Alisha Boe on her party girl alter-ego, birthing scenes and the renewal of The Buccaneers

For Alisha Boe, putting on a 10-pound prosthetic baby belly was a relief. “That was the best thing ever,” she says. It was, after all, less physically demanding than the alternative: doing cartwheels in a tightly-cinched corset. “I felt like I was doing some action movie because I had to talk so much and then move and then spin and do handstands in a corset,” she says. “I found myself getting dizzy in between takes.”

Boe was not filming an action flick, but the hit period series The Buccaneers. Starring alongside fellow Norwegian Kristine Frøseth(Boe was born in Oslo and raised in California), Boe plays Concita, a free-wheeling American caught between the love of her life and his uptight aristocratic British family. At the conclusion of season one, Concita and her husband, having just decided to run away and start fresh, have discovered they are penniless. Luckily she will have a chance to turn things around – the show was just picked up for a second season.

At first, wearing a fake belly is all kind glances from the crew and unexpected maternal instinct. “I loved wearing it – I’d never been pregnant for a TV show or movie,” says Boe. “All the women on set wanted to touch my belly. It does this strange thing – everyone looks at you differently. I understand how a lot of pregnant women are like, ‘Hey, I’m still a person! I’m not just a pregnant woman’.”

Related: Everything you need to know about The Buccaneers

But the thing about fake pregnancies is they’re often followed by a fake birth, and Concita’s was a doozy. The director, Susanna White, had instructed Boe to stand during the labour scene. As luck would have it, Boe’s best friend, actor Gideon Adlon, had done some five birthing scenes in her young career (coincidentally, Adlon starred alongside Frøseth in the series The Society). “I called her up and was like, ‘Any tips?’,” Boe says. She also turned to her scene partner, a nurse who happened to be a real life nurse, for advice. They both said the same thing: “Scream from your uterus”. So she gave it her best shot, noting that “you don’t really know the experience until you have a child yourself”. “I just started screaming,” she says. “And all the men behind the camera are there. They just yell ‘cut’ and are like, ‘that’s great’. And I just walk away like nothing happened.”

Boe plays Concita with aplomb – particularly when the character is beyond the watchful eye of her in-laws and free to be the life of the party. It’s a characteristic Boe can relate to. “When I’m at a party, I become somewhat of an attention whore, I guess,” she says, grinning. “If I have a glass of wine or something, I will become the loudest person in the room.” She even has a name for her outgoing alter-ego: Perla. “We get really scared of Perla,” she says.

Related: Kristine Frøseth weighs in on which man her ‘Buccaneers’ character should end up with

It was actually Frøseth who first told Boe she was going to be a Buccaneer. Boe thought she had bombed her audition. “I just remember ending the Zoom call and saying, ‘Wow, that was the worst audition I’ve ever done in my whole entire life’,” she says. She had just returned from fashion week in Milan – the Tod’s show, specifically – and she was jet-lagged. But then came an unexpected DM from Frøseth, whom she knew socially, saying she got the part.

Shortly thereafter, the two Norwegian actors found themselves in period attire on set in Scotland. Boe, however, no longer speaks much of her native language – she moved to Los Angeles when she was seven. “She’s showing me up by being the real Norwegian,” Boe says of Frøseth. “It was a whole thing while filming – I kept trying to practise with her, but I need to sit down and actually get pen to paper and get a teacher and relearn my whole first language. It’s the bane of my existence.”

But that didn’t dampen the experience. She and Frøseth, as well as the rest of the young, mostly-female cast, developed a palpable closeness. Then there was the setting. “I just want to say publicly that I am in love with Scotland and Scottish people, especially Glaswegians,” Boe says. “I just think they’re the most incredible group and they have the sexiest accents.”

Related: Everything we know so far about Young Royals' final season

Boe didn’t watch many period dramas growing up, though she did love the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin (“I cried at the end – it has a really tragic ending”). “I felt it was inaccessible to me, not because of the material, but because it wasn’t the first thing where I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I relate to this so hard. Like all these women look like me…’,” says Boe, who is half Somalian. Shows like The Buccaneers (and Bridgerton before it) are blazing a new trail for representation in period dramas that aren’t overly concerned with strict historical accuracy. “It’s cool we have the freedom and imagination to look at them as women rather than say, ‘Only white women wear this and the black woman is meant to be the servant’, or whatever,” says Boe. She’s “really grateful” to see a greater diversity in the choice of roles available to her. Though it wasn’t always the case. “When I was younger, you would call me ‘ethnically ambiguous’ and I would go out for Filipino or Hispanic. Like, ‘You have a tinge of colour, you can be anything’,” she says. “We’ve gotten smarter and we’ve gotten more respectful, but we still have a long way to go.”

Given her love of Glaswegians, it’s no surprise Boe is looking forward to returning for season two, despite being the last to know it was green lit. When the news broke, she was in a Korean spa with her aforementioned best friend, Adlon and her phone was tucked away in a locker. “You’re just fully naked and you’re there for, like, five hours because you get scrubbed down and there’s a massage and there’s a vagina steam,” she says. When she finally was reunited with her phone, there were a flurry of texts and missed calls from the showrunner, her agent, her lawyer and her castmates. Josie Totah, who plays Mabel on the show, even bypassed Boe’s ‘do not disturb’ to make sure she was okay. “And that’s how I found out,” says Boe.” I just missed a bunch of calls about how we had been picked up for season two and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, I was getting a vagina steam’.”