JASMINE BLACKBOROW
- 5' ELEVEN''
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
Jasmine Blackborow has already had the kind of career aspiring actors dream of. After graduating from Central School of Speech and Drama, and sending no less than a hundred requests for an agent – the old-fashioned, paper way, no less – she was, rather unsurprisingly given her talent, picked up by the legendary Jeremy Conway – who, despite now being retired, she still turns to for advice to this day. With a rich array of roles in addition, from her screen roles in Legends, The Gentlemen, Shadow and Bone, or Moss and Freud, to the upcoming Pride and Prejudice, Jasmine has a CV that is already to be envied. Adding a further – significant – string to her bow, she has written and directed her first short, Lovely, which is currently on the festival circuit: a beautiful, tender, deeply moving, yet humorous glimpse into caring for someone who can no longer communicate. 5’ELEVEN” spoke to Jasmine about her career to date, her work in The Gentlemen and Pride and Prejudice and creating something powerfully beautiful out of life’s challenges.
Words by Carla McCannon
Photographed by Ollo Weguelin. Styled by Millie Cullum. Makeup by Maya Man at Stella Creative Artists using SUQQU. Hair by Sandra Hahnel at Caren using Ouai. Photographer assisted by Alex Simpson. Stylist assisted by Helena Chelchowska. Jasmine Blackborow appears courtesy of CLD Communications.
As the mother of a young daughter, do you find that working on screen fits around motherhood in an easier way for you than theatre?
It does for me at the moment, yes. I do think, if you were asking this question of Kaya or Theo [her co-stars in The Gentlemen], maybe it's a different kind of thing to juggle and to handle. But it works really well for me, even though the hours are really long. And you can be all over the country, all over the world. You are at the mercy of the production in some ways.
But then, you know, filming Marie Antoinette with a babe in arms, [Jasmine's daughter] was 12-weeks-old when I started shooting that, and we had to move to Paris with her. But I was in maybe three days a week. That's like going back to part-time, you know? And The Gentlemen could be intense for a couple of weeks, and then I'm off for a week. The same with Legends. Well, last year was crazy because I was filming Legends and The Gentlemen at the same time, and then The Gentlemen and Pride and Prejudice at the same time. So my weeks were pretty full, and I was travelling around a lot. But my daughter's a little bit older, and yes, the hours are long, and there's something about the theatre that you're in every day, and you have to have your energy at night. And then your child's going to wake you up at 6:00 in the morning. Whereas, at least with filming TV, I'm up at 4 or 5, being picked up, so I'm the one sneaking out, and then I come back, and I sometimes can make it back in time for bedtime. And she gets to come with [me]. With the second season of The Gentlemen, we filmed a lot in Italy last year. So my husband brought her out for a few days, and everyone had their families there because it was such a special place. She was playing with other cast and crew's children, and we were all swimming in the lake together, and it was great.
That sounds amazing. I can't wait to see it. We are huge fans of the first season of The Gentlemen, and very excited to find out there's a second.
Oh, yeah. It's a good one. There's a big mafia plot. You'll see a lot more of Charly this season, my character. The family are all a big part of the story, and of Eddie's story. It's just as bombastic and crazy and funny as ever, and it has big showcase scenes, but it does get a bit deep at moments. There's some gritty stuff in there too. I had some big emotional scenes, and who knows what will actually make it into the final cut, but my character went on more of a rollercoaster than I was actually expecting. But everything's always done with this wonderful kind of tongue-in-cheek tone, and it's so celebratory, I think, of Britain and different types of people.
To go back to Marie Antoinette, which you shot in France, I'm curious how you found it comparing shooting in France to shooting in England. Did you have a French crew?
Yes, and I picked up so much French in terms of film-crew vocab, which isn't really useful for day-to-day life in the Pyrenees. [Laughter] But the main difference between a French set and a British set is lunchtime.
I can imagine!
The French lunch is very protected, of course. You always get an hour, and then you have half an hour to get ready again, so that's an hour and a half. Whereas on a lot of UK sets, it's a continuous lunch, so you stop for 20 minutes, maybe. And it would be a full sit-down three-course meal, with a table with cheese and wine. So you could have wine in the middle of the day if you wanted; obviously, it's France.[Laughter] It would work really well if I had finished all of my shooting for the day before lunch, because then I actually could have a glass of wine. And in the first season, because of COVID, they didn't want anything buffet-style, so we genuinely had waiters to come and show us the menu, and ask what we wanted for starter, main, and dessert. It was so crazy. Because it's a shoot, timings can be all sorts of times, so one day we were filming at this beautiful lake. It might have been near Fontainebleau or something like that, and I was sitting eating a confit duck at 11:00 in the morning wearing a corset and a wig. And someone's offering you a glass of wine!
Very Marie Antoinette.
[Laughter] Yeah, it was! I loved it.
In terms of Legends, do you have a favourite memory from that whole experience?
That's really hard. I have to say the people: the creatives, the cast; it's the cream of the crop. That is the best of the best, and for me, I was lapping it up, just watching everybody work; I felt so inspired. It made me feel like “I've made it.” That's definitely my biggest takeaway from it. And in terms of funny memories, I talked to Steve Coogan about asbestos for a long time. Who knew? Who knew that there was so much to say about asbestos? I mean, he has a lot to say about it. [Laughter]
And so with all the experience that you've garnered between theatre and screen, how did all of that evolve and translate into you writing and directing? Because that's a really fascinating thing to have also started to develop, and I imagine it's not the last thing that you're going to write and direct.
It has been a really long time in the making, and I think that's very normal with passion projects. We were first given the funding. It was part funding, part self-funded. Screen Cornwall very generously gave us some money to help make it, because it's about my grandmother who was Cornish. My cousin and I made it together: my cousin produced, and I wrote and directed. We first applied for that during COVID. We clubbed together and sent this pitch to Screen Cornwall and did not expect to get the funding, and we did. But then we didn't shoot it for two years. We shot it while I was quite heavily pregnant, and it's only now finished, and I've got a three-year-old!
It's taken such a long time, but it's amazing to bring something into fruition that you came up with so long ago. And you think, "Would I have made that film now if I were pitching? Is that what it would be?" But I'm so glad that that's the one we started with. It's a very personal story for us. It's about our grandmother, as I said, who died relatively young, after being diagnosed – and living for about a decade – with this quite horrible illness called PSP. It's a degenerative illness. The first thing she lost was her ability to speak. For a woman who had been a communicator – she spoke different languages and worked in language education – to have lost her ability to speak was brutal. She was such a force of nature, and she was really beautiful and charismatic. Just watching her verbal abilities disappear, then how that changes the personality, and then physically she started to lose everything, and couldn't move herself by the end, but her mind was still going. It's not like Alzheimer's, where you lose your memory. She'd get really frustrated, as you can imagine. My mum and my aunt cared for her a lot. My great-grandmother was still alive. We're a family of only women: I think it's six generations now of only girls being born. So there's this really strong female legacy in our family. My great-grandmother was still alive to watch her daughter die. It's just all really mad and important, and that's life, isn't it? And everyone, every family has these kinds of stories, I think. And particularly every family will be touched by illness and suffering in some way.
But also we've written a comedy – not a full comedy – but it's a comedy drama. It is very moving, but it's about finding the humour in things. Because some of the situations you end up in, you don't expect to be in, and they are so funny. We'd often sit together and laugh because we'd all be getting our knickers in a twist trying to understand what she wanted and what she was trying to communicate with us. And after she died, we wanted to tell her story. We weren't quite sure how to do it. We wanted to tell our mothers' story as well, what it's like to care for your own mother. We wanted it to be our truth, which was that you can't sit around and cry all the time because if you start crying, you'll never stop. You do just have to get on with things, and I think people who live with people with long-term illnesses would also relate to that.
Yes. Absolutely. As you said, it's such a universal subject. I'm sure it will appeal to and touch so many different people because who hasn't known grief and watched people get older and get ill. How did you choose the title, Lovely?
It's the only word she could still say. She could say ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘lovely’. And that was it. It got her into a lot of trouble. There is a line in the film where one of the characters says, "So Phoebe, tell Granny your news." And Phoebe says, "Rio dumped me." And she says, "Lovely." And Phoebe's like, "Right. Okay." [Laughter]
I think it's such a quintessentially British response to things, too. Lovely.
Yeah. Isn't it? It's been picked by Women X Festival in Darlington and Encounters Festival in Bristol, which is an international festival. We're applying for BIFA, maybe BAFTA. Who knows? Just having those incredible people in the industry watching it is enough for me. Most importantly, I do just want ordinary people to be able to watch it. So hopefully, being picked by any of these festivals means more screenings, and more people being able to see it in a cinema as it should be watched; and then, eventually, of course, it will probably go online. We're arranging screenings with the PSP Association as well. They're doing screenings with their local community groups, so that people with [the illness] can see it. But we won't be able to do that properly until it's out of the festival circuit.
What can you tell us about your upcoming projects?
I'm so chuffed about a real variety of things. Season two of The Gentlemen is still to come out. Pride and Prejudice is still to come out. And I can't wait for everyone to see them. They're so different, and they're so brilliant. I think everyone is going to love Pride and Prejudice, especially the time of year [it's due to be released] later this year: cold weather and Pride and Prejudice. It was joyous to make, and it is joyous to watch. I just shot something with a director I've collaborated with a lot over the years; it's his first feature, and we just wrapped. I don't know when that will be out, but leading something for the first time was really cool. It's called Counterweight, and it's about eco-activists. It's a bit of a thriller, a whodunit, but it's all about eco-activists. I love the research side of my prep, and this was a great one to get my teeth into and become an environmental warrior.
What a plethora of exciting projects!
I have been so fortunate to have had this range of things to work on. It's just so cool, the different disciplines it requires of you as an actor, the different things it opens your mind up to... I love that, and long may it continue.
I'm absolutely sure it will!
You can catch Jasmine in the second season of The Gentleman on Netflix from September 3rd, and Pride and Prejudice on Netflix later this year, date TBC.
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