Actress Nadia Sawalha Explains the Mystique of ‘Annie Palmer’
By Larry Jaffee
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND—Nadia Sawalha, the actress who EastEnders fans know as “Annie Palmer,” was nearly cast as “Polly” the Walford Gazette reporter, and vice versa.
She tells me this as we settle for an interview in the “green room” following a taping of the Granada-produced TV series Soap Fever, for which Sawalha currently is the presenter.
Reared in an acting family, her father and sister (Julia Sawalha, best known for playing daughter Saffron Absolutely Fabulous) are also both thespians. Back to the story of how she ended up as Annie.
Nadia auditioned with a slew of other actresses. She thought it was going well when she realized that during the interview process, she was in with the casting director for 45 minutes.
“They asked me to talk about myself. I’m chatting away. I do that when I’m nervous. I noticed that everyone else was out the door after a minute. The next day they asked me to come back for a screen test.
‘Blimey, I thought I’d never get this far.’ The only two they screen-tested was me and Victoria Gould. We were always going to get the job. They hadn’t decided which way they were going to go (who was going to be Annie and who Polly).
“They always have a vague idea of they want, and then they build the character around the person they choose. I was pleased when they turned it around.”
I tell her that I’m glad she ended up with the role that she did—it suited her. She agrees. I also score a few points when I tell her that Annie always seems a bit more posh than the others in the Square—she dressed better, spoke better, etc.
“Thank you. She always believed that she was better than those people.”
“Annie Palmer” is described in last year’s BBC-published Who’s Who Guide to EastEnders as “a rather terrifying creation, a kind of dominatrix without the dungeon. A verbal Miss Whiplash, she tore strips off anyone who crosses her.”
Nadia says of the character, “It’s nice to play such a devilsome lady.”
She points out that she got the audition only two weeks after she instructed her agent that she wanted a soap opera part.
“I always had seen myself as jobbing actress. I never had any dreams of being a big star. I always wanted to earn good money and have a regular kind of job. A soap kind of fit the bill for that. Unbelivably, two weeks later I got a call for an audition.”
She thought she didn’t look right for EastEnders. “My father is Arabic and my mother English. I just thought that I was too exotic —that there wasn’t enough call for a foreigner.”
Besides EastEnders, Sawalha has acted in a couple of films, including one with Ewan McGregor. She says that she perfers television to the sitting arond and waiting process of a movie set. “That’s like‘Just learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture. They then take four hours to talk about it.”
Nadia recalls working on a film with Sherilyn Fenn, who kept on having to stop in the middle of a scene to nurse her baby “every time I had a close-up. That was very annoying.”
Back to EastEnders, I tell her I recall a scene when she first arrived in the Square that the character Lenny immediately hit on her. Sawalha says that such treatment is almost a ritual on the set when a new female character joins the cast. “‘Isn’t she lovely?—no matter what you look like, a back end of the bus.”
I also mention that I had lunch with her real-life boyfriend two days earlier at the EastEnders studio, Marc Bannerman, who plays Gianni DiMarco. “I know, he told me,” she replies.
“It was lovely for me to meet Pam [St. Clement] today,” Nadia says, of her special guest on Soap Fever. Even before she made it to EastEnders, Nadia apparently had a talent to mimic Pat mixing and taking a swig of gin and tonic. My sisters would tell me, ‘You’re doing Pat.’”
Speaking of her sisters, she’s looking forward to starring with Julia later this year in a West End play. They’ve worked together before.
She adds that Julia is also about to star work on a reunion with her Absolutely Fabulous co-stars Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley and Jane Horrocks in a new series all playing different parts.
Nadia sees the irony of her speaking with the Walford Gazette—remember Annie Palmer wasn’t too fond of the rag.
I tell her that I was pleased to find out a character on EastEnders was named Annie because that’s my two-year-old daughter’s name.
Nadia says she’s planning to take a holiday to New York—her first time—in a few months.
”And thanks for being in our [Soap Fever] audience,” she adds.
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