Yahoo News Jessica Barden accuses ‘posh’ Crown star Emma Corrin of ‘working class tourism’
When Emma Corrin shared hopes of starring in a "gritty" Scottish film with "an outrageous accent" it seemed they simply wanted a change from playing the upper crust young Princess Diana in The Crown.
However, now the Netflix star has been accused by a fellow actress of "working class tourism".
Jessica Barden, best known as the rebellious teenager Alyssa in the Channel 4 comedy drama The End of the F***ing World, said "posh actors" should not stray into depicting characters from poorer backgrounds like her own.
The 30-year-old actress was born in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, from a family of Yorkshire miners, with her father a former prison officer and her mother an accountant.
"I hate words like gritty or feisty," Barden told The Sunday Times Culture magazine.
"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."
When Corrin, 27, finished playing Diana they told The Observer: “I want to do a gritty, independent film, maybe in Scotland or something. I’ll have an outrageous accent, and flowing red hair.”
Barden, who now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Max Winkler, an American screenwriter, starred 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.
A lot of self-protection
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."
She 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.
She said "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."
Corrin, meanwhile, was born in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, with a businessman father and speech therapist mother, was privately educated at Woldingham School and went to the University of Cambridge.
People forget the struggle
The children of doctors, lawyers and senior managers are more than four times more likely to be actors than those from a working class background, research by Edinburgh and Sheffield universities found in 2019.
In 2022, Line of Duty star Vicky McClure launched her own production company BYO (Build Your Own) Films to increase working class representation on screens.
She said some people "forget what it’s like to deal with the mundane and the struggle of the day to day".
Corrin, who uses "they/them" pronouns, played the title role in 2022’s adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
They have said the younger generation "are finding a way to express themselves which is less binary in a very organic way".
It is not the first time public figures have been accused of working class tourism. In 2018 Jack Monroe, the food poverty campaigner, took a swipe at YouTuber Alfie Deyes, 29, for filming himself trying to live on £1 for a day, saying "it is nothing more than 'poorface' – performance poverty".
