A few days after last weekend’s pivotal episode “Company Man” aired, I spoke with Petche about her breakthrough role. First things first: It’s pronounced “pet-chi,” she graciously clarifies. “I mean, it’s like a running joke in my family,” she tells me. “What could it possibly go into now? I’ve had ‘pesh.’ I’ve had ‘peach.’”
Petche is speaking to me from Glasgow, where she is visiting her doctor sister, though she grew up and still lives in Brighton, on the UK coast. “There’s something about being by the sea, which I’ve always craved whenever I’ve been away from it,” she says.
Petche spent most of her childhood in that city, going to the shore on sunny days like the rest of the holidaying crowds. Her dad worked in London as an editor and her mother in education, though film was a big part of their lives. She describes a large Jaws poster that greets visitors to their home, and how as a musical kid, she would beg her parents to take her to Billy Elliot or Matilda. When she was about 10, she began working as an actor; her first professional experience was on a show called Vexed. “But when you’re younger, it’s just like, how fun to miss a day of school to go and pretend to be a zombie or a witch,” she says. As she got older, she realized how much the whole endeavor meant to her, and at 18, she left home to attend Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.
In her third year, she was cast in Industry, a show with an indulgently raw vision of the one percent and the young people scrabbling for a foothold within it. She knew the job was going to require a whole new course of study in financial jargon—and that she would have to bone up in order to convince the audience of her authority as the bank’s sidelined sage. “I think I didn’t quite understand the severity of the plot until I received the script. There’s quite a long section of her speaking by herself. There’s this lovely moment where she’s just like, Someone needs to sit down and listen,” Petche says.
