Juno Temple’s recalling her reaction to watching the opening episode of Vinyl, the latest TV offering from Martin Scorsese, following the huge success of his Prohibition-set Boardwalk Empire.
“I came out shaking, like I was high as a kite,” the 26-year-old says excitedly. “It felt like a Scorsese film to me. You don’t want to look away for a minute. You don’t want to pee, you don’t cough, you don’t sneeze, and what a great way to bring in the show with that kind of energy.”
The 10-part drama is set in Seventies New York, and offers a ride through the sex and drug-addled music business at the dawn of the punk, disco and hip-hop eras (Mick Jagger is a co executive producer).
Temple, who appeared in last year’s Far From The Madding Crowd, plays Jamie Vine, an assistant at the record company run by Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), who she describes as “pretty feisty and fearless”.
“I’m so inspired by her fearlessness, and I hope people think I’m brave with the films I do, and now TV. It’s important to be fearless. You might fall on your face but sometimes, my God, you run a marathon,” exclaims the London-born actress.
“What inspires me with Jamie is her joy of being a woman and how she owns that. And even though it’s a time when it was so male-orientated, especially in that industry, she’s not scared of that. She’s going to make herself heard, you know?”
Temple believes that while they share “a lot of similarities”, there’s a glaring difference between her and her music-obsessed alter ego.
“I spend a lot of my life in my pyjamas, and she would never be caught dead in her pyjamas,” she admits, laughing.
She’s pretty fond of her character’s Seventies clothes, though.
“As a woman, it makes you feel stoked to leave the house. They hug the body in the right way. It’s about accentuating being a woman and owning being a woman, and they were really doing that [in the Seventies] because sexuality was open to them in such a new way.”
The petite actress, who’s based in Los Angeles these days, auditioned for the role in New York.
“I got a phone call a week or so later to say Marty [Scorsese] wanted to read me, which was definitely a moment,” she grins.
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