‘You think you’re done and you get pigeonholed’: Samantha Morton on raving, Richard Russell and having another shot as a singer

The actor and musician spoke at our Guardian Live ‘Honest Playlist’ event at Green Man festival about growing up in Nottingham on the free-party scene, and the healing powers of music

On the Sunday afternoon of Green Man Festival in August, Samantha Morton joined me onstage in the Talking Shop tent to discuss her life in music. The celebrated actor and director is currently in cinemas as the scene-stealing Circe in The Odyssey, but she is also a musician. Later that day, she performed on the main stage later with Everything Is Recorded, the supergroup led by XL label boss Richard Russell, who also collaborated with Morton on her 2024 solo album Daffodils & Dirt. More recently, she voiced her character’s title song on The Odyssey soundtrack. “I love talking about music,” she says. “I never really get asked enough to talk about music.”

For this in-depth conversation with Guardian Live, Morton took us through her Honest Playlist of songs on various themes that have meant something to her, including the first single she bought, Musical Youth’s reggae-pop hit Pass The Dutchie, the song she’d do at karaoke, Michael Prophet and Ricky Tuffy’s Your Love, and a great song to fall in love to (Moments In Love by Art of Noise). She thinks about playlists often, revealing that she makes them whenever she needs to get into character for a role and used to “carry tapes in my back pocket everywhere I went because I couldn’t have bad music.”