Lucy Halliday had been adamant on not pursuing a career in the industry before an open casting call for Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean came along.

“It just looked terrifying,” says the Scottish actress, who was studying medicine at the time. “I couldn’t imagine doing that as a job.”

But she took the plunge and in November last year picked up a Bafta Scotland Award, following a British Independent Film Award (Bifa) nomination the year before, for her portrayal of a lesbian teen in 1980s Newcastle.

Now, Halliday is wrapping up Convergence, a BFI- and Screen Scotland-supported writers programme, where she has been developing a short and feature film script as well as talking with producers. “A lot of my writing is about how we’re all growing up until the day you fall off the planet,” says Halliday, who is also completing a maths and physics degree.

When she was nine, Halliday’s parents sent her to PACE — the youth theatre in Paisley, Scotland that counts James McAvoy and Richard Madden as alumni — after BBC Glasgow eventually asked her to desist from sending stories she had written on stapled-together pieces of paper. “My parents thought [PACE] would help me leave my nefarious ways behind,” she says with a laugh.

Through PACE, Halliday performed in various productions in and out of the youth theatre, but Blue Jean was her first professional audition (“I remember Googling how to do an audition”).

Halliday chucked her phone across the room when she first read the script. “I’ve come to learn that means I really like [a script],” she says of eyeing up new projects — an announcement or two are in the pipeline. “There’s parts of my brain that have been activated that I never knew existed in terms of figuring out between scripts, and deciphering them.”

As for her dream role, Halliday gives an impassioned speech about why she would be perfect as Scottish heroine Merida in a live-action remake of Disney’s Brave. “But if I ever get a job again that can even do half of what Blue Jean does,” she adds on a more serious note, “in terms of making people feel heard or seen or valued, that would be an amazing job.”

Contact: Isabelle Sweetland, Abigail Millar, Curtis Brown 

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