Oona Chaplin: The Chaplin kid

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Lydia Slater|Es Magazine. Photographs|Paul Smith. Styled|Gianluca Longo

10 April 2012

With a pedigree like hers, there was really only one possible career for Oona Chaplin. Grandpa Charlie, Britain's bestloved film star, has cast a very long shadow. Oona's mother, father, grandmother, uncles, aunts and numerous cousins all made or make a living in showbusiness. 'I tried to fight it for a long time, but it was inevitable,' Oona says. Only her half-brother Shane managed to break free to become a psychologist, and even he originally considered a directing career.

We have arranged to meet in the Boundary hotel, where Oona has been posing for ES's photographer. I'm waiting in the lobby when the lift doors part and out steps a Chaplin: small and slight, with dark mournful eyes, emphatic black eyebrows and the trademark shy appealing grin peeking out from under a beret studded with fake jewellery. All that's missing is the moustache, which is fortunate since Oona, 23, specialises in roles that are sexy rather than slapstick.

This month, she will be on our TV screens alongside Ralf Little and Lucy Davis in a new ITV six-part comedy drama, Married, Single, Other. Oona plays Fabiana, a Brazilian cage dancer who irrupts into the lives of the central characters with cataclysmic consequences. 'I'm the token sexpot,' she says cheerfully, as we wander across the road to Shoreditch House for lunch. 'It was quite a challenging role. I'm flirtatious as a person but I don't interact with people in a sexual way. To stand in that cage in a tiny little silver bikini with 190 extras looking at me, I had to get into a completely di erent mind frame. That was one of the reasons I took the job; it was a great opportunity to access my inner Brazilian cage-dancing hotness.

'It's the first time in my life when I've seen myself on screen and thought I looked better than I acted. I was very pleased with it,' she chatters in her Spanish-American drawl. 'There's this fantastic moment in episode six when I'm stark naked, apart from a skin-coloured piece of cloth stuck to my bottom and other things just covering my nipples. I was jumping up and down on the bed, and it was such a tiny room that the director had to sit right next to the bed. He kept looking through the monitor because he was embarrassed. But I thought it was hilarious. You can't take sex scenes too seriously, one way or the other. You just have to take your clothes off and have fun.'

Having unleashed her inner Brazilian hotness, Oona seems to be finding it hard to stuff the genie back into the bottle. The day after our meeting, she's flying to Bolivia where she will be spending a lot more time with her clothes off, playing the adulterous wife of a hotelier in a short film called High and Dry (which is why she's rather cautious about ordering pasta today, in case it gives her an unflattering bulge).

Isn't she worried about being typecast? 'There seems to be a pattern emerging,' she agrees. 'But I don't have a problem with it. I'm quite happy to take my clothes off at any given moment,' she goes on, teasingly hoisting up her jumper. 'If it keeps me working, I don't care. I love it. Sex is fun, you know?' She tilts her head back and roars with unselfconscious laughter as the waiter totters off, doubtless to have a coronary in peace.

No surprise, then, to hear that Oona thinks of herself as Latina, although she is, by blood, mostly English. Her mother is Doctor Zhivago star Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie and his fourth wife Oona, granddaughter of the Nobel Prize-winning writer and dramatist Eugene O'Neill (author of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night). Her father is the Chilean cinematographer Patricio Castilla, who now manages his wife's career after more than 30 years together. Her half-brother Shane, 35, is from her mother's previous relationship with one of Spain's foremost film directors, Carlos Saura. Oona was brought up mostly in Madrid, and Spanish was her first language. 'I swear in it when I'm angry,' she says.

Her performing genes emerged early. She was five when she started dancing, both ballet and flamenco, following in the pointe-steps of her mother, who'd studied at the Royal Ballet School before David Lean discovered her. 'My teacher really took a shine to me because I looked kind of gypsyish,' says Oona. 'I was going to be a dancer, that was going to be my life.' She was a perfectionist, incredibly tidy and, like her grandfather, very disciplined about her work. 'Part of the pleasure came from doing an exercise that really hurt and making it look easy.'

Her astonishing genetic inheritance was, she says, 'a pressure, but not a bad pressure. It's amazing to realise what one human being can achieve, but it just made me want to do better.' In fact, she seems to be more daunted by the O'Neill connection. 'I can't even keep a diary because I read it back and think, "I can't write..." '

Her parents clearly did not regard themselves as keepers of the Chaplin flame, although it would have been more understandable if they had. The working-class Londoner was famous for being the Tramp, but his global influence - as writer, producer, director and, most of all, actor - was colossal. He revolutionised the film industry, cofounded United Artists with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and was hailed by George Bernard Shaw as a genius. In 1999, 22 years after his death, the American Film Institute ranked him as one of the ten greatest male actors of all time. He left a large fortune, divided up between his huge family (he had 11 children, although two died before he did). 'There's a photo on the stairs of him looking at some film,' says Oona vaguely. 'And people think it's awfully original to give my parents statuettes of him, but most of those get passed on pretty quickly.'

Charlie Chaplin died almost a decade before Oona was born, so her image of him has been created by his films. 'I know he's my grandfather, but when I think about him, I see the Tramp,' she says. 'I don't see the man of the house, being normal without a moustache. My mother says he was very Victorian, aware that he had come from nothing and that his family should be grateful for the gifts he'd bestowed on them because of his hard work.'

Her parents took a similar line. 'They made sure we knew the value of things. My mother's a right old hippie and my father has always been very, very left wing. He was involved with a Marxist militant movement called MIR' - a Chilean political party founded in 1965 by students and trade unions in the shantytowns of Santiago; Salvador Allende (the Chilean president deposed by Pinochet in the 1973 coup) was one of its early leaders. During Pinochet's dictatorship, the group was responsible for several attacks on government personnel and buildings, including assassination attempts on Pinochet himself, although there is no suggestion that Castilla was involved in this. 'I don't know how much he'd want me to say, but he did a lot against Pinochet,' she says, referring in part to the 1979 film he co-wrote, Prisoneros Desaparecidos, depicting political prisoners being tortured and interrogated without trial under the regime. Castilla's mother Hilda was equally political. A Mapuche (an indigenous Indian), she was a pioneer in women's liberation, a kind of Chilean Emmeline Pankhurst, Oona told Spanish newspaper El Mundo last year.

Oona calls her father a 'one-man army': his careers have included painter, carpenter and electrician. He also spent time in Communist Cuba, which influenced his politics. So it comes as no surprise that Oona's parents encouraged her to mix with the homeless. 'There was always an awareness that we had things, but that didn't mean we deserved them and other people didn't.'

Clearly, Oona has inherited her parents' social conscience. She works with a Ladbroke Grove charity, Streetlytes, which provides the homeless with food and toiletries. 'I go and cook there at least once a week. I love doing it. I feel very protected when I'm walking around, because I know all the crackheads in my neighbourhood. Having a problemfree life with very socially conscious parents leaves you riddled with guilt,' she adds.

As a teenager, she rebelled. 'At 15, I thought I was a grown woman. I thought it was preposterous that I had to be in bed by 11pm.' At the same time, adolescence had changed her physique and dented the discipline necessary to keep her at the peak of her dancing career. Eventually, she abandoned her dancing dreams, asked to go to boarding school and ended up at Gordonstoun, the Scottish alma mater of Prince Charles. 'It haunted me. For a long time, I couldn't watch ballet because I regretted it so much.' She finds all this hard to talk about, refusing to speculate on what might have happened. 'I still do flamenco,' she says. 'It's not too late to go back.'

Once at Gordonstoun, she gave full rein to her teenage rebellion, sneaking into the woods to smoke and drink vodka with the boys and dodge irate teachers. 'When you're a teenager, your hormones are going crazy. I felt guilty about being so frustrated and angry so I used to make up these horrific stories about things that happened to me and my family to justify the way I was. I made up siblings who suffered terribly in life because I had a lot of angst and I needed a real reason to feel the way I did.'

It's hard to believe it now, looking at this sinuous size eight before me, that she also ate herself up to a size 16. 'I see pictures of myself on Facebook that I don't even recognise.' She must have been miserable, I say. 'Oh, show me a teenage girl who doesn't have eating issues,' she replies.

As for her predestined performance career, she says, 'I tried to fight it for a really long time. I pushed acting away, which was fine by my family. I liked books. I have an academic side and it hasn't been satisfied at all even by the intellectual side of theatre. I went out with an anthropologist and I thought maybe I'd do that.' But at the end of her first year, the school took an alternative version of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the Edinburgh Fringe. Oona had to play Bottom as Charlie Chaplin, a conceit that ensured sell-out shows and reviews in the national papers. 'It was so lame,' she says. 'I wouldn't do it again, but I was 15.' The reviewers gushed over her performance, but she says it was nothing special. 'Whack the moustache on, do the funny walk and they say it's genetic.' But the consequences were far-reaching. 'The first time I came off stage, I went up to my tutor and I broke down in her arms. I was sobbing, "Oh my God, I can't help it, I love this! Shit! I'm screwed!" '

She made one final attempt to fight her destiny by deciding to give up on acting if she wasn't accepted into RADA, but naturally she was. She got a flat in Notting Hill and hung out with Gemma Arterton, though her career has yet to catapult her into the same stratosphere. 'My name gets me through the door,' she says. 'People are curious - they say, "Oona Chaplin? Isn't she dead?" But it doesn't get me the roles.'

At RADA she fell for actor Alex Lanipekun, who played junior MI5 offi cer Ben Kaplan in Spooks. The two are no longer an item --Oona is currently single - but she says that Lanipekun is the person she admires most in the world. 'He is the only person I know apart from my dad who really fights every day to live up to his own standards. That is rare and something I don't have.' Her first film break came with a small role as a hotel receptionist in Quantum of Solace. 'My one and a half minutes of glory,' she mocks. 'I was filming when I got a call from my agent, saying, "Dahling, they've given you a role in Quantum of Solace, what do you think?" And I was like, "Aaaaah!" ' she shrieks. 'Of course I thought it would be much bigger and I'd be a Bond Girl and have all these make-out scenes with Daniel Craig, but it didn't turn out like that.' Oona then took a role in a creepy thriller, Imago Mortis, made by the producers of Pan's Labyrinth, set in a European school for cinema where a murderous cult is flourishing. Oona takes lead billing alongside her mother. 'To see the work and the focus and the concentration that she gave to the role...' she marvels. 'It really changed my approach to acting.' Not too much, you hope.

The truth is that Oona has not inherited Geraldine's gravity and screen presence, but she buzzes with an irrepressible vitality and charm that are all her own. I suspect we will shortly be seeing a lot more of her - with or without her clothes.

Married, Single, Other will be on ITV1 later this month

Oona Chaplin: The Chaplin kid

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