Vanessa Kirby has admitted that she always felt ‘really lonely’ at school and theatre was one of the few places she felt ‘accepted’.
Talking in a new interview, The Crown star, 32, also wowed in a stunning accompanying shoot for the December/January 2020 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
During the chat, Vanessa admitted that she always felt ‘really different’ when she was younger at school and she found drama was the ‘least judgmental’.
Candid: Vanessa Kirby has admitted that she always felt ‘really lonely’ at school and theatre was one of the few places she felt ‘accepted’
She told the publication: ‘I always felt really different at school when I was little, and really lonely…
‘I found that space of drama and theatre was the least judgmental. I felt my calmest, most connected, most accepted spaces were always those.’
Vanessa went on to discuss how art can sometimes ‘flourish’ in times of a crisis, she continued: ‘I know that in my experience, whenever I’ve had the most difficult times, I think you want to transcend it, so you can search more.
‘So, when people say to me ”God, this must have been so hard,” I say actually, ”It was truly the most profound experience.” Because I got to go to a place that I hadn’t been before, and that changed me, you know?’
Stunning: Talking in a new interview, The Crown star, 32, also wowed in a stunning accompanying shoot for the December/January 2020 issue of Harper’s Bazaar
She added: ‘I feel that the faith that creativity and art—and that includes the audience as being an essential part of that relationship—that in the darkest of times, creativity, I think, has this impulse to flourish somehow, to speak about experience.
‘I have faith that there will be a lot of spaces where people find a need to speak.’
Vanessa also noted how there can often be beauty in something that makes someone ‘deeply uncomfortable’.
She said: ‘I think getting in touch with something that makes someone deeply uncomfortable, and deeply feeling…
No judgement: During the chat, Vanessa admitted that she always felt ‘really different’ when she was younger at school and she found drama was the ‘least judgmental’
‘I think you search beyond, you look outside places that you usually look, for resolution, or for understand, or for connections.’
Vanessa also spoke about her role as Martha in her latest hard-hitting film, Pieces Of A Woman, which was released in September, it includes a 26-minute continuous shot of the star giving birth as her character.
The actress plays Martha, a Boston woman who loses her baby during a traumatic home birth, and she spent time with a midwife and a paediatrician at the Whittington Hospital in North London in preparation.
On preparing for the heart wrenching role, Vanessa said: ‘I started watching everything I could find. Endless documentaries, home birth videos, but everything was so sanitised; everything was so edited.’
Honest: She told the publication: ‘I always felt really different at school when I was little, and really lonely… I found that space of drama and theatre was the least judgmental. I felt my calmest, most connected, most accepted spaces were always those.’
Talking about witnessing a live birth after spending time at the Whittington Hospital in North London, she said: ‘I watched her for six hours go through a really difficult labour, no painkillers, forceps. It got really, really difficult…
‘I watched her go on a completely lone journey, like an odyssey, through the most primal, almost divine… and I saw the power and the fear in all of it.
‘I came away far more of a woman in appreciating the sacredness of the feminine in a way that I don’t think I had fully realised. I feel like I had lived something in human experience I hadn’t lived before.’
She poignantly added: ‘It brought everything that I sort of had known intellectually into being, which is, this is like the magnificence of being a woman, and its creation essentially… it almost gave birth to the film inside my heart.’
Radiant: Vanessa looked radiant as she wowed in a stunning photoshoot and cover alongside the cover
Vanessa looked radiant as she wowed in a stunning photoshoot and cover alongside the cover.
The Crown star, who soared to fame for her portrayal as Princess Margaret in series one to two of the hit Netflix series, smouldered in a stylish pink coat for the cover.
While a different ensemble saw Vanessa in a strapless black Prada gown and another look saw the star in a black plunging top with a white blazer.
Vanessa has had a busy year filming for movies Pieces Of A Woman, The World to Come and the current Mission Impossible 7 in Italy.
You can read the full interview in the December/January 2020 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, available on newsstands on the 1 December.
Emotional: Vanessa also spoke about her role as Martha in her latest hard-hitting film, Pieces Of A Woman, which was released in September (pictured in film still)