Faking it (From The Northern Echo)

Faking it

11:27am Monday 15th March 2010 in

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Pretending to have an orgasm on stage every night? No problem, the star of When Harry Met Sally tells Steve Pratt.

THE question has to be asked but needs to be approached delicately to avoid offence. How to ask Sarah Jayne Dunn about faking an orgasm nightly – and twice on Saturdays.

“What about the classic scene, the one in the diner?” I venture. She takes the hint. The scene from the romantic comedy film When Harry Met Sally is a classic. You remember, the one in which Meg Ryan gives an enthusiastic and vocal demonstration of faking it, much to the surprise of fellow diners.

Dunn plays Sally in the touring stage version of the film which means she has to follow Ryan’s example.

She must be used to the question and has an answer off pat. “I’ve just finished touring in The Vagina Monologues, so it’s nothing. That was like an audition,” she says.

“Everyone knows about the scene, the film is famous for it so the audience are expecting it, but I didn’t know what kind of reaction it would get until I’d done it.”

Ex-Coronation Street actor Rupert Hill and the former Hollyoaks actress star as Harry and Sally in the production, which tours to York and Sunderland next month.

The adaptation of the story of two New Yorkers trying to answer the question, “can a man and woman ever really just be friends?” is, she says, “really brilliant”. She obviously knew the film but resisted returning to it until rehearsals were well under way because “I didn’t want to copy anything subconsciously”, she says.

“The script is very similar to the film but we’ve put our own interpretation on the performances and characters.

Sally is so much fun to play.

She’s set in her ways but charming at the same time. She and Harry are kind of destined to be together but have flaws and imperfections.”

A tour of the farce Boeing Boeing last year – as sexy American Gloria – marked her stage debut after a decade as supermodel Mandy Richardson in C4’s soap Hollyoaks, which she joined when she was 14.

She began acting “just to have fun and social reasons”, and says: “It was more a confidence thing because I was quite a shy child. The youth theatre and things I did before Hollyoaks were more to get me out of myself. I loved it and have such fond memories of those days.”

She was with an agency which offered the chance to audition for Hollyoaks.

She was signed for a couple of episodes, asked back and eventually became a regular. “I loved it there. It was a dream job for me, the equivalent of university,” she says.

Living with her character Mandy took some getting used to. “I warmed to her before the end,” says Dunn.

“There was a period in the middle when she was more bossy and poking her nose into everyone’s business – and at that point was annoying me but that’s all part of the character.”

Ten years was “a nice amount of time” but she realised that at 24 it was the only job she’d done in the industry.

If she was serious about acting, she decided she should get experience of how the business really is.

“I thought I needed to take the risk and leave Hollyoaks. I didn’t have any work lined up so it was a big leap.

But the reality of being an actor is that you spend a lot of time auditioning and not working.”

She left in 2006, returning for a sixmonth stint last year. She’s pleased that Mandy wasn’t killed off because she’d grown fond of her. “It’s nice to know she’s living out there somewhere,”

she says.

■ When Harry Met Sally: York Grand Opera House, April 6-10 (tickets 0844-8472322) and Sunderland Empire, April 12-17 (tickets 0844-8472499)