How Actor Megan Northam Uses Music to Get Into Character

This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

“I always put music in my ears when I’m reading a script. For me it’s about building bridges to a character, using moments from your life to bring to a scene. Shooting [the 2023 series] Greek Salad in Athens, I listened to a lot of French songs because I had so many different languages around me and was speaking English for six months, so I felt I had to reconnect to the French language. Each time I had a scene where I had to cry I would listen to a song called Tout simplement by the Ghanaian French singer Bibie. It’s a bit like The Winner Takes It All – one of those comforting, big songs you just need to hear sometimes. On Urchin, Harris Dickinson brought me this 1980s French synth-pop song called Voyage, voyage by Desireless for a scene where I was dancing with Frank Dillane’s character while we were both supposed to be on ketamine. Harris was like, ‘Do you know it? Is it cheesy or is it good?’ Well, it’s definitely cheesy. But it worked.”

Born to a French mother and British father who works as a set designer for opera companies, Megan Northam took up the cello at the age of six and might well have found her calling as a musician had acting not got its claws in first. She was César-nominated for her harrowing turn as a jihadi bride in Mareike Engelhardt’s Rabia – a “lonely” experience that Northam says she is not in a hurry to repeat – but it was her turn as Andrea, the free-spirited love interest to Frank Dillane’s recovering drug addict in Harris Dickinson’s feature-directorial debut, Urchin, that brought her sparky, soulful presence to wider acclaim. She recently starred in Des vivants, a series based on the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, and will next play Cosette in a lavish new film adaptation of Les misérables.