'I wonder now - would I have done OnlyFans?'

Ahead of her starring role in hot new BBC drama Rain Dogs, Bafta award-winning actress Daisy May Cooper tells Alexandra Jones about scars from her childhood, why she auditioned to be a stripper and quitting social media

- Alexandra Jones

DAISY May Cooper and I are at HBO’s offices just off Old Street. The 36-yearold actress has been holed up here all day, doing the press junket for Rain Dogs, the BBC/ HBO eight-parter she stars in, which premieres next week. She looks phenomenal in an orange bodycon dress with her blonde hair in big Farrah Fawcett waves. “Divorce!” she cries, when I say she looks great. “It’ll do that to you.”

Cooper — a Bafta-award-winning actress and the creator of This Country and Am I Being Unreasonable? — is immensely good company: sweary, chaotic and forthright, though there are moments when she catches me off guard. She has this mercurial ability to switch from fired-up and polemical to self-conscious and vulnerable in the space of a single answer. At one point she begins to cry, recalling a time she went for an audition in London: “The only pair of shoes that I had were these sandals that had broken apart,” she explains. “And I only had £9 in my account — which is exactly what I needed to get a return National Express ticket to London [she was living with her parents in Cirencester at the time]. It meant I couldn’t get the Tube, I’d have to walk all day — so I just wrapped my sandals in parcel tape. It sounds hilarious but try walking from Victoria coach station all the way to central London and back in shoes that are falling apart. I felt so humiliated on the way back home…” she dabs her eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get upset.”