“I might do something mental like run naked through the streets,” says Scottish actor Karen Gillan when I ask what she might do if the world were ending, as it does in her latest film, The Life of Chuck. Then she cracks up. “I don’t know why I said that. I honestly have no desire to run naked through the streets. But I suppose my brain went to ideas of the weird and wild. To the things I’d normally be way too scared to do.”
Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, The Life of Chuck is based on Stephen King’s 2020 novella of the same name. Although King is best known for revealing the unthinkable horrors that lurk between the pavement cracks of American suburbia, he’s also a master of showing us the joy and magic that also exist there. Flanagan is also best known for his spookier work – he’s been the show runner of many Netflix horror series including The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Midnight Mass (2021), and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), before which he also adapted King’s novel Gerald’s Game for the big screen in 2017.
In this perspective-flipper of a tale, droll-toned comic Nick Offerman takes on King’s narrative voice as Flanagan urges viewers to seize moments of wonder in the everyday, because life (both of humans, the human race and planets) is finite. The titular Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) is a humble accountant. In a key scene, he puts down his briefcase in the street and begins dancing to the beat of a busker’s drums. He pulls a woman (played by Annalise Basso) from the crowd and they twirl through a breath-holder of a public performance, accompanied only by the rattling drums of the delighted percussionist. The seven-minute-long sequence boldly breaks rules of narrative cinema just as the characters break with standard street etiquette.
Born in Inverness in 1987, Gillan is best known for her sci-fi roles. She made her name in the UK as time-travelling Amy Pond, companion to the Eleventh Doctor, in Doctor Who before warp-speeding her way to Hollywood fame, first as blue-faced Nebula in the Marvel universe (from 2014) then as dimension-hopping Ruby Roundhouse in the rebooted 2017 and 2019 Jumanji films. In 2023, she gave a sucker-punching performance in sci-fi satire Dual, starring a depressed alcoholic who clones herself after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Today she jokes that viewers might read something vaguely otherworldly into her pale skin and red hair. “I’ve had people come up and tell me that I AM an alien. They sincerely think that. When I was about 29, one grown man told me – with total conviction – that people with my skin and hair colouring are from outer space.”
But in The Life of Chuck she plays a nurse. Just another normal human struggling to make sense of a world fragmenting around her. The internet is down. Doctors and patients alike are abandoning the hospital in which she works. Heart monitors are synchronising their bleeps. She reaches for the reassurance of her ex-husband (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as things fall apart.
This film made 37-year-old Gillan realise that she would do likewise. Instead of “ticking through a bucket list or doing crazy things, I now know I’d just get to the people I love and just be with them. That’s it. Simple as that.”
Video calling today from the Scottish-themed Californian cottage she shares with her husband (US comic Nick Kocher) and their infant daughter Clementine, Gillan is currently enjoying a little of that precious “just being” time between projects. She’d like to get behind the camera again – her powerful directorial debut, The Party’s Just Beginning (2018), really opened up the issue of male suicide in the North of Scotland. But she’s worried about juggling filmmaking with caring for Clementine.
“You’re usually looking at 15-hour days on film sets,” Gillan winces. “It’s not a sustainable existence. I thought that was normal until now.” She flags up the longer hours that female actors often spend in hair and make up compared to their male counterparts. “Men will come in for, like, 15 minutes. And we’re there for hours.” Surely it takes more than 15 minutes for a make-up artist to cover her ginormous Jumanji co-star, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, in foundation? Gillan creases up. “He comes in for probably five minutes before he starts. I mean, he’s great. If I could be ready in five minutes I’d be happy. But women – who wear more make-up, have more hair styling – are in that trailer two hours before the day starts.”
She’s thrilled when I tell her that Sarah Polley made 2022’s Oscar-nominated drama Women Talking on a set designed to run around family-friendly hours. “This is great to hear,” gushes Gillan. “I’ve been talking to producers about the ways we can make the work more child friendly, more mother and father friendly. Right now I couldn’t direct a film without almost never seeing my baby and that’s not a price I’m willing to pay.”
Gillan had a “very normal” childhood, raised on a council estate in Inverness. But she always “just knew” she’d make it as a performer. “I don’t want to sound arrogant” – she doesn’t – “because I have no idea where that certainty came from. I didn’t know anyone in the industry.” Excelling at music and drama at school, she modelled her future career on her then-idol, Jennifer Lopez. “I saw her straddling the worlds of movies and music and thought, that would be nice.” You’d be Karen from the Loch? “Oh God! That’s so much less gritty isn’t it?”
By her early teens, she was making her own horror movies and has me in stitches describing one she’s just rewatched, in which she played a schoolgirl serial killer who ends up knifing her own father. “He did a very convincing death for me, stumbling around in the doorway,” she laughs. She took time out of school for a role in ITV detective drama Rebus (2000), moved to Edinburgh to study acting at 16, then down to London to train at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, where she was scouted by a modelling agency.
Although she’s obviously very beautiful, I find it hard to imagine the highly animated Gillan keeping either physically or intellectually still enough for modelling. “Thanks!” she laughs. “It wasn’t the plan.” But she compared the job with the bar jobs that her drama school peers were taking between auditions. “I realised you could make more money, doing less, modelling.”
She doesn’t think she was all that good at the job and kept her mind occupied writing a script set in the modelling word. “I was always scribbling in my notebook on shoots,” she recalls. “That was how I got my dopamine hit and made sense of what was happening. I’ve always been like that. If I’m not doing what I really want, then I’m working on what I want to do next.”
Landing the Doctor Who role felt like “a huge leap, a shocking miracle” to Gillan. “After that the leaps felt smaller. Although getting the Marvel and Jumanji films were further leaps.” She says she still gets weird “flak” for the skimpy costume she wore in Jumanji. She’s pointed out in the past that the outfit was a joke about the sexualised outfits allocated to female avatars in video games. “I can understand where people are coming from. But it was a commentary on Lara Croft, the male gaze… those are not practical clothes at all.”
Gillan would always pick board games over computer games and frets about screen time. She says working on The Life of Chuck has made her “realise that in this life we place so much emphasis on the things that would impress other people and it’s hard to be present when you’re so focused on presenting a slightly different reality to people online”.
A couple of months ago she noticed the obsession with recording everything had “slightly infected the way I am as a mum”. “When my baby does something cute, I want to video it,” she admits. “But I found myself staring at videos of her more than I was staring at the actual her. I thought: ‘Time to put the phone away.’”
‘The Life of Chuck’ is in cinemas now
