‘It only took me 10 minutes to choose being an actor’

Erin Doherty, star of A Thousand Blows’ and Adolescence’, talks to Lydia Spencer-Elliott about pickpocketing lessons, the dangers of social media and the art of the one-shot drama

- Lydia Spencer-Elliott

Erin Doherty didn’t expect to be scared of a boy almost two decades her junior. The 32-year-old actor has made a career playing formidable women; often enigmatic characters projecting a certain toughness, a sense of gradually fraying invulnerability. She was a young Princess Anne in The Crown.

An unhinged internet stalker in the BBC’s Chloe. And, most recently, the notorious gang leader in Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s new series A Thousand Blows. Yet, for all of her onscreen power, Doherty cowered when confronted by her baby-faced co-star Owen Cooper on the set of Netflix’s harrowing four-part murder drama Adolescence. “It wasn’t acting,” she admits. “He was genuinely making me jump.”

Doherty is a masterful shapeshifter and, increasingly, one of the brightest screen and stage stars of her generation. Whether she’s a swaggering Victorian or a senior royal, the actor, raised in Crawley, West Sussex, vanishes entirely inside her characters, leaving behind performances so persuasive that she can steal scenes from the likes of Olivia Colman. Each role she takes on is teeming with the signature energy of the individual she inhabits. In front of the camera, she conducts herself with relentless focus; neck long, gaze stern, with a discerning look in her eye that challenges her castmates to keep up. “I love my job,” Doherty admits of her exhaustingly crammed schedule, which currently consists of two theatre performances a day with press junket calls and podcast appearances in between. “When you’re 80, you don’t want to look back and be like ‘I wish I’d done that.’” she says. “So, if they’ll have me, I’ll keep going. Why would I stop?”

She appears in Adolescence (co-written by