Local Kew actress Mimi Slinger, is only 18 but she’s already played one soaps’ meanest girls on ITV’s Emmerdale. Well, that’s before she got pushed off a bridge…
When I first thought about interviewing Mimi Slinger, she was playing Emmerdale meanie, Leanna Cavanagh. By the time we actually talked, Leanna was dead, falling from a bridge at the hands of the manipulative and evil Meena Jutla.
When we chat over Zoom in July, not long after Leanna’s final scenes played out on screen, Mimi is relieved that the seven months of keeping her character’s fate secret are over: ‘We shot the scenes in May, but I’ve known since December that Leanna was going to be killed off, so it’s been a long time to keep a secret. It was hard, but it’s such a great storyline to finish on.’
Mimi was just 15 when she got the role but had wanted to be an actress since she was six. She grew up in Singapore, where her parents were working. ‘It was such an amazing place to live, I mean, we’d just come back from school and go swimming. I loved living there.
‘It was singing that first got me into musical theatre and I was offered a solo in our school concert. Then I discovered after school drama classes and although I loved singing, acting became the main thing.’
She was already ambitious and, aged 11, she begged her parents to allow her to return to England to try for drama school. ‘They’re super supportive, so they sent me away to live with my grandparents for a year before they came back, and we moved to Kew.’
She tried for all the major drama schools and was offered places at both ArtsEd and
Sylvia Young Theatre School, immediately falling in love with the latter, whose alumni include Billie Piper and Keeley Hawes.
She automatically joined the school’s agency and when Emmerdale was searching for a new character, she made her first self-tape. ‘There were meetings and auditions and then I was cast as Leanna, which was crazy.’
As she was only 15 and Emmerdale is shot in Yorkshire, she had a chaperone who travelled with her every week for three years: ‘We got on really well, it’s like having a friend there.’ When she wasn’t filming, Mimi had to fit in her schoolwork with a tutor, along with the other young actors: ‘We’d all be filming at different times, but if we were doing scenes together, we’d be doing tutoring hours together, too. We all got quite close, which is really nice.’ She’s good friends with actors such as Daisy Campbell, who plays Amelia Spencer: ‘Her family let me stay with them whenever I was filming in the last year.’
She admits when she started on the show, learning her lines was the most stressful part, but ‘over the years, it’s just become muscle memory, so when it comes to learning a script, I can literally now just read it once and it goes into my head. I wish that would have worked with the academic stuff at school, but, no, it didn’t!’.
Over the three years she played Leanna, she enjoyed getting to develop her character, the troubled daughter of Liam Cavanagh, making life difficult for his many girlfriends after the death of her mother and being in and out of a relationship with Jacob Gallagher. Mimi has previously admitted herself she wouldn’t be friends with the hard Leanna, but understands that losing her mother early would affect her life choices.
She started discussions last year about leaving but was still shocked when she was told that she would be killed off.
Preparing for your own death scene, aged just 18, was more exciting than scary: ‘We decided a few weeks before we filmed that we wanted to make it as real as possible and we wouldn’t be able to do that if we were socially distanced, so Paige (Sandhu, who plays Meena) and I decided to go into a bubble. Paige is such a great actress and, on the day went straight into psycho character, so I was scared. She made it easy, she was so good.’
And while it was a hard decision to leave, she’s keen to take on more challenges. ‘I am itching to do more characters. I just really want to play a variety of roles to show what I can do.’
She’s got an ‘amazing’ agency (United, who also represent Keira Knightly, Olivia Coleman and Rob Brydon) and has also just been signed by Storm modelling agency. Not surprising, as she’s a natural beauty compared with her full make-up character, Leanna.
She may have just had three years on a top soap, but at 18, Mimi Slinger feels she’s only just beginning her career.
Pippa Duncan
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