Street. “He was like, oh I’ve written this play – do you want to come to the pub and read it?” It was performed first at the Old Red Lion, before a run at Edinburgh and the Bush Theatre, from which Zmitrowicz got an agent and her career began. She worked “slowly but surely” in fringe theatres and small roles with the English Touring Theatre. A role in Arinzé Kene’s play God’s Property, which was produced by Talawa in 2013 and also starred Kingsley Ben-Adir, was “a really seminal thing” for her.

“I feel like I did an apprenticeship in acting – I didn’t go to drama school, but I’ve done all the rungs,” she says. Her route into the industry has made her acutely aware of how the pandemic has shrunk opportunities for others trying to follow a similar path. “It’s been sad for the whole industry, like with the Vault Festival being cancelled, when I was just saying how I’ve done all of that fringe work and regional touring. It’s kind of scary for emerging artists at the moment, because those opportunities and other routes that aren’t just going to drama school are getting smaller and smaller. That worries me.”

The last decade has been seismic in terms of change for the theatre industry, from MeToo revelations to the Black Lives Matter movement to the ruptures of the pandemic. But in terms of progress, “it’s never done – you don’t go, oh cool, we fixed it,” Zmitrowicz says. “But I do think that buildings and people are thinking more consciously about how to make work that’s a zero harm environment. That’s important.”

Her upcoming role in The Power, which is about a world literally dominated by female power – a matriarchy emerges after women discover they can release high voltage electrical charge from their hands - may have been summoned by a special power of its own. Zmitrowicz plays Roxy Monke, the daughter of a London crime boss who harnesses her power after seeing her mum murdered. She tells me about a WhatsApp message from her cousin, when the novel first came out. “She said, oh I’m reading this book – if they ever made it into a TV show, you’d have to play Roxy because I’m reading it with you in mind’. Cut to a few years later…!” (Her castmate on The Glow, Fisayo Akinade, has requested Zmitrowicz’s cousin imagines something for him too.)

The show, which could run for as many as five seasons, will start some fascinating debates. “What I think is really interesting about it is that [in the show] it’s the power that corrupts, rather than the gender. So therefore we need better systems in place to look after people in society – I feel really strongly about that,” she says.

The work that Zmitrowicz does is often particularly feminist in tone – she puts that down to a mix of personal taste and the fact that there are now more interesting roles being written for women. She’s also worked with a lot of female directors who have been big influences on her - she cites Featherstone, who she’s working with for a fourth time on The Glow, as one. When her character was raped in the play Bad Roads in a scene with castmate Tadhg Murphy (who is also in The Glow), “the way Vicky staged it, she just turned the lights off. So actually, me and Tadhg were holding hands in the dark – it was really nice and safe.” And while working on The Power, director Reed Morano – who recently won an Emmy for The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017 – enabled Zmitrowicz to push her performance in a particularly emotional scene by crying along with her, accompanying her on her character’s emotional journey.

Working on female-led sets for stories like this mean “you can really go to that place,” she says. But that place has been pretty serious lately – next, she fancies doing a comedy. She’s got the glow, the power and, from her mischievous grin, I reckon she’s got the funny too.

The Glow is at the Royal Court from Jan 24 to March 5; royalcourttheatre.com. The Power airs on Amazon Prime later this year