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Karen Gillan: ‘I’m living with a consistent, subtle homesickness’

Karen Gillan enters the restaurant in downtown Manhattan, tall and slightly ungainly, with the high colour of one still young enough to be easily embarrassed. The 30-year-old recently moved to New York from LA, after five years spent appearing mainly in blockbusters, and is promoting a much more modest film today. The Party’s Just Beginning, written by and starring Gillan, is also her directorial debut and is set in her native Inverness, although “it’s not the postcard version”, she says, laughing. Nonetheless, it is infused with affection. “All the time,” she says, when I ask if she misses Scotland. “I’m living with a consistent, subtle homesickness all the time.”

In the movie, which had a budget of just under £5m – “not the smallest in the world,” says Gillan, “but in the grand scheme of things very low” – she plays Luisaidh, a woman in her early 20s still living at home and struggling to find a life beyond the cheese counter in the supermarket where she works and the emotionally deadened life of her parents. It is a film about youth, alienation and, above all, friendship, in which the strongest dialogue is that between Luisaidh and her married friend Donna, and strongly suggests that, while the movie is a drama, and at times a high drama, Gillan’s writing talent may lie more persuasively in comedy.