‘How much can one person take?': Posy Sterling on her intense portrayal of a mum trapped in custody hell

The Guardian

12 hours ago

Each morning before filming Lollipop, Posy Sterling took a giant bucket outside, filled it with ice and climbed in. Never mind that it was November or that her call time was at 5am; the actor would take daily dips in the freezing water in the dark. In Lollipop, Sterling plays a headstrong mother who has recently been released from prison and is fighting to win back her kids. The role is heavy, but the ice baths meant she started the days feeling light. 'I just found it euphoric,' she says. Tickled, her driver started bringing her more ice as part of her ritual.
Today, Sterling, 32, is similarly full of beans, buzzing from two coffees and fresh from six weeks in New York. 'I haven't slept,' she says brightly. The actor has been quietly building her profile since Screen International named her one of 2023's Stars of Tomorrow, with performances in the Saoirse Ronan addiction drama The Outrun and Benedict Andrews's buzzy take on The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse in London, which has just finished a run off Broadway. We're meeting in an office in north London, where Sterling is excited to talk about her first leading role in a film.
'I share a fire with Molly,' she says of her character in Lollipop. Sterling is breezy and charming, but there is an intensity to the way she speaks. She says she related to Molly's 'refusal to be reduced', despite the difficulties she faces. In the film, Molly lives in a tent while on a waiting list for a one-bedroom flat. It is the only kind of accommodation she can apply for as a single, unmarried woman, but in order to live with both her children, she needs at least two bedrooms.
As if things weren't hard enough, Molly has just spent the last four months in prison. According to the Prison Reform Trust, 58% of prison sentences given to women in England and Wales in 2022 were for less than six months. 'And yet the repercussions of what someone like Molly is going through can last a lifetime,' Sterling says. 'Usually they're reacting to the environment they're in,' she adds, listing poverty, addiction and domestic violence as typical contributing factors. 'A different punishment could be served instead of a prison sentence.' She pauses and laughs darkly. 'Or help, maybe?'
The film is written and directed by Daisy-May Hudson, who made the 2015 documentary Half Way, about her and her family's experience of homelessness, when she was just 24. Lollipop is Hudson's first fiction film but it is driven by a similar mission: to expose the bureaucracy that punishes people who have fallen through the cracks of society, and to show their joy and resilience. Sterling is electric as Molly, blazing with intelligence and maternal rage.
'What I really like about what Daisy-May chose to do, is that she doesn't ever say why Molly went to prison,' Sterling says. 'That doesn't define a person, and it doesn't tell you anything, actually, about who they are,' though 'it's probably the first thing people would ask'. The film resists offering up Molly's crime as a way of justifying her situation. Instead, Hudson presents a character study of a flawed, fiercely loving woman trying her best to be a 'good' mum.
Sterling doesn't have children of her own but, before Lollipop, had already spent time researching pregnancy in prisons for another role. Sweatbox was produced by Clean Break, a celebrated theatre company whose cast and crew are made up of women affected by the criminal justice system. Set entirely in a prison van and following three women as they are transported between prison and court, the play was turned into a short film, which caught the eye of Lollipop's casting director, Lucy Pardee, a regular collaborator of Andrea Arnold. Sterling read the script for Lollipop seven times before her audition, because how prison affects mothers was something she 'cared about already'.
In order to build the character of Molly, Sterling had conversations with a woman who had fought to regain custody of her children after they were removed. 'She would tell me viscerally what her body went through when this happened to her, which was something I was able to draw on when playing Molly,' she says. In the film's most devastating scene, the stoic Molly finally crumbles, letting out an animal howl of pain on the floor of a social services building. Sterling tears up when I mention it. 'It felt quite ancestral, to be honest,' she says. 'It's important that you see how something is just affecting someone. How much can one person take?'
Sterling was born in Manchester in 1992, and spent her childhood in north London and, later, Market Harborough in Leicestershire. She is one of eight, including stepsiblings. Sterling and her younger siblings were born quite close together but have different accents because of where they grew up. She says she was 'massively protective' of them. 'I was separated from my siblings for a time,' she explains cautiously, and 'was moved around quite a lot growing up'. The experience of being in so many different situations gave her a fascination with people-watching and quietly psychoanalysing behaviour.
'I don't want to say I was naughty,' she says, but at school, the label stuck. 'I was always very passionate,' she adds, two deep dimples emerging. 'But I was quite rebellious.' Performing was an escape while growing up and Sterling, a gifted singer, would put on shows and direct anyone within earshot. She applied to Italia Conti drama school, whose alumni include Lesley Manville and Naomi Campbell. 'Basically I did get in, before Clean Break,' she says.
Sterling declines to talk about the circumstances that led her to Clean Break, but explains that 'to be a service user [at the organisation], you do have to tick some boxes' – Clean Break being for women who have either been affected by the criminal justice system or are at risk of offending. In 2015 she joined Clean Break's Young Artists programme, which she describes as 'a second chance for a lot of women'. When Sterling was referred there, she remembers that she didn't want anything to do with acting. 'I felt things deeply and had started to do my healing,' she says, and so the prospect of ploughing her emotions 'felt like that would be too much'.
The programme was an opportunity 'to turn pain and experience into something', as well as an instructive lesson that acting is not the same as therapy. 'Sometimes at drama schools, they try to get you to dig and unearth all the worst things in your life, whereas somewhere like Clean Break, they are nurturing you as a person. It's not always about 'How do you get into character?' but 'How do you get out of character?''
Italia Conti 'held my place' and Sterling graduated in 2016. To be an actor, she says, you need life experience – something that nobody can teach. 'But you need to have the skill to approach characters, and to be able to access parts of yourself in a way that isn't going to re-traumatise you.' In Lollipop, Sterling's soulful performance feels authentic, but it is precise and crafted.
It impressed her former mentor, Zawe Ashton, who was introduced to Sterling through Clean Break. In an email, Ashton says Lollipop was the first acting work she had seen from Sterling. She said her performance was 'full of primal feeling and nuance' and left her 'truly awestruck … Posy is that electrifying blend of trained technique and raw emotion.'
Sterling is also a gifted vocalist and sings in the film. She is 'learning the guitar at the moment' and has been 'jamming the blues' with musicians she met in New York. During an early Clean Break performance, her rendition of a Frank Sinatra number caught the ear of Jane Winehouse, stepmother of Amy, who invited her to participate in the Amy's Yard outreach programme, which supports vulnerable young musicians. Sterling wrote and recorded a song in Winehouse's studio, and met the producer Mark Ronson at a gala 10 years ago. The experience was a turning point that 'connected me to myself again', she says.
A few weeks ago in New York, at a performance of The Cherry Orchard, the actor Grace Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep, was in the audience. She was so taken by the play that she brought Ronson, her husband, with her to see it again the following day. Sterling did a double take when she saw him while on stage. 'They were meant to be going to another show, and she traded the tickets in to come back to see it a second time,' says Sterling. It was a full-circle moment, reminding her of just how much has happened during the last decade.
Sterling credits Clean Break and the outreach programmes she took part in with instilling self-belief at a time when she had little. 'They really want you to see what they see,' she says. 'Then it feels like there's been a reason for all of this.'
Lollipop is in cinemas from 13 June.