Kim Medcalf

Kim Medcalf

Kim Medcalf is currently enticing West End audiences with the nightly invitation to come to the cabaret, old chum, which, as Sally Bowles, she extends in Rufus Norris’ vivid re-imagining of the John Kander and Fred Ebb classic Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre. But things might have been very different for the vivacious 33-year-old actress: she could have been stuck behind a desk, working in corporate business, instead. After graduating with a law degree from Bristol University and then working in marketing and sales, she suddenly ditched it all to do what she really wanted to do—act. After undertaking a year of postgraduate drama training, she took to the theatrical boards, but her initial tenure as a stage actress was short-lived. After just one theatre job, she won a key role on the TV soap EastEnders, taking over as Sam Mitchell from Daniella Westbrook. Her four years on the show made her a household name—or at least, a household face. Now, however, things have come full circle, and she’s back on the musical stage that she trained for. Theatre.com caught up with her backstage in her dressing room, several hours before the evening performance.

You’re finally doing what you set out to do, aren’t you? I am too—I also read law at University, but left it behind me.
Can you imagine what we’d be feeling like right now if we hadn’t? I’d be the most miserable lawyer and probably awful as well, stuck in an office.

Was acting something you always wanted to do?
Acting was something that I was always very comfortable doing, from the time I went to school. I lived in Bromley in southeast London, and went to a girls’ grammar school there. There was a boys’ grammar school down the road, and we all mixed together to do a production of The Pajama Game. I got to play Babe Williams, and we had a massive orchestra—the whole borough got together for it, and it was fantastic. I’d also done two pantos at the Churchill [the local producing theatre in Bromley]—Barbara Windsor was in one of them—though when I came to do EastEnders, she didn’t remember me. I was one of the little dancing girls and I was about 13 when I did it, so I’m not surprised. Though I wanted to continue in the theatre, I just didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t come from a family where anyone else had done it. I remember I bought The Stage, and though I didn’t know how to do this, I felt I just had to do something. So I went to an open audition for Starlight Express. I turned up with my friend, who is now a doctor. Everyone else had their proper resumé and everything, and I only had a little passport photograph on me. But I got through the singing, from about 400 to the last 40 but then had to go upstairs to learn the dance routine. I had only brought cycling shorts and a swimming costume. I was that naïve.

Kim Medcalf in Cabaret

How did you finally make the switch to do proper drama training, and learn how to actually negotiate the way auditions worked?
It wasn’t until I was 25 or 26, on holiday with a group of friends, that I woke up to doing something about it. There were four of us, doing law or management consultancy jobs. We were all having a bit of a mid-twenties crisis, sitting around a table in France and quite drunk, and wondering what we were doing with our lives. We literally went around the table; it came to me and they all said to me, “You say you want to act, and you say that you know it is what you should be doing, but you’ve done nothing about it.” I said, that wasn’t fair—I just didn’t know how. They said, “But you’re not looking—you must go and talk to someone, ring a drama school, be brave.” They made me cry. But I remember getting home that Monday morning and thinking, “You buggers, I’ll show you.” So I rang about four drama schools, but it was the end of August and they weren’t auditioning, except Central who told me they had started this new musical post-grad training. They were having final auditions that Wednesday, so they told me to bring along a song and just turn up. They offered me a place, but I asked them if I could defer it a year. I was so flummoxed, as it was due to start the next week and I hadn’t told my work or anything. So I saved up for a year and then went there.

So you were a bit older by the time you did it.
There’s no room for regrets, but I do think when I look back that maybe I could have gone to drama school instead of the three years I was working. In some ways that would have been wonderful, but in others I love my life now and the fact that I’ve got a very separate world as a result. I have a lot of friends who are not in this business. And coming into it a bit later was ideal for me—I’m quite sensitive, and having to be a bit tougher away from it all and then walking into this has grounded me more. Making the change was quite a hard thing to get my head around—I had a paid job and a company car, but I was also terribly bored and I just knew I was in the wrong profession. It must be like being in the wrong relationship. You just know it’s wrong. When people ask me now how I do whatever it is I do, I say there is nothing in my mind that has ever been more stressful than walking into a sales meeting and talking about profit margins and percentages. I’m intelligent enough so I can do it I suppose, but it never felt right. I would much rather this stress than that, because ever since I was a kid I have loved this. So, when people ask me why I did acting after I’d done law, it was never about that; but rather why I did law at all.

Kim Medcalf in Cabaret

Were there any benefits?
I was probably a bit saturated before and needed a bit of breathing space before I entered the acting profession. If I’d gone into the business at 15 or even 18, I don’t think I would have coped very well. I was just a kid. It took me going around the world with my best friends on my gap year between school and university to grow up a bit. It was something I needed to do, and I think that going to Bristol and having those three years out there where I wasn’t doing something that was all about me, me, me, was great, too.