Denise Gough, interview: 'I thought it was all over, but it isn’t'

It's always a profound pleasure when an actor or actress of high talent finally, belatedly, gets the recognition they deserve. This happened last autumn for Denise Gough, who garnered superlatives by the sackload for her blistering performance at the National Theatre in People, Places & Things, Duncan Macmillan’s unflinching look at addiction and rehab. Gough was shortlisted for an Evening Standard Award and won the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Actress for the part and now the play is about to receive a hotly anticipated West End transfer.

Gough, 35, is, at the very least, used to waiting. She was named as the Critics’ Circle Best Newcomer after she’d been working for more than a decade and in a desperate, job-free year just before bagging this career-defining role, she almost gave up on acting altogether. You’re about to become a bona fide West End star now, I say to her. How does that feel? “F**king fantastic, darling!” she says, switching from her warm Irish tones to adopt, as she often does, a wonderfully over-the-top, grande-dame-of-the-British-theatre voice. “I’ve gotta stop swearing in my interviews. My father’s like, ‘Please, Niecey! We want to show them to the neighbours’.”

She pauses, normal voice resumed. “I’m absolutely delighted. I thought it was all over, but it isn’t.” Gough is such agreeable company that I fancy hunkering down in a cosy Irish pub with her, rather than in a small room off the National Theatre’s press office.

How did she feel when she first read Macmillan’s script to encounter Emma, an actress unravelling spectacularly due to her dependence on drink and drugs? “I thought, ‘Oh my God, if you’re showing me this and then you’re not going to give it to me it’s really cruel’,” she says. The final scene of the play, brutal in its laid-bare honesty, is quite simply the most powerful segment of theatre I’ve seen in years; when she read it, Gough says, “I was like, ‘Okay, if I don’t get this part then I’ll stop’. Because there couldn’t be a role more suited to what I’m able to do than that.”

Not that she was taking any chances with the audition process. “In the second audition I snorted half a gram of icing sugar. Pure sugar, directly to your brain! I was like a kid by the end of it.” She was told she had the part that evening. “They probably thought, ‘Next time she will inject with something that looks like heroin. That’s how far she’ll go.’ ”

I ask Gough if she recognises herself in Emma. “I recognise everyone in Emma. That’s why I love her. But I don’t relate to being in treatment and stuff, as that’s not part of my life.” What about the battling personal demons aspect of the character? “Haven’t we all? I can definitely relate to the idea of wanting to switch off [from life]. I’ve used various things to do that, but not so much anymore. I think it’s very brave to be present in your life.”

A line from the script that particularly struck me is when Emma comments: “If I’m not in character, I don’t even know if I’m there.” Is that a common peril of the acting profession? “Not so much now, but definitely when I was younger the most important thing in my life was to be an actress,” says Gough. “My Dad used to say, ‘Niecey, you’re somebody’s daughter, sister, auntie. You’re all of those things before you’re an actress’. I was like, ‘I don’t care.’ I thought, if I get to be an actress, my whole life will be great. But then I got to be an actress and life is still life. I realised that it’s really important to develop something else from which I get my self-esteem.” There’s a sense here, as elsewhere through our time together, that Gough’s wisdom and perspective is hard-won.

While a glittering future looks set to welcome Gough now, it certainly didn’t during her work-free year “in Siberia”, as she describes it, before she won this part. With money running low and fearful that she’d no longer be able to pay her rent, she applied despondently, on her mother’s suggestion, for a job as a cleaner. She didn’t get it. It was make-or-break time and in her glorious phrase, “I just got busy living”, looking after her niece and nephew, working in a playgroup and immersing herself in yoga, meditation and therapy. Above all, she decided to be honest — with herself and others — about her struggles. On the off-chance that Siberia should ever beckon again, would she cope? “I realised we all have a tent in Siberia. If we just poke our heads out, we can hang out with each other, light a fire, sing songs.”

Gough picked up her recent Critics’ Circle Award wearing a T-shirt for the admirable ERA (Equal Representation for Actresses) campaign, which aims for a 50:50 gender split in casting by 2018. It’s a cause about which she has long felt passionate. “I think it’s important to use this position I’m now in to do stuff like that,” she says. “If they’re going to talk about what I’m wearing, at least wear something that deserves a good conversation.”

She is, however, vehement that she’s an “actress”, rather than the more politically correct term, “actor”. “Nobody consulted me when they said we all had to be ‘actors’! I’ve wanted to be an actress since I was a child and now I finally get to be an actress I’m told I’m not allowed to be one? [People say they don’t] want to be a girly version of ‘actor’. F**k off! Who decided that putting ‘-ess’ on the end of anything was girly? Where was I that day? I’m fierce!” I’d love Gough to get a part in Hollywood for many reasons, not least the fact that she would play merry hell with the tedium of an organised press junket, blowing it all apart with her unfiltered honesty and love of four-letter words.

She grew up in Ennis, County Clare, in the west of Ireland, the seventh of 11 children. What’s the dynamic, being one of 11? “It’s no surprise to me that I now spend my life standing on stages in front of people who have to shut up until I’ve finished talking and then clap,” she says with an impish grin. It was a loving but non-theatrical family, yet Gough found her calling early on playing Miss Hannigan in a school production of Annie. “Something went really wrong onstage, so I improvised. The audience laughed and I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m home’.” A “wayward teenager”, she left home at 15, moved to London at 16 and “bummed around” before eventually winning a scholarship to drama school.

Gough has no idea what the future holds for her once this “job of a lifetime” finishes in the summer. Offers are coming in, but she doesn’t want to distract herself with these at the moment. A great role on television or film, away from the prostitutes or drug addicts she usually plays, would be splendid, but she’s not desperate. Equilibrium reigns. “I cannot tell you how grateful I am. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel worthy of it either. People mistake gratitude for a false modesty. That’s not what I’m about. But how lucky am I? What a life! This is my f**king life and I was trying to be a cleaner. Isn’t it funny?”

People, Places & Things is at Wyndham’s, WC2 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk) March 15-June 18

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout