It was Saint Maud that ensured that Hamlet-style offers came rolling in. After training at the Drama Centre London at 19, Clark appeared in theatre and film productions that gave her the chance to work with Copperfield director Armando Iannucci and Benedict Cumberbatch [in Patrick Melrose]. But she took flight with this god-fearing frightfest from first-time writer and director Rose Glass, whose gothic tale of a nurse experiencing a kind of religious psychosis dealt in trauma and loneliness while giving serious jump scares.
Clark is in almost every frame of Saint Maud, which had a transformative effect on her career. It was at the film’s Toronto premiere that she found out she had got the Rings of Power gig. In auditions, she says, she usually thinks “Can I trick them into thinking that I can do this?” But with Saint Maud it was different. She felt an affinity with Maud, who is someone simply trying her best to get things right, and empathised with the predicament of someone struggling in the under-funded caring profession, having heard her mother, who works in medicine,…
