Chloe Pirrie
Chloe Pirrie is an actor, born 1987.
The break was a small Scottish film. Pirrie took the title role in Shell, a spare drama set around an isolated Highland petrol station, and it is still the performance that people who follow British film cite first. Almost everything since has been television, and the quality of the shows she has been picked for is the notable thing about the page.
The recurring assignment is a woman the story is looking back at, or looking past. Alice Harmon in The Queen's Gambit exists almost entirely in flashback and has to work as both a memory and a person, which is a strange technical problem and she solves it. Merritt Lingard in Dept. Q is the case rather than the detective, and the part lands because she plays her with a hard edge instead of as a sympathetic absence. Emily Bronte in To Walk Invisible, Andromache in Troy: Fall of a City, Matilda Lafferty in Under the Banner of Heaven and Lisa Dearn in Industry all ask for the same thing: a woman with a full interior life who is not the person the scene is about.
The supporting list is long and consistently well chosen. Carnival Row, Hanna, War and Peace, Temple, The Living and the Dead, The Game, An Inspector Calls, Isabella Knightley in Emma, plus the films Youth, Burn Burn Burn and Kryptic. Wikipedia adds The Crown, Blood Cells, Stutterer and Brief Encounters, which are not among the credits listed here. There is no obvious star vehicle in the record and, on this evidence, no particular need for one.
Movies (8)
TV (12)
Where to start with Chloe Pirrie
Track down Shell if you can, because it is the only thing here built entirely around her and it shows what the rest of the page keeps borrowing. Otherwise Dept. Q is the most current and the most substantial television role she has had, and the series depends on her being interesting enough to sustain everyone else's interest in her. The Queen's Gambit is what most visitors arrive from: a small part, played across time, that gives the whole series its emotional weather. To Walk Invisible is the one to watch for the acting, playing Emily Bronte without any of the usual costume-drama piety. Under the Banner of Heaven and Industry show the range in prestige ensembles. Burn Burn Burn is the small British comedy nobody saw and it is charming.