Karen Gillan’s house in the US is, she says, “like a little piece of Scotland in Los Angeles”. She is sipping coffee in her living room. The wallpaper behind her is a forest of brown, beige and mallards. When Vogue shot here last year, it described Gillan’s taste in interiors as “quirky”. “Yeah,” she sputters. “It’s all old trinkets.”
A piece of Scotland in Los Angeles is not a bad description of Gillan herself. Born in Inverness, she has lived in LA on and off for years. It’s a love-hate relationship. “I never feel settled here. It’s a real issue of mine.” Whenever she’s in LA, she gets the feeling that it’s not where she’s meant to be. Then she flies off and makes a film. “I come back and think …” – she does a cartoonish swooning sigh – “… It’s nice to be home. Then in a week I’m like: I’ve got to move.”
Gillan has yet to acquire the gloss and poise associated with Hollywood’s rich and famous. Today, she’s wearing a brown hoodie, massive gold hoop earrings and no makeup. Of all the celebrities I’ve interviewed on video during the pandemic she seems least bothered about flattering camera angles or how she looks on screen: leaning over her laptop like she’s Zooming with a mate.
People rave about the LA lifestyle, but she’s not convinced. “I’m like: what, the sun? Well, I’m ginger, so rule that out. And I don’t drive, so I can’t get about. I mean I can take Ubers.” Actually, she has just started learning to drive; she has lesson two this morning right after our interview. She got through the first months of lockdown in LA with her puppy, Turtle, a bull terrier-poodle mix: “The love of my life.”
Gillan seems most comfortable nattering away like this, with a stream of self-deprecating banter. Her sense of humour is often up there on screen too, beginning with her breakout role playing Doctor Who sidekick Amy Pond. Gillan moved to the US for Oculus, a supernatural thriller from the Paranormal Activity producers. Then came her role as the cyborg Nebula in the Guardians of the Galaxy, followed by the Jumanji franchise. She pulled off that unicornish transition from teatime telly to Hollywood, then in 2017 went home to Inverness to shoot her writer-director debut, The Party’s Just Beginning, a funny-downbeat indie.
Gillan is the first to own up to being fiercely ambitious. As a kid, she rampaged around the house with a video camera: making horror movies. Throughout her teenage years, she was interested in one thing: acting. At 15, she wrote to every agent in Scotland. “I was just really laser-focused on making it happen because it’s not like I had any family or friends in the industry.” Her mother worked in a supermarket, her father in a care home for people with learning disabilities. “Being from a place that feels really really far away from London, it’s not like you could just fall into all this. You have to make it happen for yourself.”
In her early 20s, she partied averagely hard. But the drive never waned. “I definitely went out and had fun, but I remember only ever allowing myself to party once a week, never consecutive nights.”
The one Los Angeles habit that Gillan has picked up is fitness. At school, she was good at running, but that was it. “I’m a terrible dancer, so not great at [fight] routines.” After a few action films, she has improved. “I’ve definitely got better. You should have seen me when I started; I just looked like spaghetti.” At her screen test for Guardians of the Galaxy, she remembers being asked to fight in front of a green screen. “It must have looked hilarious, just limbs flying around. They were like: ooookay, you’ve got the role, but you need to learn to fight.”
Now she’s got the exercise bug. “That sort of changed my life because I’d never worked out before. I’d never eaten healthily in my life. I didn’t know how to do it. I would happily eat McDonald’s, chocolate, crisps, Tesco sandwiches. It wasn’t healthy at all. I can’t believe the way I used to go on.”
For her latest role in Gunpowder Milkshake, she slipped into full-on action-hero mode. The movie feels like a cross between John Wick and Kill Bill – in one fight scene Gillan bites the ear off an adversary. She arrived on set fresh from shooting the new Jumanji film where she’d trained with the Mission Impossible team. “I was raring to go with my nunchucks, and I was in OK shape, but this whole other level of action.” She plays Samantha, an assassin hired by “the Firm”, a secretive association of men in suits led by Paul Giamatti. When an assassination goes wrong, Samantha goes on the run with an eight-year-old girl. Then her hitwoman mum (played by Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey) who walked out 15 years previously, makes an appearance.
Gillan says she wanted to inject her character with a bit of emotion and vulnerability. “I felt as if I had seen a lot of assassins who are softly spoken and stoic. I wanted to do something different.” It also gave her the chance to dive into the psychology of the character. She would have loved to be a therapist, she says. “That itch gets totally scratched in my job.” For this part, she researched abandonment issues, the impact on a child in later life of a parent vanishing from their lives. Gillan mimics the director’s panicked face when she brought up her research: eyebrows raised in mock alarm. “I reassured him: don’t worry, it’s still going to be fun.”
Gunpowder Milkshake is a popcorn movie set in a stylised neon-lit alternate universe populated by gangsters and hired killers. The big shootout finale takes place inside a library that doubles as a weapons depot (the books of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf are lent out with guns and flick knives hidden inside). A trio of supercool librarian-hitwomen (played by Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino) join mum and daughter in combat against enough male goons to fill a football stadium. Is the film a reaction to #MeToo and Time’s Up, tapping into female rage?
Yes and no. “It wasn’t something that we necessarily spoke about. I think we all felt like it was definitely representing a movement that has been happening recently.” What she liked about it was the idea of bringing women together. “It’s a really really positive thing that’s come out of the whole Time’s Up movement, that women are being heard in a way they weren’t before.”
In 2018, Gillan joined female attenders wearing black to the Baftas in support of the Time’s Up movement. Has she ever experienced misogyny herself at all in her career? She shakes her head. “No. Not directly. But, honestly, hearing those stories was enough to support the movement.” I half-wonder, perhaps unfairly, whether she would tell me if she had. While she’s chatty and fun company, spend an hour with her and what you notice is a certain reserve, a carefulness never to say anything too personal or revealing.
One thing I notice when I’m researching is that for someone who shot to fame in her 20s, Gillan clung on to her privacy. There’s never been a Daily Mail story about her falling out of a taxi or staggering bleary-eyed out of an afterparty. “I’ve noticed that, too!” She throws herself back on the sofa with a laugh. “I’m starting to wonder. Am I living my life the right way? There is nothing. Maybe I need to be a bit more exciting.”
Though Gillan did find herself at the sharp end of a minor feminist backlash in 2017 when images emerged of her character in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle dressed in the teensiest of shorts and a top no bigger than a sports bra (while her male co-stars wore jungle-appropriate khakis). She stands by her defence that the images reflected the casual sexism of video game culture back in the day. “I could understand people’s reactions. But I don’t have any regrets at all. It’s a fun film, and we were making a comment on the fact that women were dressed like that in those 90s video games. It felt like there was more substance to it. I don’t think my stance has changed too much.” Funnily enough, she was thinking about this earlier, reading one of those body-positive articles advising women in their 20s to wear bikinis 24/7. “I thought: maybe this is something I can show the grandkids. Like: ‘Granny really had it.’ Or maybe that’s weird.” She giggles. “Maybe I shouldn’t show the grandkids.”
Gillan made her name in Hollywood blockbusters. It’s interesting that when wrote and directed her first film, The Party’s Just Beginning, she went back to Inverness and shot a drama about depression and suicide. Did that reflect her taste in film more than the acting roles? “I actually probably act in more action films than I watch,” she says. “Though as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to appreciate more of a pure popcorn movie. When I was going through my 20s, I was quite serious with my cinema choices, which I cringe at now. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve understood the value of escapism and cinema. I was watching just the most depressing films.” Who was her favourite director? “Michael Haneke! I was not messing around with the depressing.”
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