Daisy May Cooper claims Rada students were asked to talk about rapes and miscarriages

Daisy May Cooper has fiercely condemned one of London’s most famous theatre schools, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada).

The creator and star ofThis Country and Am I Being Unreasonable? trained at the institution in the mid-2000s.

“I’ve not known bullying like what I experienced in that school, in any f***ing workplace,” she told the Evening Standard in a new interview.

“I don’t think that I realised that it was real bullying until I started talking to other people from my year, or other people that went… That [kind of] bullying does not need to exist anywhere.

“It’s not like, ‘We’re trying to shape you into the best people that you could be, so we’ve got to be mean.’ That’s not going to get the best out of people, that’s going to leave [them] with scars that they can never fix.”

She said that the problem was the teaching approach, telling the publication: “They were getting people to talk about miscarriages that they’d had, or rapes that they’d been through – and then there’d be no aftercare. You’d just cry about it and they’d go, ‘That’s really good, you managed to get somewhere then.’

“And I’m sorry, I don’t give a f***, acting is pretend, that’s what we do. There’s no reason that you’ve got to bring up a rape… just to get congratulated for being a good actor. It’s dangerous.

“You were so desperate because it was like, ‘If I don’t do this course, I’ll never get seen by an agent, so this is the rest of my career’ – you’d put up with anything.”

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The Independent has contacted Rada for comment.

In an apology published in the Standard interview, a representative for the school said: “We are very sorry to hear about Daisy May Cooper’s experiences at Rada when she trained here, and would not tolerate the practices she describes in our present teaching environment.

“The wellbeing of our students is critical to us, and our wellbeing team works closely with students while they are exploring challenging material, and afterwards. We are also committed to a zero-tolerance policy on any discrimination, harassment or bullying.”

Cooper’s new comments echo those she made to The Independent in 2020, in which she said: “I was terrified every day. I would do monologues and our tyrannical teacher would say, ‘That’s dreadful. You can’t act, why are you even on this course?’ It was such a headf***, and if you had a bad class, the rest of your peers would ostracise you.

“It was unbelievably stressful – 15-hour days where you were just told how s*** you were all the time and pushed to your absolute limit. It was toxic.”

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She was adamant that Rada is not the only way in for aspiring actors. “Young people need to be f***ing encouraged,” she said.

Selin Hizli, who starred with Cooper in Am I Being Unreasonable? and also co-wrote the show, also had negative experiences at Rada. She told The Independent in 2022: “We had this teacher who was really intense and exacting. I needed a really gentle, soft touch and that’s not what that was.

“That little voice in my head that was already there saying ‘I don’t think you’re quite right for this’ was now being projected at me externally. Rada robbed me of any instinct I had about acting. It was also one of the least creative places I’ve ever been. It was a star factory.”

Rada has many, many famous graduates, including Anthony Hopkins, Cynthia Erivo, Alan Rickman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Imelda Staunton and Tom Hiddleston.

In the same interview, Cooper said she has a phone “phobia” because of debt collectors, revealing that she doesn’t own a phone because she expects every call to be “bad news”.

Daisy May Cooper can next be seen in the BBC One drama Rain Dogs, which begins on Tuesday 4 April.