Does Maddy Hill have some kind of tracksuit fetish? The actor, who charmed EastEnders fans as the sportswear-loving tomboy Nancy Carter, now has the lead role in the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Imogen. But despite the dramatic career swerve, when we meet in the theatre’s elegant Swan bar, Hill is, once again, in head-to-toe Adidas.
Shouting with laughter, the 26-year-old protests that she didn’t know how “tracksuit” her new role would be. Under director Matthew Dunster, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline has been reworked and dragged into modern-day London: warring factions are transformed into gangs, and kings into drug kingpins, the grime soundtrack is turned up high – and, of course, there’s plenty of athleisure.
Even with these inner-city stylings, the Globe is a long way from Albert Square – but Hill has never been your average soap star. True, she is slim, pretty and blond, but she is also politically engaged and scathingly honest. (How did she get cast? “They wanted someone ‘off the telly’ to get bums on seats.”) Once the conversation shifts away from herself, she lights up, quoting essays on Islamophobia by the actor Riz Ahmed, or leaning forward in her eagerness to talk about violence against women.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Among the fake eyelashes and hair extensions of Walford market, Hill set about transforming Nancy into the square’s first explicitly feminist character. There was always a hint that Nancy was as amused as the viewers by the soap’s more absurd plot twists. Yet she also created a character who railed against injustice and upbraided Danny Dyer’s Mick for a misogynistic comment after he insulted a sex worker.
It turns out this was something of a guerrilla campaign by Hill, beginning with her suggestion that Nancy should wear basketball shorts. This, she points out, also gave her “a shorter makeup call than the men. I was winning!” Next came the suggestions for feminist “tweaks” to her script, until finally the writers started doing it themselves.
“I was thinking about the 14-year-old girls watching who didn’t realise they were feminists,” she says, earnestly. “When I was 14, I was just like, ‘I don’t want to do girly stuff’… There’s a danger those girls can accidentally start being misogynist because you start seeing ‘girly’ things as weak. But if there’s a role model who looks, acts and behaves like them but doesn’t hate the idea of being a woman maybe they can be more comfortable with themselves.” She has also won praise for her sensitive portrayal of Nancy’s epilepsy.
Leaving the soap was hard because of the closeness of the cast, but Hill tells me she has stayed in touch with many of them. She recently went to Dyer’s Spanish-themed wedding, which she says happily, “was absolutely mad. There were fireworks at the end and in burning flames it said, ‘Let’s ’ave it large.’
“He was going to get, ‘Let’s have it large’, but” – she pauses to do a terrible Dyer impression – “‘The H was another grand …’”
Still, after two years on the square, it was time to escape before her character had to go down the well-trodden path of affairs or murder plots. And, she admits, she was ready for something that was “the polar opposite” of the slang of E20.
Shakespeare fit the bill nicely. “I think the poetry of Shakespeare is utterly beautiful,” she says. “If you can communicate that to a modern audience, they won’t miss out on something that they might be scared of, or might have been put off of in school.”
Opening with the grime track You Don’t Know (Bonkaz), Dunster’s rewrite is almost certain to annoy traditionalists. In one of the strongest scenes a broken-hearted Imogen sings an a cappella version of Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, in front of a cannabis farm.
Hill wasn’t blind to the risks of a youth-focused contemporary production. “When the word ‘urban’ comes into play you know you are going to cringe,” she says, pressing her point with an Alan Partridge voice. “‘C’mon, guys, it’s an urban play – breakdancing, beatboxing, BMX-ing …” She winces. “Toe-curling.”
What made the production different, she says, was Dunster’s enthusiasm for collaboration, and a commitment to casting actors who understood the setting, rather than “a group of awkward, middle-class white people”. The young, community-trained local actors who worked alongside seasoned professionals added the expertise to help the play’s authenticity: picking the right footwear, for example, became as important as a historically accurate doublet.
“If anyone was wearing the wrong trainers, they just couldn’t go ahead,” Hill says. “If a dance move was suggested that wasn’t right, everyone would be like, ‘Uh, no.’”
Hill trained at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in Kent; her father works in the City and her mother set up an outreach scheme. Hackney born and bred, she considers herself somewhere in the middle of Imogen’s “perfectly balanced” cast. “When you’ve grown up in that culture, you know what’s embarrassing and what’s not.”
She feels lucky to have had a part in EastEnders, when there is so little representation of working-class culture on screens and stages. “I know lots of actors sneer at soaps. But there is no better platform to speak to the working classes,” she says. “Theatre is a white, middle-class world. It needs to change.”
Soon she’s off on a British obsession with period dramas, and an England that no longer exists. She’s on the brink of talking herself out of a job, hesitates, then carries on.
“It will probably happen and everyone will laugh at me, but being in a costume drama, sitting around drinking tea in corsets?” She pretends to vomit. “There is so much more to our culture. London – and England – is exciting and vibrant and diverse. What’s not to celebrate about that? It’s incredible.”
I wonder how someone so strong-minded makes sense of Imogen, who, even after Dunster has overhauled her, is still soft-hearted in the face of betrayal. “Without the changes I would have struggled to make her likable,” Hill admits. “Without the changes she is a pawn that gets dragged around, broken and distressed, and left high and dry.”
But Imogen still forgives a man who tries to kill her. Hill laughs, and all but throws her hands up. “You just have to say there is more to the play than that, and put it to bed.”
Away from the screen, Hill is no less interested in taking a stand: last year she asked Rape Crisis to make her its first celebrity ambassador. She was puzzled, she says, when she realised there were no celebrity endorsements for sexual-assault charities. “I wondered, is that because people think it is something they shouldn’t talk about?”
The organisation told her it had contacted celebrity agents in the past, only to hear: “We don’t want our client associated with a dirty charity.”
Now Hill is talking with the charity about going into schools to discuss consent. “I am really concerned about porn, and I feel I could potentially be a voice to those young girls who didn’t know what to expect in their formative sexual experiences.”
With her characters, she says, she is sticking firmly to her feminist beliefs. “I think those parts will come to me,” she says hopefully. “Because I am not suited to anything else.”
• Imogen is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 16 October
