NAOMIE GETS HER TEETH INTO THE BIG TIME

YOU know how it is with life-changing roles - you wait ages for one, then three arrive together. The star being touted as Britain's answer to Halle Berry seems to have come from nowhere to land a series of parts that better-known actresses would kill for.

Naomie Harris won plaudits for her portrayal of Clara in Channel 4's adaptation of White Teeth, she is the co-lead in Danny Boyle's stunning new horror film 28 Days Later, and she has the main role in the new BBC1 drama The Project. "It's hard to follow that now," says the 26-year-old Londoner.

"I really want to work but I have to hold out and not jump at the first thing that comes along."

How does it feel to know you are being talked about as "the next big thing"? "I can't get my head round that at all," she says. "All I want is to keep working, as any actor does. I don't really like the idea of being recognised on the street."

Harris, who was brought up by her single mother in a council house in Finsbury Park, has been acting professionally since she joined the Anna Scher Theatre School in Islington at the age of seven. She appeared in several children's television programmes before studying social and political science at Cambridge University.

But it hasn't all been plain sailing.

Although she had been a friendly, popular child, she had to leave her secondary school because of bullying.

"I think it was because I had been in a quite well-known children's series, Simon and the Witch. That created a bit of jealousy," she says. "The bullying made me hate school. I used to bunk off and go into the park across the road and just sit there reading. I'd been very confident but mum always says that I was a different person after that."

University was another disaster.

"Coming from a working-class background, it was a culture shock," she says. "I went to university because I loved the subject. I thought I'd find likeminded people to exchange ideas with, but Cambridge is so intense and competitive that you don't get that. It's a very lonely place."

After graduating in 1998, she spent two years at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Then came a period of unpaid theatre work and bit parts in little-known films before the call came from Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting.

Harris is sweet, gentle and well-spoken. She is a scrupulously polite girl who obviously dotes on her mother with whom she still lives in north London.

So what's a nice girl like her doing in 28 Days Later, a brutal and terrifying chiller?

"It is usually the guy who is the strong, heroic figure and the woman who runs around screaming," she says. "In this film, it is Selena [Harris's character] who is the ballsy one and I really liked that."

Appropriately enough for a film set in a post-viral apocalypse Britain, favourable word-of-mouth reports have spread like a contagion, generating Tough: Harris is

generating the kind of anticipatory buzz certain to make the movie a huge success.

It is a mark of Harris's talent as an actor that she is utterly convincing as a cynical, machete-wielding heroine in the mould of Ripley from the Alien series. Boyle says she has "phenomenal ability" and describes her as "elegant but very tough".

"My family loved the film but they were really shocked by the violence," Harris says. "My mum particularly found it difficult to cope with."

The casting director of 28 Days Later suggested her for the role of Clara in White Teeth, then Harris landed the part of an MP, Maggie, in The Project, an ambitious and controversial drama about the rise of New Labour. Her part was originally intended for a white actress and she was the only black actress the programme-makers saw.

She believes her career would be taking a different path if she were white.

"There'd be far more film and TV opportunities. I wouldn't have a period like I'm having now where I'm not working. But I'm not resentful because as a black person I am a minority in Britain. It seems reasonable that there should be more parts for the majority."

If she could play in anything she wanted next, she says she'd love to do a period drama. "I adore Jane Austen, she's my favourite author," she says.

"But I think it's a bit of a dream."

Besides her obvious ability, Harris's shyness and self- deprecation mask a steely determination. She used bullying as a spur to academic achievement.

She stuck out three awful years at a college she hated. She wrote 250 letters to charities in order to get funding for drama school.

It would be a brave punter who bet against her making the first black Emma or Elizabeth Bennet.

_28 Days Later opens on 1 November.

The Project will be broadcast on BBC1 early in November.

Copyright 2002
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