Her scene-stealing turn in Industry and upcoming role as Amy Winehouse in this year’s hotly anticipated biopic sees Marisa Abela poised on the brink of real fame. On the eve of the film’s release, she speaks to Helena Lee about honouring the troubled singer and how she keeps her own feet on the ground
MARISA ABELA IS ALWAYS EARLY. SHE DOESN’T MIND IF OTHER PEOPLE are late, but she is adamant that no one should be made to wait for her. Indeed, for our date today she arrives 10 minutes before the allotted time, stepping into the Camden members’ club the House of Koko seconds ahead of me. ‘I’m that person who might sit for half an hour outside because I actually got in the car when they told me to,’ she confesses with a smile, as we settle into a corner of the roof terrace for lunch. ‘Sometimes it’s to my detriment, but I’ve always been a perfectionist.’
It seems an unlikely trait for Abela, whose onscreen roles so far have all involved unravelling spectacularly for the camera: after a drug-fuelled party in the disaster drama Cobra; and as the privileged yet vulnerable graduate trainee Yasmin in the hit HBO/BBC banking drama series Industry – a skill that will doubtless also be required for her upcoming role portraying the singer Amy Winehouse in a new biopic, Back to Black.
However, in person, Abela has a low-key confidence: assured and articulate, unguarded yet in control. Today, she is dressed in a casual black Rixo dress, a jacket and flat boots for walking to our rendezvous along the canal in the spring sun from her home in north London. It’s a moment of calm before the maelstrom of attention that she will certainly encounter with the film’s release.
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, Back to Black charts the events and loves in Winehouse’s life that led to the creation of her eponymous, award-winning 2008 album. Abela inhabits the singer so completely – her voice , her appearance, her manner – that at times you forget that she isn’t actually Winehouse.
But the part was not Abela’s from the outset. In fact, on learning about the project, her reaction was to turn it down. ‘My first instinct was to say “No, that’s too much, too huge.”’ Her agent persuaded her to meet Taylor-Johnson and the casting director Nina Gold. Before the meeting, Abela started researching Winehouse, focusing on the woman before she was famous: the person obsessed with listening to Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Lauryn Hill – and built a picture of what she calls ‘Frankera Amy’, during the time the singer’s first album Frank was released in 2003.
‘The more I got to know her, the more I felt a major connection to this spiky Jewish girl from London who had a lot to say, and was reall
