When you’re meeting a wildly prolific, multi-award winning character actor, you might well assume you’d be able to pick them out of a crowd. But when I cross paths with Monica Dolan outside the rehearsal rooms of the Donmar theatre in London, she works out who I am first.
She’s preparing to star here in sombre school shooting drama Mass, and that means she’s swapped the platinum blonde mop she wore in some of her biggest roles (Mr Bates vs The Post Office; Sherwood) for a more unassuming look: natural, short brown hair paired with a T-shirt and an air of mild anxiety. Soon, we’re swapping firmly unglamorous tips about winding down before bed (she favours sneaking off for a chamomile tea just before curtain call, “otherwise I won’t get to sleep ’til 2am!”).
She might not frequently get stopped in the street, but Dolan is an essential presence in the TV she stars in: she’s completely absorbed into whatever role she plays, whether it’s her Bafta-winning, haunting role as infamous murderer Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult (2011), or her Olivier-earning stage part as a loyal 1950s wife in All About Eve (2019).
Is it surreal using her body as a blank canvas for make-up artists to transform into such an eclectic array of roles? “When I look in the mirror as a character, I’m nearly always looking at them quite objectively,” says Dolan, matter of factly. “I’ll be thinking, you know, the eyeliner could be a bit heavier. Things like that.” When she played – spoiler alert – terrifying drug cartel head Ann Branson in BBC crime drama Sherwood, it took quite a bit of experimenting before the character’s psychopathic tendencies really came to the fore. “In costume fittings I Iike to try everything on, because even if it feels wrong, that gives you some information. Then I put on this black leather coat and thought, ‘Okay, that’s her’.”
But mostly, Dolan’s preferred method of getting into a character isn’t through raiding the wardrobes – it’s through scouring the library. When preparing to play Rosemary West, she went straight to the murderer’s solicitor to get her hands on the official court transcripts, and studied them for telling, humanising details (West enjoyed watching a pigeon on her windowsill).
Now, she’s poring over autobiographies as she prepares to play the role of Linda, mother of a school shooter. “I don’t know what I would have done without [American author and activist] Sue Klebold’s book,” she says. “Her son Dylan was one of the shooters at Columbine, and it’s been extraordinarily helpful, because there’s no shying away from examining her own situation and all the emotions that go with that.”
There’s potential that the tragedy at the centre of this story could feel remote to British audiences. “We’re a small knobbly little country so it was much more straightforward to change our gun laws after Dunblane,” says Dolan. “Whereas the US is this vast space, where guns are something the culture was founded on – you know, that’s how America was taken from the Native Americans.”
Still, what Mass does speak to is a growing British interest in different forms of justice – ones that go beyond punishment. James Graham’s Punch recently won an Olivier Award for its potent retelling of the true story of a 19-year-old who killed a man with a single punch, then atoned for his actions in long, painful conversations with the victim’s parents.
Similarly, instead of raking through the chaos of the shooting’s immediate aftermath, the play – by TV actor-turned-writer Fran Kranz – focuses on a reconciliation that takes place years later. It first premiered as a critically acclaimed indie film in 2021, winning plaudits for its tense, faltering look at a meeting between the parents of a school shooter and the parents of a victim.
Dolan believes the intimate London staging will let her feel the audience’s reactions in real time. “It’s something that divides people, and you can sense that in the room,” she says. “The play doesn’t shy away from how difficult [the parents’ meeting] is and what it costs.”
Dolan’s television work has of course made a strong impact, too.
She played post office operator Jo Hamilton in Mr Bates vs The Post Office – a true story drama so acclaimed it embarrassed the government into finally taking action to help sub-postmasters who’d lost their savings, livelihoods, and in four cases, their lives.
Did its success give her hope that stories could change the world? “The right thing won’t have happened until everyone’s got their money,” she says, bluntly. Then, softening, she adds “but as far as your work goes, it does sort of make you think, ‘Okay, maybe it is worth doing’. I felt really incredibly proud of the audience, and of just how angry people were. It was very exciting that people cared”.
She had the challenge of filming the show at the same time as Sherwood. “One Sunday we were filming Mr Bates in central London, and there was a van waiting in the carpark to take me and my dog straight to Skegness that night, to film Sherwood the next morning. If you’re technically sort of free, then people think you’re available. But you also need to sleep,” she adds ruefully.
I ask her what it was like morphing from a kind, flustered everywoman into the terrifying head of a drug cartel, but she was more concerned about switching between two completely different accents, Hampshire and Nottinghamshire: “I remember it getting so difficult because it all sort of mixes up in your brain.”
Dolan was born in Middlesborough to Irish Catholic parents – an “academic” family who instilled a strong work ethic in her. “It definitely was anything but a showbiz upbringing,” she says. “My dad had been a chemical engineer and my mum was a biochemist, and my three siblings were all very clever – my sister had a Maths award named after her. But because I was the youngest child, I felt like I didn’t have to compete with them. I tried acting through my comprehensive school, and thought, ‘Oh, this is something I can do’.”
Dolan has a rare ability to switch between deeply serious roles and comedic ones – like Alan Partridge’s saucy love interest Angela in Alpha Papa, or Welsh communications officer Tracey Pritchard in W1A. She thinks that comes from her early training in youth theatre group Act One, which was “very much about improvisation”.
Even now, she says that “strangely quite a lot of my friends are comedians”. They even nearly convinced her into doing a solo standup show at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, but her serious side won out. “I ended up doing B*easts, a solo show that had some gallows humour but wasn’t a bundle of laughs,” she says – modestly, given that it won a Stage award for its intense exploration of the sexualisation of children.
Still, after the intensity of Mass, Dolan will be giving her funny side full vent in the second series of BBC queer comedy Smoggie Queens, and she comes alive when I ask about it. “It’s all about a group of friends. And what else do you have, really?” she says, explaining its appeal. “Everyone enjoys each other and is accepting of each other. I saw the first season and I’m pals with [co star] Mark Benton, so I texted him and said, ‘If there’s anything I can do in it I would love to’, and I ended up joining the cast!”
Smoggie Queens will give Dolan a chance to let her hair down – and finally escape the dowdy get-ups her characters often wear. “The makeup people and the hair people are phenomenal,” she says, but she doesn’t want to let on exactly what guise we’ll catch her in this time.
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
‘Mass’ is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, to 6 June