Charlotte Kirk Made Her Own Table Because Nobody Would Let Her Sit at Theirs

A Christmas romcom built on improvisation, NDAs, and hard-won creative control. Kirk's story is less about a film and more about survival economics in an industry that chews through people.

Christmas & Chaos is a low-budget British romcom made without a script, starring Charlotte Kirk as a pop star on a deadline to write three hit songs. Kirk also produced it, brought in director Jamie Adams, and worked out the story beats in advance of shooting — but the dialogue, the texture, the moments that land, all emerged in the room. The result, by Kirk's own account, surprised even her. The improvisational method matters more than it sounds. Kirk had no prior improv training, and the first few takes were nerve-racking by her own description. What Adams's approach gave her was freedom from the script's permission structure — you couldn't play it safe because there was nothing to play safe against. Some of what came out was autobiographical: a phone call between Sadie and an ex-partner drew on her real relationship with director Neil Marshall, the man she was engaged to and continues to work with. 'I think Charlotte came out there for a second,' she says watching it back. Kirk built her production company out of necessity, not ambition. The calculus is simple and grim: she makes two films a year because that is the only way to keep working. 'It's not the work that's difficult; it's the not working,' she says. Genre films with Marshall — a 17th-century horror, an Alien riff, an erotic thriller — have been the backbone, but Christmas & Chaos represents a deliberate pivot toward something lighter, something she could shape from the ground up. The pop-star role required her to sing on camera. She has stage fright. She did it anyway. There is a larger context the film sits inside, and Kirk is careful about it. She is bound by at least two NDAs signed after a scandal involving powerful men in the industry — men who have denied wrongdoing and characterized any relationship as consensual. California law limiting the use of NDAs in sexual harassment cases gave her an opening to try to have one lifted, and she has tried. She hasn't succeeded yet. 'There are things that have been written about me, and a lot of it is not true,' she says. 'Hopefully, one day I'll be able to tell the truth.' What she is free to say is that she was 18, recently arrived in the US from a working-class English background, autistic by her own account, and naive about trust. 'I trusted a lot of people, and the wrong people, and I shouldn't have.' She moved to America partly because the British industry felt class-gated — RADA or nothing — and partly because her autism meant she didn't process the risk the way most teenagers would. She ended up in the middle of a scandal involving some of the most powerful people in the business before she had any power of her own. Producing is her answer to that. The day after Russell Brand was convicted of rape and sexual assault, Kirk says she's 'kind of immune to it now' — not numb, but unsurprised. 'There are plenty more out there continuing to do things every day.' The producing isn't just about creative control; it's structural self-defense. If you can green-light your own work, you reduce your dependence on the men who green-light others. Christmas & Chaos is probably not the film that defines her. But it is the film she made on her own terms, and it represents a mode of working she can sustain — two films a year, genre-flexible, with a collaborator in Marshall she trusts, and with enough creative ownership that the work is genuinely hers. There is a sequel she hopes to make to their 2024 crime film Duchess. There is a 'slightly controversial' project early next year she won't describe beyond saying it will surprise people. She got it because they saw the work she created herself. That is the system she built.