Leonora Crichlow is in awe of sports people after taking up the challenge of making the film Fast Girls

BEING Human star Lenora Crichlow watched the London Olympics with a fresh eye after her starring role in new British picture Fast Girls. The “fast” in the title refers to their speed not their morals in a film about a bunch of girls brought together as a British female sprint relay team to compete in the world championship.

Crichlow is Shania, a 22-year-old girl from a London council estate recruited for the relay team. Phil Davis plays her amateur coach with Merlin’s King Arthur, Bradley James, as the team physiotherapist.

Her audition tested her physical as well as her acting skills. “There were sit-ups and press-ups that I couldn’t manage in my audition,” she says.

“I didn’t manage one but got A for effort. It was quite terrifying and let us know what we were in for, but it was part of the challenge to say, ‘I will promise you I will do my best’.

“Actually the biggest challenge of the whole physical thing was showing up, letting go and doing your best.”

Keeping fit as an actress is very different to training as an athlete for competition. “Sprinting is quite technical. It’s one thing to look a certain way, but it’s also how you hold and carry yourself when you do run.”

So, during the Olympics, she was playing special attention to the competitors. “I’m not someone who has ever watched the Olympics and said, ‘That looks easy’. I’ve always had an appreciation of those athletes,” Crichlow says.

“I suppose it was just an insight into what they were feeling or going through. I’m not going to compare my experience with theirs. That would be a injustice to them.”

For all the actresses playing the team members (the others are Lorraine Burroughs, Lashana Lynch and Lily James) it meant learning to be sprinters, or at least look like sprinters.

“That was one of our biggest journeys. They had a big ask of everybody, including the actors, to pull it off. We represent a group of people who are really gifted – real athletes,” says Crichlow.

“It’s a different aspect of training for a role.

The whole process was hard. I have yet to find a job that doesn’t come with a challenge. This was another thing to be mindful of and stress over.”

SHE has not, she emphasises, become a sprinter in real life. “I love my job and my life and my body. I learnt some invaluable lessons on this job. It taught me the huge importance of training and fitness and the way my body can get.”

Mentally, she likes to draw on her own experiences and her own life for any character she plays. “As an athlete you’re as good as your last race. You have to have a strong sense of who you are. I know athletes who have trained all their lives. As an actor you are waiting for that telephone to ring, but you still have to have a life. In sport you eventually depend on yourself. That’s why sport is such an incredible thing. That’s why it’s global – anyone can get up and run,” she says.

Crichlow has played ghost Annie in the BBC series Being Human for four seasons, having had just one day to pack up and leave Cardiff where the series is filmed and heading for London to shoot Fast Girls.

“I know they’re filming at the moment. They’re carrying on. There are no plans for Annie to go back,’ she says.

She was determined to have a rest. “At the moment I am doing life and taking a bit of time off to catch up with myself. It’s been very busy. My ambition is I just want to keep working. I take each project as it comes.”

  • Fast Girls (12) is released by Studio Canal on DVD and Blu-ray on October 8