By the time I graduated, I had built a life there, and I really didn’t want to leave. I managed to get a role in a play at the Young Vic Theatre, which was a dream come true. I mean, I think I only had a handful of lines in it, but it meant the world to me that I got this job. It was a lovely entrance to what being an actor is: you do eight shows a week, and at the end of the day they give you almost enough money to pay your rent.

When the play finished and I was definitively unemployed, the reality of just how hard it was going to be set in. I waitressed, and I babysat, but then my North American accent came in handy, and I started getting these really odd voice-over jobs to subsidize my rent. From there, I did motion-capture video games and these strange in-house videos for Best Buy employees. I filmed a series of videos written by a Swedish woman for German kids learning English that was called What’s In, What’s On, and What’s Up. Being yelled at by this Swedish woman as I tried to correct the grammar for these Germans who were going to be learning English is probably my worst memory of that period.

I always knew it was gonna be tough, but I sort of felt like, “Well, this is it. This is what I signed up for.” But I got really lucky. There was a girl who came into the pub every night. We didn’t really know each other, but she got a job in casting at the Bush Theater and was looking for a North American actress to do this play called Apologia. She got me in for a reading, and that changed my life.

They hired me, and through that job, I met a lot of extraordinary people who I ended up working with over the next few years. It changed the course of things for me over there. It felt like, at last, I had a little passport into the London theater community.

My first job in New York was doing Look Back in Anger Off Broadway with Adam Driver and Matthew Rhys. I started going back and forth between there and London, doing other plays. But by the time I ran out of visa options in the United Kingdom, I was exhausted. It felt like I was drowning in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.