Jo Joyner, currently appearing with Chris Addison and fellow Royal Welsh College alumni and comedian Alun Cochrane in Sky Living’s Trying Again, graduated in acting from the Royal Welsh College in 1999. She went straight into working in theatre, radio & television, winning a prestigious Rose D’or international award for her role in TV’s Swinging. She joined EastEnders in 2006 playing long-suffering Tanya Branning and, after seven years of award-winning, BAFTA nominated, top rated storylines, she left the soap last year.
Jo Joyner with Chris Addison in Sky Living’s Trying Again
Why did you come to Royal Welsh College?
I followed my heart when I came here. As soon as I walked in the building I felt at home and secure – right down to the welcome from the security man! I was a country girl and it was my first time living in a City, but Cardiff’s such a warm, friendly and safe city and it’s so easy to get to know your way around that I settled in really quickly.
How did your training at Royal Welsh College expose you to the industry, and how did this help you start your acting career?
The industry exposure was excellent with agents coming to see the showcases in Cardiff as well as our performances in London. The Royal Welsh College has a fantastic reputation and its training and facilities are 100 times better now than they were when I came here – and I thought they were great already.
After my showcase I was lucky enough to have a few offers from agents. You really need to have a relationship with your agent, so I chose someone I could talk to and who would listen to me. You also need to remember that it’s a team effort: you can’t just sit and wait for your agent to do all the work. I have always seen it as a business and you have to take as much control as you can. You’ve got to work hard to create your own opportunities, find out what’s out there, get to know the right people and make sure you’re in the right place at the right time.
How did you start getting yourself known in the industry?
I decided to go to Manchester straight after graduating as I knew some other actors there and Manchester was a really exciting place for TV and theatre at the time. As I said, it’s vital to be proactive and not just sit and wait for your agent to phone you. I spent the first few years after I left sowing seeds that are coming into fruition even now. There’s not a lot you can plan in an acting career, but I am a bit of a control freak, so I wanted to plan the parts I could control. I wanted to make sure that I had as secure a future as possible, knowing that one day I would want a house and a family. That’s a tough place to be later in your career if you haven’t thought it through.
In the very early days when I first left college I was part of a theatre group formed with friends who were all jobbing actors. We were called Homegrown Theatre, and the group included Naomi Watts and Burn Gorman, and we devised and created our own plays. It was originally to create a platform to be seen and generate work for ourselves.We won the MEN Theatre awards for best new play and newcomer. It was a great success and we only had to disband because we all had too much work!
Jo as Beth in Channel 4’s No Angels
I worked hard on building a great CV, lots of good quirky independent stuff : Clocking Off, Cops, edgy, new well-written drama in TV and theatre. I was lucky to be in the original cast of a play called Raw, playing a violent young gang leader. We toured and won a fringe first in Edinburgh and I got nominated at the MEN (Manchester Evening News Theatre) awards for best new-comer.
During the three years I was filming No Angels for Channel 4 I also filmed some Doctor Who, the period drama North & South and two series and a special of a sketch show called Swinging. That was one of my favourite jobs, creating over 30 different characters. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for it, I’d have done it for free! One of my favourite characters, Patty Edwards – Sex Therapist, won me an award for Best Female Comedy performer at the Golden Rose of Montreal in 2006.
I’m still reaping the benefit of that early work even now: casting people are back in touch now that I’ve left EastEnders. But if they weren’t I’d be contacting them – you’ve got to be proactive.
How does being in a soap opera differ from other acting work?
Being in a soap is unlike any other acting job you’ll ever have. The schedule is about four to five times as fast as any normal drama. Normally you’d expect to shoot seven scenes a day maximum, maybe 12 pages a day. In soap it’s around 17-21 scenes a day and an average 40 pages. It’s fast and unforgiving so it easily exposes a bad actor. It’s paid very well, but like anything well-paid its all-consuming. It becomes your life and there’s little time for friends and family. They have to be quite forgiving of your schedule.
The Brannings; as Tanya with on-screen husband Max in Eastenders
How did your training prepare you for acting on television/theatre/film. Do you find you use the same elements of your training for television, or do the same key rules apply?
I think the ultimate rules apply in TV, radio or theatre. You’re either a truthful, honest actor who combines this with technical knowledge and instinct or you’re not. I believe that’s the kind of down to earth, thinking actor that the Royal Welsh College helps to create. I’m hugely thankful for my time and experiences at the college and not least of all for meeting my future husband here…
Do you have any words of advice for our acting third years, in their final year and looking forward to entering the big stage out there?
The showcases were a really high pressured time, but I remember being really high on the excitement and adrenalin. When you leave College it’s the end of such a long period of education – suddenly you have no one to tell you what to do, you have no timetable to your day for the first time since you were 5. You can either be full of anxiety and terrified, or you can grab that excitement and go with it.
You have to bottle all those ‘invincible’ moments: when you come out of a showcase, when you’ve just done a great one-woman show, when you feel like you’re fantastic at what you do – and remember them. Take it out when you hit the lows, because you will hit them and its tough. But you have to remember that you ARE capable of being great. Maybe you didn’t get that job, but looking back now I can see that often those jobs weren’t right for me anyway – and life took me in a different, and better, direction, because I didn’t get it. You can’t take it personally. If you ever sit on the other side of the casting you can see that the right person for the part is so obvious when they arrive. If it’s not you, you just have to move on until one day you’ll walk in and the director & casting will go ‘ahh, there she is, that’s our ‘Debbie’, ‘Maggie’ or ‘Juliet’.
Jo is just about to start filming for a series with the BBC but she can’t tell us any more than that at the moment. She’ll keep us posted.
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