Mira Solenne Doesn't Want to Be Famous. She Wants to Be Right.

Mira Solenne arrives at the rehearsal room in Bermondsey carrying a paper bag of clementines and a script so annotated it looks like a medieval manuscript. She is thirty-four, and for most of the last decade she has been the kind of actor other actors talk about in lowered voices: the Hedda who made the audience laugh in the wrong places, the Rosalind who played the forest scenes barefoot on gravel. Until this spring, almost nobody outside the theatre had heard of her.

That changed with 'The Weather Inside', a spare, eighty-minute drama by the Danish director Kasper Holm-Veje in which Solenne plays a lighthouse keeper's daughter who stops speaking for a year. The film opened in a handful of cinemas and was expected to disappear quietly. Instead it ran for fourteen weeks, largely on word of mouth, and her performance, conducted almost entirely through the eyes and hands, became the subject of a thousand earnest essays. She has read none of them.

Solenne is not being coy about this. She describes attention as a kind of weather system that she can observe from indoors but has no wish to stand in. She does not have public social media accounts. She has turned down two fragrance campaigns, a limited series about a royal scandal and, memorably, a role as a scientist in a franchise film that required, in her words, a great deal of pointing at things that are not there.

I don't want to be famous. I want to be right. Those are very different jobs, and only one of them lets you go to the market on a Saturday.

The discipline of the stage

Her method, such as it is, comes from the rehearsal room. Solenne trained at a small drama school in Leeds and spent her twenties in repertory theatres from Bristol to Aberdeen, playing four roles a season and learning, as she puts it, to be useful. She still approaches film like a play, insisting on reading the entire script aloud with the cast before shooting and arriving on set knowing every other character's lines as well as her own.

Holm-Veje, who cast her after seeing her in a fringe production of a Norwegian chamber piece, says she was the least interested actor he had ever met in how she looked on camera and the most interested in what the camera was doing. On the second day of the shoot she asked the cinematographer to remove a light that was, she argued, making her character too easy to read. He did, and the scene became the film's centrepiece.

The offers now arriving are bigger, and Solenne is weighing them with the caution of someone who has watched talented friends disappear into the machinery. She has agreed to one film next year, a period piece set in a Cornish tin mine, and to a return to the stage in autumn as Lady Macbeth in a three-hander staged in a converted chapel. She chose the chapel, she says, because it holds eighty people and has no bar.

Before leaving, she offers a clementine and asks, with genuine curiosity, what the piece will be about. Told that it is about her, she looks faintly alarmed, then laughs. Outside, a teenager recognises her and asks, nervously, for a photograph. Solenne agrees, then asks the girl what she is reading. They talk about the book for ten minutes. The photograph, when it is finally taken, is slightly out of focus, and both of them seem to prefer it that way.