“I’ve definitely experienced things I can’t explain – particularly from tarot,” Helen George tells me during our conversation about spirituality and mysticism, the subject of a new podcast, Mystic Mates, she co-hosts with best friend and fellow West End actor, Yvette Robinson. “Because I’m in the public eye, I’m always very wary, but I’ve had experiences with mediums where I’ve been given very compelling and intricate readings about my life and heritage, and where people I have known have come and described themselves. It’s fascinating.”
George is best known to many as nurse Trixie Franklin in the Bafta-winning BBC series Call the Midwife, but it was during an early stage performance of The Woman in White at London’s Palace Theatre – where she first met Robinson – when her interest in all things mystical crystallised. “She’d just arrived from Australia and was very different to anyone I’d met,” says George. “I thought she was amazing – I really looked up to her.”
Robinson, who has performed in some of the West End’s most popular shows, including Evita and Mamma Mia!, had a bag of runes on her dressing room table that caught George’s eye, along with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s most revered texts. “When I told her that I’d read it, she was like ‘What?’ because she assumed I was just some blonde dolly,” she recalls. “But we bonded after that. I would always go into her dressing room and pull a rune – that’s where our friendship began.”
