Samantha Barks: ‘I would Skype my grandma after harrowing scenes on Bitter Harvest’

Samantha Barks says she turned to her grandmother for support as she filmed tough scenes for her latest movie, Bitter Harvest.

The star, 26, plays Natalka, a young woman who battles for survival during Holodomor, the man-made famine which killed millions in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933.

The film, directed by George Mendeluk, was shot in Ukraine. Barks said: “I was just getting weaker and weaker throughout the film.

“I think the hardest part for me was at the end of each day — because you know you’re up the next morning filming an equally difficult scene.

“I went out for dinner with people and talked to people, Skyping my Grandma and just having a little bit of time as me, so you can be fresh for the morning to do another difficult scene.”

The actress and singer, who starred in the film adaptation of Les Misérables, knew little about the atrocity before being cast in the film.

“I think the fact that I didn’t know about it, I felt instantly ashamed,” she said. “It’s horrendous that this could happen under people’s noses and people not know about it but I think that it’s an important story to be told and also, as an actress, the character is such a challenging role.

“The script was like, ‘Whoa’. From scene to scene it was pretty much all heavy stuff because it’s real, it’s real lives, real people, real things that happened to real people.”

Max Irons plays Natalka’s childhood sweetheart Yuri, who joins the anti-Bolshevik resistance movement after being imprisoned and tortured.

Irons, 31, drew on the experiences of the local cast and crew for the role.

He said: “We were in Ukraine, in the cold, with a Ukrainian cast and crew whose parents and grandparents had been through it and survived or not survived.

"So we had those sources to draw on and there’s nothing quite like sitting across from somebody and seeing in their eyes what happened to their family.”

Bitter Harvest is out tomorrow