Having caught Kate Perry’s fantastic character-based showreel on her Twitter account, we couldn’t resist reaching out to talk and getting a little more insight into the woman behind the video and talking about acting, filmmaking, and storytelling with such a talented performer.
Could you introduce yourself to our audience and give us a little background on your work?
Hello, I’m Kate Perry from Derry, an actor/writer/sketch comedian from Northern Ireland. My passion for storytelling began at ten years old, watching Westerns in a town called Dungannon. I’m from a family of twelve children so my elder brothers would take the younger ones to ‘the pictures’ on Saturday mornings to give my mother and the neighbors a break. That’s where I fell in love with storytelling, westerns, and cinema. I loved the genre for blending the comical and serious, farcical and cerebral, highbrow and lowbrow. I believe these elements have influenced my style of writing ever since.
I have written one-woman shows, sketches, radio plays, and short films. I live in London now but prior to that, I spent time in South Africa, the US, and Ireland.
You have been sharing your showreel via Twitter, which includes a series of comedic characters, can you tell us more about this and if there is a plan to expand on the concept?
I began my writing and performing character comedy while living in San Francisco doing spots in the evening at a club called The Marsh. I had a full-time job at the time as an events manager so never thought of making the commitment of moving into the arts full-time. However, due to the encouragement of friends and co-workers, I developed the characters which eventually turned the 10 mins spots into a one-hour one-woman show. I toured the show in Ireland to critical acclaim, came back to the US, quit my job, and returned to Ireland to live in Dublin. I continued acting and writing and wrote a sketch show called Do Not Adjust Yourself for the Dublin Fringe Festival which led to writing opportunities at BBC NI, which led to commissions for BBC Radio 4 and RTE Radio 1. I also went to college for the first time in my 40s and did an MPhil in creative writing at Trinity College and then a master’s degree in screenwriting at the Institute of Arts Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. I moved to London in 2011, kept performing, and eventually took The Very Perry show to the Edinburgh Fringe. On the back of that, I was invited to the San Francisco Theatre Festival and The United Theatre Solo Festival in New York, where The Very Perry Show won the best comedy award. I have been working on other projects ever since but now I'm back writing new material and developing other comedy characters.
You have a short film currently doing the festival circuit and winning awards, what can you tell us about the project and how it came about?
I was originally commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a fictional short story for a series called Under My Bed with the remit of exploring memories and stories of what characters might have found stashed away in the dark. I called it Ruthless.
I came up with the idea of a ten-year-old boy who finds a prosthetic leg under the bed and how he uses it as currency to get something he desperately wants, which is the latest T. Rex album, Electric Warrior. He has also recently lost his mother, his father has shut down emotionally and they are stuck in a mire of grief. The problem is that PJ is skint and his Da is on the dole so PJ comes up with a cunning plan to get the dough, involving a pawnbroker, a sock, and a prosthetic leg.
I wanted to explore that sense of loss lifted with moments of comedy and lightness using the backdrop of the troubles and the glam rock movement happening in Northern Ireland. In Belfast, in the early 70s something was in the air and it wasn’t a bomb, it was a revolution. Glam Rock was drowning out the noise of armored cars and as British soldiers patrolled the streets, kids were glued to Top Of The Pops, entranced by Marc Bolan, the androgynous, satin-clad, glitter-god.
In a nutshell, the prosthetic leg and a T. Rex album become the conduit for overcoming grief. After I wrote the radio play I knew it would make a good film so I adapted the story to a screenplay and applied for funding through Northern Ireland Screen. Luckily they liked the script, I found a producer and we shot the film in Belfast in 2019. Ruthless is currently on the film festival circuit and has won 5 awards so far and been nominated for six so I’m over the moon for team Ruthless.
Is there a particular role or project that you are working on at the moment you can tell us about and is there a particular role you would love to be cast in?
I am currently writing a children’s book called Saucepan Eddie. Hard to talk about as it’s in the early developmental stage so not sure where it is going….but it’s going somewhere.
As for a role I’d like to be in, I was cast as one of the Yoga Mums in season two of Ted Lasso and would happily jump into that lycra again!
To learn more about Kate Perry and her work see: