Country and Town House sat down with Elizabeth Dulau to chat Kleya Marki and her return in Andor season 2, and one of their questions was direct and very much to the point – what is it like playing her?
“One of the most enjoyable aspects of playing Kleya is that she is supposed to be able to blend in anywhere and become anyone. So I was confronted with this dilemma of how to play a person that’s that malleable. I remembered a piece of advice from an old acting teacher when talking about Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who is famously mercurial. They said, ‘you can’t play all of Cleopatra in every scene, you can only play who she is in that moment’.
I applied this same logic to Kleya. I really focused on just playing each moment in the script with as much conviction as possible, not worrying too much about who she was three or four episodes ago. So hopefully the end result is a surprising tapestry of many different colours. I’m really hoping the audience always feels that way about Kleya: surprised. Never having fully figured her out or able to guess what she’s going to do next.”
