The interview you are about to read was pitched for a single, simple reason: Actor Erin Doherty had just delivered my favorite performance of the year. The role in question is Mary Carr, the female ganglord and ace thief at the heart of creator Steven Knight’s 19th-century crime-and-boxing opus A Thousand Blows. Positioned as one third of an triangle with the two other main characters, rival boxers Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham) and Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby), Mary held down her end of the screen without needing to set foot inside the ring. Doherty’s ferocity and vulnerability left a lasting impression.
Then a funny thing happened. In the time it took to coordinate an interview with Doherty about her standout work on the series, a whole second show emerged in which she was just as impressive. Co-created by her A Thousand Blows co-star Graham, Netflix’s Adolescence is a searing four-part examination of how algorithmically promoted misogyny has turned the teenage wasteland lethal.
Doherty plays Briony Ariston, a psychologist assigned to assess 13-year-old murderer Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), for only one episode, but it’s a one-shot two-person masterpiece. So this is the first and only time in my career I set up an interview about my favorite performance of the year, only for the actor in question to deliver a second such performance in the meantime.
“That is very surreal to hear,” Doherty says with a wide smile when I mention this to her. It’s an even more impressive achievement when you consider how different the two parts are from one another, or from Doherty’s breakout role as Princess Anne in The Crown a few years back. And like the Princess Royal, Mary Carr is a real historical figure, commanding the real-life all-female gang called the Forty Elephants. During a Zoom call earlier this week, Doherty revealed what it was like to play both a woman criminal mastermind and a woman who specializes in the minds of criminals, and turn both into unforgettable television.
DECIDER: In A Thousand Blows, your character, Mary Carr, is the only one of the three main characters who doesn’t beat people up for a living. That means you have to hold the audience’s interest alongside two actors, Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby, who were literally trained ass-kickers.
ERIN DOHERTY: I definitely, immediately clocked the juxtaposition of those three personas. Boxing is such a fascinating sport to witness, and whenever it’s on our screens, the immediacy is just so engrossing. Million Dollar Baby is one of my favorite films of all time. So I knew that I was gonna have to pull my weight in that sense.
But if I’m honest, it was all there in the writing, and the fact that these women and their story hadn’t been explored yet. They were genuine craftsmen, so thoroughly skilled at what they did. They treated their job with that amount of respect. I just hoped that people found that as fascinating as I already did. I was given the opportunity to take on Mary on screen for the first time. No one had touched her! I was like, “Half my job is done for me.”
The first thing we see Mary do is lie, as she pretends to be a pregnant woman in labor so her gang can pick onlookers’ pockets. In that same episode, she sexually assaults a man at gunpoint. She’s an unpleasant person, and it’s up to you as an actor to get people to root for her. That seems like a lot to carry.
Yes, it was. I had all those thoughts and fears going into it. But at the same time, I’m a big believer in people rooting for people’s hearts. So if I just pumped this woman full of heart and purity, if I got it right and did my job right and really showed you beneath that armor, then I was like, hopefully people fall in love with her in the same way that I do. I think we all do questionable things, and selfishly, I find that the most exciting and interesting thing to explore as an actor. I don’t really want to play good guys. I’m always like, okay, but what else? What is questionable? What are the gray areas?
I do genuinely believe that there is no black and white in terms of personality. Everyone exists in this weird limbo. And whether or not we view ourselves that way, I think it’s more interesting to put aside the social fear of being like, “Oh God, will people just think I’m awful?” And just going, “What’s more interesting? What is more gripping?” I’m so drawn to those portrayals of people. I’m always looking for the grit, the little oddities that we may not necessarily want to look at in our own lives. That excites me so much more as a career path.
The moment that really sealed things for me was when Hezekiah, Mary’s friend and lover, confronts her about her deceptions — no spoilers, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s all but impossible to forgive. Rather than deny it, Mary screams, “I lie! I lie!” She recognizes that this is her most vital skill, but that it’s also a prison for her. It’s hard to watch a person take their own measure like that. I found it so intense and riveting.
I’m so glad. Honestly, hearing you say that is everything to me, because for me, the saving grace of Mary is that she is a human being. She is, like all of us, just trying to survive. Like, yes, in that context, the temperature was turned up times 100 because she literally was fighting for her life every day. But what was so necessary to me was having the payoff of that scene at the end. We didn’t have scripts for all of the episodes at the start. So when I finally did read that — it must have been like a few months into filming — I was like, thank God we get this from her. I always knew it was under there, and I was always trying to bring it into the scenes. But to reach this point where she was literally on the ground begging for someone to just see her, to pull back those layers and to rip open her chest and go, “Look, I see the flaws, but I would die without this. So, please, can we both just get past this?” It was an absolute gift.
It’s a weird actor secret that sometimes you’re like, “Oh, no one ever really got to know what was at the crux and the core of this human being.” I always knew that was in there, but you don’t necessarily know that you’re gonna be given the opportunity to put it on screen. So to be given that with Mary is one of the great privileges that I’ve ever had on screen — especially when you think about her introduction giving birth to this non-existent baby, and then you jump ahead to that point. It’s so rare that you get to show that arc. Once you’ve gone on that journey with her, I was absolutely gagging to say those words.
Mary is the kind of person your character in Adolescence, Briony, would be brought in to evaluate. Did playing a criminal influence the way you played a person whose job is to interact with criminals?
I think subconsciously it has to. From my perspective, being an actor, I just am obsessed with psychology, and why people do the things they do. For me, that’s the joy. It’s why I pinch myself every day that I get to do this. I just find people so interesting! So the prep of a character is my favorite part of a job. You’re a detective, digging, finding little clues, filling in gaps. And you’re like, “Oh, maybe that’s why they feel that way, or that’s why that comes out like that, and that’s why they choose that word.” I love that aspect of mining the text, and Briony felt like the physical embodiment of that love.
It was quite vulnerable, in and of itself. This was the closest to myself, the closest to Erin that I’d ever felt in terms of a character, because all I had to do was be present with this boy in this room. The hardest part of that job was being exposed like a mirror, and really leaning into what therapists have to do, which is just to be with someone and guide them without the other person really being aware of it.
From a practical perspective, you’re sitting there to be yelled at by this boy for a long time. For a long freaking time. Was that unpleasant? It feels like it had to have been a tough day at work.
No, it really was. We rehearsed for two weeks, then we shot it for one week, and we did two takes a day, because that is all we could emotionally and physically achieve. I think we’d be on the floor if we tried to do it any more. At the end of the whole three-week process, I was obliterated, just a shell of a being.
To maintain that focus, to get through a whole shot with someone as essentially a two-hander, was physically draining. To be on the receiving end of someone’s emotions is so exhausting. I’ve already admired therapists for years and years and years, I think what they do is incredible, but this process made me understand that they are athletes in their own sense. So yeah, it was really challenging to go through it twice a day. But hopefully we were able to portray the danger and the dynamism of what it means to actually go through a session. It was a tough ask. But that project and that story specifically needed that episode to really pick out what is going on inside this boy’s mind.
At the end of the episode, Briony cuts off the interview with Jamie very abruptly, and ignores him when he begs her to say that she likes him. As a viewer, part of me was like, “Just fucking say it! This kid’s dying inside!” But another part of me had heard the vile, gutter misogyny coming out of his mouth, and saw how horrifying it must have been for her to confront the fact that he’d been given this mindset. I get where she’s coming from. At least I think I do.
If anything, the end of the scene was the easiest part to play, because it was just this kind of emotional explosion that had been bottled up for the entirety of the episode. The most challenging part was keeping a lid on it and toeing that professional line. Honestly, half of me is in there as Erin, thinking “Just say it!” But it’s the professional moral code that you can’t betray. No matter how much you’re willing this kid or any client to be the person you want them to be and to prove you wrong and to give you a glimmer of hope, you can’t cross that line. That actually creates the exhaustion.
But I’m so grateful we got the payoff we got with Briony once Jamie had left the room. As Erin, I don’t know how I would’ve filtered the emotional stress any other way. It was a vomit of emotion at the end. What I keep coming back to is absolute respect for real life professionals. After one week of doing it, I have no idea how they can continue.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.