!['The voices telling you what you can and can't do are so loud when you're a teenager,' says actress Vinette Robinson](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000384943663_17207938659450_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJIWwNCqt6VLCbSIDw6mXYDqm0gYDcu6VTA4mKR8maVE.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Vinette Robinson interview: ‘I was told acting wasn’t for someone like me’
The Bradford-born actress on intrusive technology, hit TV shows – from crime drama Suspect to Boiling Point – and drama school snobbery
!['The voices telling you what you can and can't do are so loud when you're a teenager,' says actress Vinette Robinson](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000384943663_17207938659450_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJIWwNCqt6VLCbSIDw6mXYDqm0gYDcu6VTA4mKR8maVE.jpeg?imwidth=680)
“What do you think about these Ring doorbells?” asks Vinette Robinson, proving that you never know where an interview with a celebrity will take you. The 42-year-old actress, best known for her tough, sparky turns in Sherlock, The Gathering and Boiling Point, has just bought one of the devices, which informs her when anybody arrives at the door of her London home. But she’s starting to question the purchase.
“I’ve put a thing on my door showing me stuff I’d never have thought about, never have worried about before, and I suspect this surveillance culture is probably not the most healthy way to live.” She was, coincidentally, in an episode of Inside No 9 filmed from the perspective of a doorbell camera. Fittingly, she has also starred in the dystopian sci-fi drama series Black Mirror.
Famously “very private” about her personal life, Robinson doesn’t talk about who she shares that London home with, but it’s easy to see why she’d want to know who’s outside her home. It’s also easy to relate to her weary resentment of the additional mental load delivered by her new gadget.
You’ll next see her on screen as a firearms officer – blasting bullets into the hearts of paper targets – in the second series of the Channel 4 crime drama Suspect. She’s all cool control as she flips the clip into her gun and rolls a toned shoulder. In the role, she looks like a woman whose space only a fool would invade. But when I meet her via Zoom, she’s snuggling into her cardigan in the corner of her bedroom and assuring me that “though I’ve played quite a few badass characters lately, I don’t think that’s the vibe I give off in real life. And you should remember that actors’ casting goes in phases. When I started out, I played a long streak of fragile, emotionally vulnerable characters.”
![tmg.video.placeholder.alt UTWEmggRPHo](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UTWEmggRPHo/mqdefault.jpg)
It turns out that her career has been hard-won. Born in Bradford in 1982, Robinson is the daughter of a British mother and a Jamaican father who separated when she was “very young”. But she tells me that she “adores” both her parents and credits them with giving her the self-belief to blow off the disdain of “snobbish” gatekeepers to the acting world. “I grew up on a council estate,” she tells me, “and my school careers officer told me that my dream of acting was ‘stupid’, ‘silly’ and ‘not for someone like you’.”
Does she think this was about class, race or gender? “Mostly class,” she says. “But there was intersectional racism, too. The voices telling you what you can and can’t do are so loud when you’re a teenager. I’m so grateful to have a mum who always told me I could do whatever I wanted to do.”
At 13, Robinson went for her first audition (for the role of Queen Amidala in 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that eventually went to Natalie Portman), and landed her first proper television role in The Cops, aged 17. The short hop to drama school, you assume, must have been a doddle. But she tells me otherwise.
“I’m very lucky to have grown up at a time when there was government funding for young actors from my background, because that has all gone now. But I still remember I was asked to go before a panel to apply for a school that would allow me to study performing arts, where I was sneeringly asked if I wanted to be in Coronation Street.” She shakes her head and exhales. “Not that there’s anything wrong with soap operas. I think Corrie is great. But that was all they could see a child like me wanting to do. It was great when my mum said, ‘She wants to do Shakespeare, actually.’ There was an assumption that somebody who looked and sounded like me would only do urban TV, but I wanted to do theatre.”
She winces at the memory of being asked at one drama-school audition where a girl like her had seen live theatre. “I’d only been to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, because that’s where we lived. He said I should have been coming to London.” She’s angry now. “I couldn’t afford to go all the way to London! But also: what is wrong with regional theatre?”
![Robinson with Sadie Soverall in Channel 4's The Gathering](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000376152432_17207940482060_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Robinson’s recent rise to prominence began with her role as Carly, the sous chef, in the terrifically tense 2021 film Boiling Point. Shot in one adrenaline-pumping take, the critically acclaimed British drama got as close to theatre as the screen can get. As a lover of research, Robinson laments the lack of time that she had to “learn cheffing skills”. She’s a perfectionist who would have enjoyed “getting to Olympic-level shooting” before even picking up a gun for Suspect. “But the reality of budgets means I got to learn to chop mushrooms for Boiling Point and I’d never even fired a gun before shooting Suspect.”
Robinson has been most affected by roles – in The Gathering, Black Mirror and Radio 4’s recent A Vindication of Frankenstein’s Monster – exploring our relationship with technology. In The Gathering, she played the tiger mum of an aspiring teenage gymnast, caught up in a world of online sex and seaside drugs. “That show dug deep into parental neuroses,” she says. “It explored what happens when teenagers go out into the world. I was a good teenager myself – almost boringly so – but I’m sure my parents still worried about me. You’re venturing into spaces where you might feel capable, but, looking back, you don’t yet have the emotional or psychological capability to understand everything. But you won’t learn until you go there, so…”
The Gathering asked when and how parents should track their teens using phones. “I’m all for the communication aspect of phones, but I don’t like smartphones,” says Robinson. “Kids can access anything in the world that way and they’re not always prepared. I say give them all a Nokia brick and everybody would be happier.”
Robinson has swerved away from online debates about her more culture-war-baiting roles: as the civil-rights campaigner Rosa Parks in Doctor Who and engaging in the Star Wars universe’s first lesbian kiss in 2020’s Rise of Skywalker. Fans on social media slammed her character’s brief smooch as tokenism, but she has no time for trolls.
![Robinson won critical acclaim for her role in chef drama Boiling Point](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000350227255_17207940635310_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf_4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“It’s just nonsense isn’t it?” she sighs. “I think social media has really disrupted the way we communicate. The consequences aren’t felt. People can say what they want without having to deal with the repercussions, the ramifications, the look on the face of the person they’re talking about.”
This leads Robinson to make a case for smartphones as “experience blockers”. When I admit I’ve had to stop my own children watching videos of other children playing with toys instead of picking up their own, she throws up her hands. “What is that about? This whole thing of kids watching other people play video games. Maybe I just sound old, but I can’t understand it. Why would you watch somebody else have that experience instead of doing it yourself?”
Robinson is proud to “do life” directly. She’s talking to me after a long weekend camping at Glastonbury and says that “happening upon events is the whole beauty of life”. She had wanted to see LCD Soundsystem but instead stumbled upon the folk band Stornoway at sunset: “That was amazing; we’d never have picked that show. No social-media algorithm shows you new stuff like that, and those different sounds, ideas, people are what you need.”
The live buzz of Glastonbury has made Robinson yearn to be part of live theatre again. “But I can’t afford to do it any more,” she sighs. “I love it so much. I’m really missing it. But even on screen, drama budgets are being cut by a third.” As we end our chat, I ask if she would consider writing. She seems to have lots of ideas. “I would. Because you can feel quite helpless as an actor, waiting for good parts to come your way.”
Suspect is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday