Georgina Campbell interview
Georgina Campbell talks about her role in Tripped...
Can you try and explain a bit about what Tripped is all about?
It's basically about two guys, Danny and Milo, played by Blake Harrison and George Webster. It's kind of about them being sucked into a parallel world, and trying to make their way home. All the while, there's a character called Callum, played by Richard Gadd, who's trying to kill them. Through every parallel world, he's trying to kill them, and they don't know why. So you see them travel on his journey to get home while they're also trying to figure out why they're being hunted by this guy.
Alongside that, it's really just a story about growing up. Danny is getting to a point in his life where he's just on a precipice of being grown up - or the idea of what being grown up is. He's engaged to my character, Kate. Milo and Danny have been friends for a long time and they've got to the point where you kind of start forgetting why you were friends in the first place, because you've both changed so much. Milo has all these childish attributes and isn't together and doesn't have a job and doesn't have a girlfriend and smokes all day and takes drugs. He represents this reckless, youthful past that Danny is struggling with.
You play Kate. What's her story?
Kate's a funny one. You follow Milo and Danny throughout the series, so even when they go into different worlds and come across themselves, you're still seeing it through their eyes. So you really get to know them well. You don't really get to know Kate as well, because she doesn't come on the journey. She appears in every single world as a different person. There's not really a linear narrative as to who Kate is and she changes a lot from one world to another.
So she has a different personality in each world?
Yeah, although the initial, stable Kate that Danny is wanting to get home to is his fiancée, and she has a good job and seems to have been the catalyst of Danny growing up and getting a good job and them having a flat together. In all the different episodes, it's sort of like all the different Kates there could have been if her life had gone in a different direction.
As an actor is that quite fun, in terms of you getting to experiment with different personalities, and play a lot of different roles?
Yeah, it's great. It is fun. It's also quite hard, because you don't want each character to be ridiculously outlandish. I wanted Kate to be - in all the parallel worlds, she's still a version of Kate, she's still identifiable, so it's about getting a balance of being true to Kate, but taking her in different directions. A lot of that is in the writing, actually. Harry and Jack are fantastic in the way they've managed to write all these different characters in one overall character.
Most series aren't filmed chronologically - was it difficult to keep track of which Kate you were playing on any given day of filming?
I thought it would be, but actually, there was a bit of moving around, but mostly it did seem to be that I was only ever playing one Kate in any one day, and the next day I might be playing a different Kate. There wasn't too much jumping around within the days. And all the Kates looked quite different - different hair, different outfits, different make up, so that process helped with that. You'd start with all of that before you got on set, which helped you remember which Kate it was.
What was it like working with Blake and George?
Awful! [Laughs] They're lovely. It was such a fun shoot, which was great, because it was also quite hectic, doing all of these different characters. It was quite a mad schedule. But they're so great and so funny, and I think we all had a laugh. They took the mick out of me a lot - I was the little sister figure who constantly got ripped apart by both the boys.
So it was workplace bullying?
[Laughs] Yes, they destroyed my life.
Did you find corpsing a problem?
To begin with, I didn't, but once I got into it, yeah, I really did. Blake did The Inbetweeners and is a very, very good comic actor, so that didn't help. There's also a character called Paul, who's played by Jamie Demetriou, who's absolutely hilarious. Every time he was on set, I couldn't control myself. So there's all these retakes of me looking down because I couldn't look at anyone. I dunno if it'll all end up on a reel on some DVD, but yeah, I corpse a lot. I hope that's a good sign.
Is it true that you got to film a couple of fight scenes?
I did, I got to film a couple of fight scenes. I got to do some sword fighting, which was really exciting. It was really being thrown in at the deep end, because there wasn't that much time to hone my skills. I guess, if you're in a big film, you get loads of lessons from some top international fencer for a year, and end up looking brilliant. We had a day of practising, and then before we did scenes, we had a stunt guy called Andreas who would come and help us. We had a few mishaps. I think Richard hit me over the head with a sword at one point. There were a few bumps and bruises along the way.
Are you a fan of this kind if genre of TV?
Yeah, I do quite like sci-fi stuff. I guess TV and film are escapism anyway, but when you get something so fantastical, it's really enjoyable to watch, and really enjoyable to be a part of as well, because it's so broad and so different from real life. It's pretty cool.