Not many actors have made a name for themselves with quite the same force as Lara Pulver. In January last year more than eight million people tuned in to BBC1 and watched her star as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, the opening episode in the second series of Sherlock.
I’m not saying that Pulver’s appearance in one of the early scenes wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels (albeit with some clever camera angles preserving her modesty) was the only reason for the vast amount of attention the episode received. It’s surely no coincidence, however, that her name was almost immediately trending on Twitter and that this particular Sherlock adventure quickly became one of iPlayer’s most watched programmes.
When we meet on a Monday morning in a Soho restaurant, Pulver, 32, laughs in horror at the idea of ‘that scene’ now being an undeletable viral hit. She’s also giggling as she recounts her experience of meeting devoted Sherlock fans at the recent Comic-Con convention in America.
Irene Adler’s persona in the Beeb’s updated take on Holmes is that of a whip-cracking dominatrix, and this seems to have struck a chord with some of those on — to put it kindly — the more cultish fringes of the Sherlock fan base. About 20 Irene impersonators turned up to Comic-Con, all with clothes on, thankfully, and asked Pulver to autograph an array of paddles and whips. Despite being rather shocked, she obliged.
‘My fear was that people were so in love with Benedict [Cumberbatch] and Martin [Freeman]’s relationship as Holmes and Watson, with Sherlock possibly being gay or asexual, that I was asking to be chastised as a female love interest. Yet I can’t get over how supportive people have been to me,’ she says.
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