Tanya Burr: Play rehearsals turned me into a virtual recluse

When YouTube star Tanya Burr decided to tread the boards of the London stage, she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. The beauty vlogger, 28, has revealed how throwing herself into “intense” rehearsals means she has barely spoken to her husband and fellow influencer Jim Chapman.

For her first major acting role, Burr is playing Ella in a revival of Confidence by Judy Upton at the Southwark Playhouse. She said: “I think I knew it was going to be a really big job but my husband will tell you, because I’ve barely spoken to him, I have literally spent every waking hour working on it,” she told the Standard.

“At first I saw it as ‘oh I have rehearsals 9-6pm every day and 10-2pm on a Saturday so I’ll have my evenings and my Sunday off’. But you don’t. I expected it to be intense but it was a much more intense experience than I ever could have known.”

Burr has nearly 3.7 million subscribers on YouTube. She married Chapman, 30, who runs a popular style vlog on the website, in 2015.

She said that becoming an actress had been a childhood dream. “I always wanted to do it. Then I got involved in YouTube and got caught up in that for five years.” Aged 24, she started acting lessons and found an agent.

“It’s been a long process before I’ve started to get any work and now it’s all starting to take off, which is exciting,” she said. Burr has had roles in short films and appears in new Sky drama Bulletproof, starring Noel Clarke and Ashley Walters. She is also in forthcoming film Hurt By Paradise.

She said that her 18-year-old character in Confidence is a far cry from her younger self. “Ella is the complete opposite of me as a teenager. As the title suggests, she is full of confidence and she is ambitious and sexy and hard as nails and she’s just basically a go-getting young girl who takes everyone for a ride. I was much more awkward.”

Burr also insisted that she can keep up her social media work alongside acting. “There are so many actors like Emma Roberts, or Millie Bobby Brown who you would see as actors and influencers,” she said.

Confidence is at the Southwark Playhouse until June 16