Interview

Clare Dunne on getting noticed, switching from stage to screen, and gender-swapping in Peter Pan

Despite being involved with theatre since the age of 12, the actor and ‘all-round storyteller’ says she’s only now starting to feel a sense of acceptance and ownership of her success

Clare Dunne. ‘In the end, the things that seem like hardship can turn around and become good in the end. That has been the nature of what my life has been like sometimes.’ Picture: Fergal Phillips

Clare Dunne walks into the Gate Theatre’s Green Room holding a container tin of her mother’s freshly baked flapjacks. “Go on, have one.” She is, she says, “morto” for having kept us waiting, but any sense of contrition quickly dissolves when she sits down, adds milk to her coffee, takes a sip, and starts talking about her involvement in what is her first seasonal play (Peter Pan, by JM Barrie, in a new version by ...