Kerrie Hayes

Viv in Blue Jean (2023) is the one who is already out. Georgia Oakley's film belongs to Rosy McEwen's Jean, a PE teacher who checks the roots of her bleached crop the way other people check a locked door, and Hayes is the woman waiting at home who did all that years ago and has run out of patience with people who have not. She does not raise her voice much. She lets Jean have the fear and takes the impatience for herself, and when the two of them argue it is about small things standing in for the large one, which is how real couples argue. The bar, where the women know each other's names and someone is always at the pool table, is her territory, and the film is warmest when it is there.

That calm is a late arrival, because Hayes began as the mouthy one. Her first job was a lead, Ruby Moss in Lilies (2007), and she followed it with the lead in Kicks (2009) and supporting parts in Nowhere Boy (2009) and Brighton Rock (2010). Then came The Mill (2013–2014) and Esther Price, a period drama built around a young working-class woman who picks her battles. Since then it has mostly been television: The Living and the Dead (2016), Three Girls (2017), Tin Star (2020), The English Game (2020), The Responder (2022–2024) as Ellie Mullen. The pattern is resilient, outspoken women in period or social-realist settings, most of them with her Liverpool accent left alone. We have not reviewed the television and will not pretend to judge it in detail.

What she brings to Viv is the air of someone who has done her homework, and it turns out she had. "I took myself out to this notorious lesbian bar in Liverpool called The Lisbon. I sat in loads of bars like a weirdo, sat in the corner watching the way these women were behaving, the way they carry themselves physically and interact in this safe environment where being a lesbian is celebrated." You can see it in how Viv sits, how she holds a glass, how little she looks over her shoulder. About an hour in we noticed we wanted the film to stay in the bar with her, and that is partly a compliment to Hayes and partly a complaint about the film, which keeps going back to the school to explain its symbols to us.

The honest limit is how little of her we have seen at feature length. A good many of the television parts were brief supporting roles in ensembles, and Viv is a supporting part too: the film is McEwen's, and Hayes is there to be the fixed point that Jean moves around. Being the fixed point is a skill, and she has it. It is not the same as carrying a film, and nobody has yet asked her to carry one for the cinema. Someone should. On the evidence of those bar scenes, she would not need to raise her voice to do it.