20 Questions: Jill Halfpenny – 'It's worth taking risks'

1. Where and when were you born?
I was born in Gateshead in 1975.

2. What was it that made you want to become an actor?
I don’t know if there was an actual moment, I can never remember not wanting to be one. I do remember my Mum taking me to London when I was 4 or 5 to see a production of Annie. Considering I was so young, I remember a lot of the show. When I ask my mum about it she says I was literally still for a whole three hours, totally entranced.

3. If you hadn't been an actor, what might you have done professionally?
I really like interior design, so I think I would have liked to be a buyer or an interior designer. That’s an alternate world I often think about when work isn't coming in!

4. What was your first big break?
I guess you could say Byker [Grove] was a bit of a break, it was the first television job I had, but you don’t really think like that when you’re younger. You don’t realise quite how lucky you are.

5. Career highlights?
As a child, Byker was one of them, I loved every minute. Legally Blonde was a really fun time and with the Olivier off the back of that it was lovely. I did a play by Lee Hall called Cooking with Elvis which was a really fun time in my life.

6. Any regrets?
I know everybody says this and it’s a bit clichéd but I do honestly believe everything is meant to happen. I suppose in a very general sense I wish that I’d been braver when I was younger, and not cared so much about what people think. A lot of the time in this business you end up people pleasing and sometimes I think it’s just worth taking risks.

7. What was the last thing you saw on stage that had a big impact on you?
I'm working with Nadia Fall at the minute, and the last show of hers I saw was Home at the National. I loved that show, there was just a rawness and realness about it that you don’t see a lot in the theatre.

8. Who are your acting idols?
I admire people very much, like Imelda Staunton who seems to be able to have a huge versatility, going between musicals and classical pieces very easily. I find that kind of talent very inspiring. I think it’s undervalued a lot of the time when people are just good at a lot of things.

9. What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Somebody told me to not let work define me. I was talking to them about how to cope with being out of work and how upset I got, and they said if you let work define you, you will have no worth unless you’re working. Our profession is full of comparisons all the time, you can get very swept up in it and I think sometimes it’s good to take a little break. You are who you are and that’s it really.

10. Why did you want to get involved in Way Upstream?
It was really all about Nadia for me. I’d seen Home and done a play reading for her at the National and I really liked her energy and thought ‘oh she’s an unusual choice to do an Ayckbourn in Chichester’. And then when we spoke on the phone she had interesting ideas and I thought spending hours in the rehearsal room with her would be really good fun.

11. Tell us about your character, Emma
Emma is the wife of Alistair, she’s very middle class. On first impressions she’s a bit mousey and put-upon but actually she’s one of those women that has inner strength and she’s the person in the play that ends up standing up for herself and everybody else sort of flails around her.

12. How do you feel about the prospect of performing on a full-sized boat, complete with river?
I am very much looking forward to it. It’s a real challenge but it’s part of the appeal of the show, just to do something you’ve never done before.

13. Have you been in any Ayckbourn plays before?
No. I did a lot at drama school because they’re classics; I'm completely aware of them and have seen a lot performed. That was the other thing; I guess you get to a certain point in your career where it’s nice to try new things because people have a certain idea of who you are and what you do and it’s good to shake things up a bit.

14. What do you think it is about Ayckbourn's work that makes him so perennially popular?
He writes about real people in real situations and it’s about the minutiae of life, it’s the unsaid and the Britishness of it all – he does that polite conversation with absolute raging subtext underneath it that we British do so well. I think we all recognise a bit of ourselves in them and think ‘oh god, I’ve done that’.

15. You've done a mixture of plays and musicals, do you have a preference?
I definitely don’t have a preference. The reason I got into this job was so I could do everything; radio, TV, theatre, the lot. It keeps me interested and keeps me on my toes and it gets very dull doing the same thing over and over. I did a lot of TV last year, but it was really nice to get back on the stage.

16. Your niece Chelsea is also an actress – would you like to perform with her?
Yeah, that would be great. We've talked about it a lot and I guess when the time is right and the part is right, I’d love to do something with her, it would be really fun.

17. What's your favourite post-show hang out?
Sophie’s is always a very easy bet in London, because it stays open and you don’t have to book.

18. How do you unwind?
I do yoga, I watch TV. I don’t have a set routine; I've never really found it a problem, unwinding after a show. When I'm tired, I'm tired!

19. If you could swap places with anyone for a day, who would it be?
I wouldn’t mind being Eva Mendes and then I could snog Ryan Gosling.

20. What's next?
I don’t know what’s next straight away – I’m pretty sure we’re doing another series of In the Club in the Autumn, so it would be nice to get something in in between. We’ll see!

Way Upstream runs at Chichester Festival Theatre until 16 May