“I’m waffling. Don’t mind me,” says Orla Brady. As if. Amusing, articulate and impossibly good-looking, if Brady weren’t such good company, we might be tempted to scowl at her abundant charms.

Nobody thought it was a particularly good idea when the Dublin-born, Wicklow-raised artist decided to try her luck in LA. Sure, Brady was already well-travelled: she had trained in performing arts at Marcel Marceau’s École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris and later at the L’École Philippe Gaulier in Paris. The busy international CV is there for us to admire: Three Sisters at the Gate Theatre, Stephen Poliakoff’s Blinded by the Sun at Royal National Theatre, supporting roles in Minder, Absolutely Fabulous and The Vicar of Dibley.

Still, in the days before we became accustomed to seeing Colin or Cillian straddling the top of the US box office, Hollywood seemed an awfully long way away.

“People thought I’d disappear,” laughs Brady. “That I’d get on a plane and I’d never be heard from again.”

An ideal base

As it happens, Los Angeles has proved an ideal base for Brady and her husband of six years, the English photographer of African wildlife Nick Brandt. Far from disappearing, in the US, she has found fame with recurring roles on Family Law, Shark, and JJ Abrams’ Fringe. And she occasionally finds time to jump the pond and pop up on Wallander, Doctor Who, and Jimmy McGovern’s Banished.

For now, she’s readying herself to kick arse in the second season of AMC’s hit martial arts show Into the Badlands. It’s not too difficult to picture the elegant, petite performer mastering a balletic fight style like wing chung. But she’s not there just yet.

“Well, I’m getting ready to get ready,” says Brady. “I’m doing basic training so I can start doing basic martial-arts training. It’s funny: you think I’m not the sort of person who dot dot dot. I love sitting here in the village square with a glass of wine in my hand. Then one day you get a job and you have to try something new and you think: ‘Oh, this isn’t so bad.’ One of the most delightful things about acting is that you’re required to experiment with your sense of self.”

She shakes her head: “It never would have occurred to me before. How did we women ever get it in to collective heads that it was unfeminine to strength train? I think and hope that’s changing.”

Into the Badlands casts Brady opposite a younger love rival played by fellow Irishwoman Sarah Bolger. It’s the happiest kind of coincidence for Brady who has gained a lunch partner and another four-legged pal in Bolger’s dog, Bucket

“We have to walk away from each other before they call ‘action’ so that we remember to use our American accents again. They didn’t know who was auditioning. They heard us using American accents. But lots of people on the show are from the UK. Or they’re Irish. And we have a Kiwi. The industry is now a very level playing field.”

Frozen out

Globetrotting may be easier, but the same industry has been slow to inch toward gender and colour balance. Accordingly, Orla Brady is a huge fan of Frozen. She almost tears up on the subject.

“I would love, love, love to have had something like Frozen when I was a kid,” she gushes. “But there were no female characters you could identify with. Pippi Longstocking was as good as it got. I always thought I had impeccable feminist credentials. But you internalise these things. You think: the boys have more to do instead of asking why do they have more to do?”

The very prescriptive roles assigned to women was a decisive factor behind her emigration during the 1980s.

“I left for a reason. I didn’t feel like there were opportunities for women. And I remember thinking, particularly coming straight out of a good convent school in Cabinteely, that Ireland was a place ruled by shame. The woman you were supposed to admire most was a mother and a virgin – so all of the responsibility and none of the fun. I remember my mother crying when Mary Robinson was elected. At the time, I didn’t understand why. But she understood it was the beginning of a sea change.”

Even abroad, however, a woman’s lot was not an easy one.

“The backlash against 1970s feminism was so damaging,” she says. “Small victories were won only to be followed up by the back-in-your-box 1980s. All those films like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, in which working women kill men. And then we move into the era of the hypersexualisation of young girls. If you want to be a singer then you must sing and twerk at the same time.”

Gray revival

Brady is understandably thrilled by efforts during the nation’s centenary year to re-connect with Irish her-story. She was, in this spirit, especially pleased to portray the ‘lost’ Irish designer Eileen Gray in the new biopic The Price of Desire. Gray, the Enniscorthy-born modernist, became renowned in France for her pioneering work with minimal interiors and lacquered furniture, notably the S-bend chair. During the 1920s she began to experiment with architecture, culminating in the building of the E-1027, a villa at Roquebrune near Monte Carlo, where much of The Price of Desire was shot.

“The first day there, I woke up really early and got the little seaside train and I persuaded the night watchman to let me in. I had an hour just sitting in that house as the sun was coming up over the water and it told me everything I needed to know about Eileen.”

The actor can’t be sure that the unassuming Eileen would have wanted to be represented onscreen in any way. But Brady is pleased to have played a part in the Gray revival nonetheless.

“She has always been there,” she says. “We just didn’t notice. And she has too often been overshadowed by contemporaries like Le Corbusier, who, unlike Eileen, was good at self-promotion. I was in New York meeting a friend recently. He’s a designer and architect and he was telling me that he wasn’t aware of her at all. So we walk into his apartment and there are two E-1027 tables. In the very last week of the shoot, I heard somebody from the crew say: ‘Where do they want this? Is it over in the Corbusier house?’

Even now, she’s still overlooked. So I’m very pleased to have worked with other women like our writer-director Mary [McGuckian] in order to throw a lovely soft light on Eileen.”

- The Price of Desire is on release