Later this afternoon she will find out that she has been nominated for a Golden Globe for her luminous performance in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s new film. We now know that, after stopping being a model, Balfe would go on to star in five seasons and counting of Outlander, the wildly popular TV franchise. She is wearing an oversized Lauren Manoogian midi-dress and is the first person I’ve seen make a face mask look glamorous. That’s why we’re sitting this morning in early December in a very flash London hotel, sharing a bottle of mineral water that costs only fractionally less than a decent bottle of wine. It’s only a mini-spoiler to mention at this point that things eventually worked out rather well for Balfe, who is now 42. Tales of the city: Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe in a scene from Belfast. “And you know, ‘This is not what I want to be doing with my life.’ “The shows were fun and exciting, but with catalogues, you’re just standing there like a clothes horse – literally,” says Balfe. She’d handled just about as much blunt rejection as she could take for one lifetime. At her age, in that youth-fixated business, Balfe knew the clock was ticking. After each set-up, a producer would ping a little bell to indicate they needed to fast-change to the next outfit. Now, though, Balfe was in Dallas, doing a well-paid but soulless shoot for a catalogue. Balfe and her friends called themselves “the blue-collar models” – they weren’t the 0.1% of supermodels, the household names, but the next rung down. She had done pretty well, walking in runway shows for Louis Vuitton and Chanel, flitting between Paris, Milan and New York. It had been almost a decade since she’d been scouted in a Dublin supermarket while rattling a tin for a multiple sclerosis charity. It was the mid-2000s and Balfe was 27-ish, she thinks. C aitríona Balfe can remember the exact moment she realised she was done with being a model.
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