She’s one of the UK’s busiest actors, and while she doesn’t discuss her role as Babu Frik in The Rise of Skywalker, The Guardian chat with Shirley Henderson about her many roles and how she balances it all.
To think, it was here – or somewhere like it in a previous home – that Henderson first worked out how Hogwarts’ bathroom-dwelling ghost Moaning Myrtle would sound as she bleated her way through lines such as: “I was just sitting in the U-bend thinking about death.” It was here, too, that she practised warning Bridget Jones about disloyal boyfriends (“Even if he isn’t shagging her already, Bridge, he’s thinking about it”) and decided on the sad-but-sinister coochy-coo whisper of Frances, the lonely misfit manipulated by a psychopath in the second series of Happy Valley. And this must have been where she crafted her cameo as Agatha Christie in the madcap whodunit See How They Run, as well as her voice work as Quackety Duck Duck in the children’s series Lovely Little Farm and as the mewling Babu Frik in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
We were fortunate enough to chat with Shirley on the blue carpet at The Rise of Skywalker premiere back in 2019.
