![]() ![]() She booked a holiday with friends to India. She got a new agent, sent in another tape, still nothing. ![]() I was living in LA and I was really struggling, actually, it was about four or five months since I’d had a job.” She taped an audition, heard nothing. “I had done a few jobs, nothing of note really. Which can also be soul-destroying, but I don’t know, it’s different.”Īfter a few years, Balfe went up for the pilot of a new series about a Second World War military nurse, Claire Randall, who finds herself transported back in time to the Scottish Highlands in 1743. “It was other arbitrary things like your name’s not big enough. “In an audition, if it didn’t work out, it wasn’t always because you didn’t do a good job, or you weren’t good,” she reasons. ![]() There were plenty of rejections in acting, too – perhaps even more than in fashion – but Balfe found these somehow more palatable: at least she usually got to open her mouth before being passed over. Photograph: Jason Hetherington/The Observer ‘What’s happening to me now is lovely’: Caitríona Balfe wears abstract printed jacket, belt and boots, all by. “And that’s a hard thing to overcome, that being the first thing that people thought of me.” “So many actors used to work in bars or used to be this or that, but you come with a lot of stigma when you’ve been a model,” she says. Balfe couldn’t be too picky back then, but she learned that it was these kinds of roles that she shouldn’t be pursuing. “Absolute insanity!” She landed a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gig as an extra on the 2006 Meryl Streep film The Devil Wears Prada, in which she thinks her legs might be visible in the opening scene as a collection of well-heeled feet are walking into the offices of Runway magazine. “Somebody should just put a camera in one of those rooms,” she says. Before Balfe’s “detour” into fashion, she had studied acting at the Dublin Institute of Technology and after quitting modelling she took it up again, attending drop-in classes in New York. An Oscar nod is presumed (by critics and pretty much everyone else, except Balfe) to follow next month.īut back in Dallas, on the catalogue shoot, the transition didn’t seem so obvious. Later this afternoon she will find out that she has been nominated for a Golden Globe for her luminous performance in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s new film. We now know that, after stopping being a model, Balfe would go on to star in five seasons and counting of Outlander, the wildly popular TV franchise. She is wearing an oversized Lauren Manoogian midi-dress and is the first person I’ve seen make a face mask look glamorous. That’s why we’re sitting this morning in early December in a very flash London hotel, sharing a bottle of mineral water that costs only fractionally less than a decent bottle of wine. It’s only a mini-spoiler to mention at this point that things eventually worked out rather well for Balfe, who is now 42. Tales of the city: Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe in a scene from Belfast. “And you know, ‘This is not what I want to be doing with my life.’ “The shows were fun and exciting, but with catalogues, you’re just standing there like a clothes horse – literally,” says Balfe. She’d handled just about as much blunt rejection as she could take for one lifetime. At her age, in that youth-fixated business, Balfe knew the clock was ticking. After each set-up, a producer would ping a little bell to indicate they needed to fast-change to the next outfit. Now, though, Balfe was in Dallas, doing a well-paid but soulless shoot for a catalogue. Balfe and her friends called themselves “the blue-collar models” – they weren’t the 0.1% of supermodels, the household names, but the next rung down. She had done pretty well, walking in runway shows for Louis Vuitton and Chanel, flitting between Paris, Milan and New York. It had been almost a decade since she’d been scouted in a Dublin supermarket while rattling a tin for a multiple sclerosis charity. It was the mid-2000s and Balfe was 27-ish, she thinks. ![]() C aitríona Balfe can remember the exact moment she realised she was done with being a model. ![]()
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