What We Seee Presents Episode 2 of That Scene, That Song featuring Charlotte Spencer.
That Scene, That Song is a conversation about two songs and two films that have shaped Charlotte, her outlook on life or work, or that have profound personal meaning.
\\The star
Episode two stars Essex-born actor Charlotte Spencer, who plays Esther Denham in ITV’s Jane Austen drama series Sanditon.
Spencer set her sights on a career in acting at the age of three. She trained in ballet at the Brenda Taylor School of Dance, where she still teaches.
The 28-year-old remembers her upbringing as “a middle-class lifestyle on a working-class wage”. Her father, a builder, and her mother, who worked at a school, remortgaged their house to her to London’s Sylvia Young Theatre School.
Musical theatre dominated Spencer’s early life. Aged 12, she played Jane Banks in Mary Poppins, and on leaving school at 16 she landed a role in Oliver!
Her first big TV gig came in 2014 when she played Carly in Line of Duty, for which she scooped a BAFTA nomination.
With the highs, came lows. A two-year lull in work put Spencer on the verge of giving up her craft. Out of that darkness, she developed a passion for teaching.
Today, Spencer juggles her acting work with coaching dance, theatre and singing. “I realised it’s actually the arts that keep me going, not just the acting,” she says.
\\The songs
For her song choices, Spencer selects Joni Mitchell’s 1971 folk-rock masterwork Case of You, which she refers to as “genius” and “poetry”. She singles out the line, ‘I’m frightened by the devil / And I’m drawn to those ones who ain’t afraid.’
“I really relate. I’m excited by people that push the boundaries, who will say if something’s wrong. People who think differently,” says the Sanditon star.
Spencer’s second choice is Otis Redding’s Cigarettes & Coffee(1966), the languid opening bars of which sound like morning sunlight yawning through blinds. She draws comparisons with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 on the imperfect reality of love.
“It’s the most beautiful because it’s the most real,” says Spencer.
\\The scenes
From cinema, Spencer chooses the opening of Disney’s original Beauty & the Beast(1992), which carves out an enchanted world and closes on the line “for who could ever learn to love a beast?”
Here, Spencer circles back to the theme of imperfect love, praising a childhood favourite that taught her to seek out “someone who can see past ‘my beast’”.
Moving from animation to art house, scene two comes from Paolo Sorrentino’s richly aesthetic drama The Great Beauty(2013) and is a continuous shot of Italian countryside.
The wordless sequence, as Spencer puts it, “makes you watch our beautiful world for a moment.”
\\The summary
Whether she’s talking about the “privilege” of having supportive parents or the casting call “failures” that were blessings in disguise, Spencer is reliably candid about the serendipitous nature of success.
More than acting, dancing or singing, the power of storytelling in all its forms emerges as the Essex native’s true passion. “Our whole civilisation is built on stories,” she says. “It’s incredible to me how people feel like the arts aren’t important.”
“Without art, you can’t survive,” she adds.
