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“I am just an actor – all I do is I memorise someone else’s words and tart around,” says Olivia Colman, Bafta-award-winning actor and patron for anti-domestic violence charity Tender.

Within a few minutes of interviewing her, the self-deprecation that Colman is known for is revealed. “Some actors know much more [than me] but I’m aware of my limitations,” she tells me. But, perhaps this is what makes her an effective charity patron.

When faced with a number of requests from charities, Colman says she chose to focus on a few, carefully chosen causes. She became a patron of Tender less than a year ago, after approaching a range of charities while researching for her role as a domestic violence survivor in the film Tyrannosaur.

“I want to be helpful to the charities I support. I think you can dilute it, the more you do,” she says. “You have to be a bit strong about what you do … otherwise you risk spreading yourself a bit thin and you can be less useful.”

She explains that sometimes there are things “I just know I can’t do”. When approached by Comic Relief to appear in a fundraising film in Africa, Colman had reservations. “I said I don’t think you want me, I won’t be able to do it,” she says. “I’ve got no armour. If they’re suffering they don’t want some twatty actor turning up in tears.”

Eventually, Colman did find a good fit at Comic Relief, with young carers. She found filming for the TV event uplifting and while she still “still cried”, she realised that, when it comes to charity work, she’s “better at doing positive stuff”.

This is what drew her to Tender – its positive, preventative work and the fact that “it’s grassroots and gives people useful tools to lead a happy life.”

Tender was established in 2003 and works with young people to raise awareness of abuse and educate them around friendships and relationships. Its workshops are run in places like schools, youth centres, offices and healthcare settings.

“That’s the point of Tender – to try and get in there early,” Colman explains. “Teach people about the warning signs and children how to be a good friend and good partner. So that’s why I said yes to being a patron, it sort of made sense. I understood that.”

When I ask her what her advice is for anyone considering becoming a patron it was very considered: know your limits by not over-committing to causes and being sure it’s the right cause for you. But there’s one thing, self-deprecating as she is, that she doesn’t mention – hard work.

“I’m not trying to pretend, you know … it’s the staff who are doing the tough shit,” she tells me. While she acknowledges that “my job means I’m helpful” she doesn’t consider herself an expert. “If Susie [McDonald, Tender’s chief executive] were here she’d be much better than me at this … I’ll never be as knowledgeable as her,” she says.

But she reveals her commitment in other ways – attending Tender’s workshops, meeting beneficiaries and volunteers and even calling the charity before this interview to “apologise in advance in case I am not saying all the things you want me to say”.

Her eagerness to get it right is obvious as she adds: “I’m always keen to have more training as a charity patron.”

Like her day job, it seems there’s rather more to her charity work than memorising words and tarting around. Her advice for aspiring charity patrons shows as much: “Make sure it’s a good fit. You can’t fake it, even as an actor. You have to have a real passion for it.”

Source: theguardian.com – Olivia Colman: You can’t fake it as a charity patron even as an actor

As the winner of three Bafta awards for Broadchurch, Accused and Twenty Twelve – including two in the same year – you might assume that Olivia Colman spends most of her time either filming or sifting between piles of possible scripts. Counterintuitively, though, greater success has brought more frequent unemployment.

“I think there’s a perception that I’ll be too busy,” she says. “So actually, after those first two Baftas, I didn’t really get offered anything, which makes you think: Oh, no! And, after I finished the second series of Broadchurch, nothing came up for six months, which really is a long time and I got a bit panicky.”

Her current schedule is rushed, however. Immediately after our conversation about the film London Road (in cinemas from Friday 12 June), she is flying to Morocco to resume shooting The Night Manager, a six-part BBC adaptation of a John le Carré novel.

Colman plays Burr, a British spy who was a man in the book but has been rewritten as a woman and – to accommodate the impending birth of the actress’s third child – a heavily pregnant one. Le Carré approved the changes when she met him, although the actress didn’t realise she had. “I didn’t know it isn’t his real name. At the read-through, I was chatting away to someone called David Cornwell, telling him how great the story was, without realising that he was John le Carré.”

Babies are a pressure on diaries and costumes that male screen actors are spared, but Colman says that she has always been lucky with morning sickness and, “It would be worse if I was having to hide it on screen because I’ve already got a waddle. But, so far, it’s always worked out for me that I’ve been able to be pregnant in the job I’m doing.”

In London Road, Colman does something she has never previously done on stage or screen – sing. When she was called to meet Rufus Norris, the new artistic director of the National Theatre, she perhaps imagined an invitation to give her Cleopatra or Hedda Gabler. But Norris – after an audition with a musical director – signed her up for his cinematic version of the stage show London Road by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork.

Although most conveniently described as a musical, it resembles nothing previously attempted in that genre. Playwright Blythe conducted interviews with residents of the area in Ipswich where, in 2006, five women working as prostitutes were murdered by forklift truck driver Steve Wright. Verbatim extracts from these conversations were then set to music by composer Cork.

A local’s expression of apprehension – “Everyone is very nervous” – becomes an aria, while the guilty verdicts in Wright’s trial are sung by a chorus of TV news reporters. It is the most original piece of music theatre I have ever seen and the film retains the shock and originality.

“It was very difficult at the beginning,” Blythe recalls, “because there were no references for what we were trying to do. I’d say to the residents, ‘It’s a musical but it’s not like Mamma Mia, but then it isn’t an opera either.'”

The actors learned the words from tapes of the original speakers, with every hesitation and repetition included. Colman – who plays Julie, organiser of a scheme to rehabilitate the area after the killings – had to adjust, unusually for an actor, to being told-off for not stumbling enough: “Alecky would say, ‘There’s actually a count of three between the ‘um’ and the ‘but’.

Learning somebody else’s speech rhythms is very difficult. It would take me a whole day to learn one speech and my husband would be testing me and would say, ‘You missed out an ‘oh’ there’ and I’d think, ‘But it’s not even a proper word!’”

Source: radiotimes.com – Olivia Colman on slow success broadchurch fever and why she’ll do anything to be in peep show