Gemma Chan
Gemma Chan
Gemma Chan is a British film, television and theatre actress and former fashion model. She portrays Charlotte in season four of the Showtime and ITV2 series Secret Diary of a Call Girl; Ruth in Channel 4's Fresh Meat; Mia Bennett in the BBC's Doctor Who "The Waters of Mars" and Soo Lin in Sherlock, She also appeared in Exam and Paramount Pictures' action-thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. She stars in Humans, an AMC/Channel 4 eight-part science-fiction drama, which premiered in...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionTV Actress
Date of Birth29 November 1982
CityLondon, England
My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.
Making a pretty picture, an image, is a completely different thing from acting to camera.
I haven't always wanted to be an actor, no. I wasn't one of the little kids that was desperate to be an actor. I did a lot of drama and a lot of music, but it was just something for fun on the side. I was quite shy as a kid and I found a lot of freedom in performing. I never knew you could do it as a job.
I ended up doing a local AmDram musical when I was nine or so. We had to sing and dance and act. It was probably terrible, but I loved it.
At one point I wanted to work for NASA and be an astrophysicist, so I did physics, math, and chemistry before realizing I probably wasn't quite smart enough to do that. But I am still hugely interested in cosmology and astrophysics. That is my geeky subject area.