Kari Corbett is moving to the Chatsworth Estate to play the first Scots character to appear in smash-hit show, Shameless. She will play trouble-making Ruby Hepburn, niece of crime queen Mimi Maguire.
The 27-year-old actress, who has starred in River City, Hollyoaks and The Royal, follows fellow Scot James McAvoy, who got his big break on the Channel 4 show – but he didn’t play a Scot on the hit show.
Kari said: “My character brings in the odd Scottish phrase, which I think is quite interesting for national television. But of course you also need to be understood, so I need to ensure my accent doesn’t become too thick.”
Kari first appears as Ruby on January 24. And the Cheryl Cole clone soon locks horns with the show’s most iconic character, Frank Gallagher, played by David Threlfall.
She said: “They seem to clash quite a lot. Their lives seem to cross, and it can be quite confrontational. She calls him a ‘p**-soaked tramp’ and tries her hardest to be as scathing as possible in true Shameless manner. Ruby can be very dismissive of him as some sort of tramp who she thinks is sexually inappropriate, and inappropriate in general. But what’s so wonderful about how they’re writing these two characters is that they manage to see each other as very intelligent in a room full of people who don’t see their intelligence.”
Kari, who is from Paisley, trained at the Scottish Youth Theatre and Langside College in Glasgow before her first role as Kirsty Henderson in River City. From there she’s built up a strong CV on Monarch of the Glen and Doctors. She then played Marian McKaig in The Royal at the same time as she was Caroline in Hollyoaks.
Although she watched the first series of Shameless, Kari admitted she caught up on events in Manchester’s Chatsworth Estate by watching DVDs of all the series while she was filming the current one.
She said: “It was a big help. I watched them while I was filming, so as I was filming I was getting to know the characters, and then coming in and performing with them. There isn’t another job like Shameless in British television. So I don’t know if anything can quite prepare you for how challenging it can be to play a dark comedy.”
While Ruby looks like Cheryl Cole, in real-life Kari says she wouldn’t want to follow the Girls Aloud star’s style.
She added: “Not even slightly. Ruby models herself on mass pop culture. She’s an early 20s woman with not a lot of money, but she can do approximations of what’s fashionable. How we dress her is that she understands what’s in fashion, but she can’t afford it, so she always gets it a little bit wrong. I think that’s very true of a lot of people who live on the Chatsworth Estate – it’s nearly there, but it’s a version of what’s fashionable that always looks slightly off.”
Source: Daily Record
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