The rising star of stage and screen talks bullies, ballet and what playing a 17th-century duchess taught her about life today
The old Fran Mills would have ignored a group of boozed-up blokes hurling obscenities in her direction. The 28-year-old actor, born with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, had a mantra for situations like these. “If a stranger is pointing or staring or videoing me,” she says, “or blokes are making rude or lewd remarks, I tell myself: ‘It’s their problem, not mine – rise above it.’ I don’t have the energy or capacity to engage. Or, in all honesty, the confidence. So I act like I can’t hear or see it.”
This was her plan when, a few nights ago, a crowd of men started ogling and lobbing crude remarks her way on the streets of London’s Soho. Mills was out with friends for the evening. “They must have been on a pub crawl,” she recalls. “Some of them noticed me and kept making comments as if I didn’t understand English. It turned sexual – remarks about how good I’d be in bed.” The vulgar machismo kept on coming: explicit, offensive, disrespectful. “It’s stuff I’ve heard before. Usually, I’d walk the opposite way. But this time, much to my own surprise, I found myself following them.”
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