Jessica Barden has hit out at “posh actors” and said her working-class background has previously limited the roles she has been offered.
The 30-year-old actress hails from North Yorkshire and first gained widespread recognition for her role in Channel 4 comedy drama The End Of The F****** World.
Speaking to The Sunday Times Culture magazine, Barden reflected on how her working class upbringing has affected her career, saying: “I hate words like gritty or feisty.
“Gritty means working class and feisty means you have an opinion.
“I die inside when I read them.
“Emma Corrin finished playing Diana (in The Crown) and said they wanted to do a ‘gritty’ independent film in Scotland with an ‘outrageous accent’ and red hair.
“I was, like, why are you allowed to talk like this?
“How is working-class tourism still OK for posh actors?
“I’m from Yorkshire.
“I get a script for a gritty working-class woman, and it means I’m playing somebody being abused.”
Barden was born in Northallerton to her father, a prison officer, and mother, an accountant.
The actress, who now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, American screenwriter Max Winkler, went on to star as a college dropout in Pink Skies Ahead, a young woman working in a dangerous scrap metal yard in Holler and a student romantically involved with her teacher in Scarborough.
Reflecting on her experience of being on set, Barden added: “”I was one of the only young working-class actors – at least I didn’t meet others…
“There’s a lot of self-protection that a working-class woman has to do in this industry – you are very vulnerable.
“I was 16 when I moved to London to do Jerusalem and I lived alone.
“I didn’t know anything about the industry.”
Barden played the role of teenager Pea Gibbons, who emerged drunk from underneath a caravan in the 2009 show of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at London’s Royal Court Theatre.