‘I trusted a lot of people, and the wrong people, and I shouldn’t have’: Charlotte Kirk on navigating Hollywood

The British actor took up writing and producing to have control over what she stars in after a scandal involving some of the most powerful men in the film business

After a recent run as an assassin, a serial killer and a gangster, Charlotte Kirk was looking for something a little lighter, and surely nothing can be more jolly, more wholesome than a Christmas romcom. In Christmas & Chaos, Kirk plays Sadie, a pop star in search of a hit – or, to be more precise, three hits for a new musical by an impresario (a comedic Jason Isaacs who only appears on screen via video call). She has just a couple of weeks to come up with something with handsome-and-heartbroken composer (Ben McGregor).

Kirk, who also produced the film, approached Jamie Adams, director of several low-budget British films, including Black Mountain Poets, intrigued by his regular use of improvisation. They worked out the story together, says Kirk, but made it without a script. All they knew was that “this was a Christmas movie, these two have got a deadline to make these hit songs and maybe there’ll be some kind of romance. And then it became something else, which is even more interesting.”

We’re speaking over Zoom, Kirk at home in London, where she lives with her partner, a property developer who also helps produce some of her films, and their baby son. In recent years, Kirk has created a career largely defined by genre films, regularly with the director Neil Marshall (known for Hellboy (2019) and The Descent (2005)). They were engaged for a while, and continue to work together, often as co-writers. Their first film, The Reckoning, was a 17th-century-set horror. That was followed by Alien-esque The Lair and erotic thriller Compulsion.

Kirk has tried everything – there are even old pop videos she made online. “Oh God,” she says with a laugh. “Some things you just can’t remove off the internet.” She did it for “fun”, she says. “Acting has always been my priority.” So playing a pop star in this latest film didn’t make her think she’d chosen the wrong path? “No, definitely not. I have stage fright with singing on stage. That was a tough day filming.” Her character Sadie is fairly ridiculous, fragile but with a monstrous ego. Did Kirk base her on anyone? “Living in LA for 10 years, I’ve come across a lot of interesting, wild, wonderful, not-so-very-nice people,” she says, with a laugh.

Aside from drama classes, Kirk hadn’t done improv before. “The first couple of takes were nerve-racking. Everyone’s finding their feet and their character, but it gave you a lot of freedom because you weren’t restricted by a script. It was really fun as you never knew what you were going to come up with.”

Sometimes it surprised her. “[Sadie] talking to her ex-partner on the phone – there was a little bit of truth in that with my ex [Marshall]. Little things here and there. When I watch the movie, I’m like, ‘I think Charlotte came out there for a second.’”

There’s a line where Sadie talks about being desperate to be relevant again. Is that something Kirk sometimes feels, in terms of the ups and downs of a film career? “It came from ‘you’re only as good as your last film’. If you make a film that isn’t on the festival circuit, or it doesn’t hit a certain audience then you can be a little bit …” she pauses. “It’s not the work that’s difficult; it’s the not working.” It’s why she creates as much of her own work as possible; she makes two films a year through her production company. That has also been necessary in an industry that has been, to understate it, often difficult for Kirk.

Kirk, 34, moved to the US when she was 18, believing she would find more opportunities for someone from her background – her father was an electrician and her mother a carer, and she attended drama school at weekends – than in the British film and TV industry. “If you haven’t gone to Rada or come from a certain area or speak in a certain way, you’re kind of … not looked down on, but you’re judged. I feel it’s a bit different in the US. You see the same faces, but there’s still room, they still let new people in.”

Acting had given her confidence, she says of her decision to move to the US while so young to try to make it as an actor. It’s also partly a facet of her autism, she says (she was diagnosed as a child). “I didn’t see fear in that way. Maybe if I didn’t have autism, I wouldn’t have gone,” she says. But she adds that she was also “a bit naive, not knowing who to trust, just taking everyone at their word.” A bit later, she says: “I trusted a lot of people, and the wrong people, and I shouldn’t have.”

During her time trying to make it in the US, Kirk was embroiled in a scandal that is complicated and which includes allegations of sexual harassment on one side, and extortion on the other. She did not speak to me about them because she remains under the terms of at least two non-disclosure agreements. But the publicly available information suggests the scandal features some of the most powerful men in the business.

Kirk has tried to have the NDA, which she signed in 2017, lifted, following a California law that limited the use of NDAs in cases of allegations of sexual harassment (the men involved have denied wrongdoing, describing any relationship with Kirk as consensual). What is it like to live under an NDA? “Just talking in general,” she says carefully, “there are things that have been written about me, and a lot of it is not true.” She has got on with her life, and worked steadily, to the point where “a lot of people don’t even know about it. But hopefully, one day I’ll be able to tell the truth.”

We speak the day after the comedian and actor Russell Brand was convicted of rape and sexual assault. “I’m kind of immune to it now,” says Kirk of seeing another man in the entertainment industry exposed. “I’m like, yeah, another one. There are plenty more out there. A lot of people think, ‘Just because we took down Weinstein and Epstein, then it’s all over.’ But there’s a lot more out there continuing to do things every day.”

Creating her own work has given Kirk some control over her career. She recently finished another film with Marshall, The Spiral Down (he wrote and produced it, but didn’t direct), and she hopes there will be a sequel to Duchess, their 2024 crime film. She has another role in a film early next year which she describes as “slightly controversial” but can’t say more, except “when you see it, you’ll say, ‘OK, that’s interesting they cast her in that role.’” She got that job, she says, “because they saw my work that I created. Producing is necessary so I can tell the stories and do the things that I want to do.”