Dame Judi Dench opens up on her declining eyesight, family history, and having a temper: "Oh yes, I’m sometimes very cross"
At 91, acting legend Judi Dench speaks candidly about sight loss, memory worries, her inherited temper, and the comfort of Shakespeare.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The snow is falling sluggishly, barely settling, as we drive down ever-more-winding country lanes and draw up to Dame Judi Dench’s fairy-tale cottage, with its heavy wooden door. It emerges beyond a barn and outbuildings, a lake, swimming pool and six acres of her beloved woodland in which, each time a dear friend dies (and there are a lot of them by now), a tree is planted with their name attached: recent additions being Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg. The grounds are tended by a friendly young man (the son of one of the longstanding group of women who help the actor), dressed in tweeds, a bounding dog at his side. Dench would doubtless demur at "grounds" – being the least given to airs and graces of any interviewee of her stature. Last time we met, in 2017, she told me how much she loathes being called an "icon" and actively despises "national treasure", relishing Tracey Ullman’s hilarious portrayal of her (available to watch on YouTube) as a swearing, boozing, shoplifting, dog-poo-throwing tearaway hiding behind her revered status. Outside is perishing, but inside all is warmth and good cheer. Indeed, it feels Christmassy, down to the glass of champagne from which Dench takes the occasional sip. Age has not withered her. Jude – as she is known to her friends – is so warm and fun (God, is she fun! And so game!), as well as funny, making spontaneous quips that reveal a still-lively mind even if she worries about losing her marbles. But on 9 December she turns 91 and the passing of time has had an impact. Her bright blue eyes, which can turn to steel when playing a part like M in the Bond films, no longer see. Her sight has been declining for some years, due to age-related macular degeneration. When I ask whether she can see my face – we are seated very close to one another, she at the head of her kitchen table – peering intently, she says, "You’re in a fog." She suffers from both eyes being "wet", the worst condition, and so there’s nothing to be done. "It’s a crusher," she says, her voice low. It was a blow to her independence when she could no longer drive, and then having to give up embroidering (swear words on dainty cushions; the soft furnishing equivalent of the Ullman skits), reading and watching television. Is there anything she particularly misses? "Well, I miss seeing Clive Myrie doing Mastermind, but I can hear the questions." So you still have the TV on, but just for listening? "Yes, that’s what it is now." She gets her temper, she says – wait, what? Dame Judi Dench has a temper? "Oh yes, I’m sometimes very cross" – from her red-haired Irish mother. (Her doctor father, Reginald Arthur, was English but grew up in Dublin, where he met Eleanor Olive Jones, who became his wife.) Dench breaks into a strong Irish accent as she recalls one of her mother’s "fiery" outbursts: "Daddy had bought her an Electrolux to replace her old Hoover. It arrived and she was standing at the top of the stairs – we had a long, long, long staircase going down to our front door – and she shouted, ‘Will ya give me back me old Hoover!’, and then she threw the Electrolux down the stairs! She had a furious temper." In her documentary, Judi Dench: Shakespeare, My Family and Me, which we are here to discuss, every so often she says she hopes she’s not going to lose the plot. Does she worry a lot about that? "Oh yes, and I do now." She feels lucky to still be able to remember great reams of Shakespeare, which she has been performing her whole life; even as a child it was the practice of her family to learn his words. "But I can’t remember what I’m doing tomorrow, I swear to you – just ask them," she points to the assistants who are lined up at the other end of the kitchen so as not to disturb us, but on hand to help if need be, which does occur. "It can be true, yes," they say as one, like a Greek chorus. The documentary has been made at the behest of director Harvey Lilley who – among other projects – helmed her episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2021, when her Danish connection first came to light and took her into the orbit of Shakespeare, who is her hero for life. In that programme, it transpired that Dench’s ten-times-great-aunt was a lady-in-waiting in the Danish king’s court at Kronborg Castle in Denmark, which inspired Elsinore, Shakespeare’s setting for Hamlet. But it was her eight- times-great-grandfather, Anders Bille – who came to England as part of the royal entourage in 1606 – on whom the new documentary turns, with its key question: could Dench’s ancestor have actually met, or at the very least brushed shoulders with, William Shakespeare on that visit, given the playwright himself was an important member of the court of James I? If at times the thread of the conceit seems in danger of snapping in its tenuousness, the great charm of its protagonist – her lovely face as the words she has said since she was a young girl flow unbidden from her, in this or that grand historic hall – prevails and you’re left feeling terribly moved, grateful, even. It’s the long decades of familiarity with the words, elucidating as they do all there is to know about the human condition, that bind her to her childhood, her family, her whole big career and the love of her life, Michael Williams, her late husband – and father of her daughter Finty (born Tara Cressida), also an actor – who died of lung cancer at 65, in 2001. Judi and Michael met in the 60s, when they were both with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and married in 1971. There are paintings and photographs of him in prominent positions in every room. He is staring at me now from the counter on the other side of the kitchen – a particularly golden, luminous blown-up photograph of him looking lovingly at the camera, which makes your heart skip a beat. I ask whether it’s at times like Christmas that she particularly misses Michael. "No," she says. "All the time." If you met Shakespeare now, what would you ask him? "Are you writing another play? Is there a part for me in it? Some old bird sitting in the corner with a nice speech at some point, not too much. And could she drop off during the play?" Dench has been a Quaker since boarding as a teenager at The Mount, a Quaker independent secondary school in York. After attending the meetings, she discovered that they were meaningful for her and has remained a Quaker ever since. Is her faith a source of strength and consolation? "Certainly." But friendship is more than important to her: "It’s absolutely vital. That’s what the Quakers are called – the Society of Friends." One such dear pal is Pierce Brosnan, about whom a story comes up on the back of me asking if she has an interest in who the new Bond might be (answer: not really). Her old 007 mucker came for lunch and she’d completely forgotten the doormat because it’s been there for so long: "The door was open, he looked down and there on the mat are the words, ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Mr Bond’." Was he tickled? "Oh, yes." Forgiveness is a central tenet of the Quaker belief system – that everyone, regardless of the crime, deserves a second chance, and that through compassion and empathy a person can change and is worthy of care, regardless of the outcome. I start to recite some lines that come into my head: "Love is not love…" and she joins in – "Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark." Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey were very good friends to her – the latter was a great comfort when her husband died, the former made her career in Hollywood. She was quick to condemn the predatory sexual behaviour of the producer when it first came out. I wonder how she feels now. Can she forgive both men? What sort of accommodation do you make when a friend has erred so egregiously? Is every good deed or accomplishment erased for ever? Can they be more than the worst thing they have ever done, even if it was persistent behaviour? Will there be a Weinstein tree in her woods when he dies? At this point, the Greek chorus has broken into a Mexican wave of alarm, but I press on because she has spoken about this to Radio Times before and time has elapsed – perhaps her views have changed? She says: "Kevin has been exonerated and I hear from Kevin, we text. I saw a bit of film of Harvey walking with two sticks and you think, 'Well…' 'I knew Harvey and I knew him well and worked with him, and I had none of that experience – very fortunately for me,' she says, with empathy for his victims. 'I imagine he's done his time…' she pauses. 'I don't know, to me it's personal – forgiveness. I just think…' her voice trails away and we leave it at that. The subject is clearly painful to her, so to lighten the tone I ask whether she has a celebrity crush. "Oh God! Well, I can't see anybody, can I?" OK, so in the past? "I don't know!" The Greek chorus coughs off-stage and looks over to something clearly significant on the wall. "Oh," Dench clocks. "Are we talking about… Yes, I expect we are… Johnny Depp?" Why? "WHY? Pull yourself together!" She points to the wall. "Up there is a framed earring that he bit off my ear in Pirates of the Caribbean." He bit off your ear? "Well, of course, he had to. I had to sit in a carriage in Greenwich and they said, 'Johnny Depp will jump in through the window, give you a kiss and jump out.' He jumped in, but he didn't give me a kiss, he went for my ear and took my earring off with his teeth. And I said [disappointed voice], 'Is that it?' and that is actually kept in." So, was that a bit of a moment for you? "Well, of course Johnny Depp, he's…" she fans herself. She’s looking forward to Christmas with her family – her daughter, Finty, her grandson Sammy and his girlfriend, Lizzie. They don’t watch TV except for the King’s speech. "If you are lucky enough to be together with the family, round the table, then that’s what I like best. A group of people talking, exchanging things and delighting in each other. There’s nothing better than that." We talk about her rapping with Lethal Bizzle, dancing in lockdown with her grandson on TikTok, the tattoo she got at 80 on the inside of her wrist – carpe diem (which looks so cool with her silver rings on every finger). The same legend is framed on a wall, alongside another one: "I love you to the moon and back," a saying her family have for one another. Oh, to be in her presence is such a tonic. She is so very present that it has the effect of making you feel more vividly alive. But does she fear death? "Oh, yeah!" she says almost enthusiastically, which makes us both laugh. "But he’s not coming in here now, is he?!" "Aye, but to die, and go we know not where," I start, and she joins in and then we are reciting together the great speech from Measure for Measure: "To lie in cold obstruction and to rot / This sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod…" Stop it, Judi! Is there any Shakespeare you don’t know? "It’s only because I’ve done the play twice." But they’re not even your lines! "He wrote about everything that we might fear or look forward to, or delight in, or love. You feel it. He wrote it." The Christmas double issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Shakespeare, My Family & Me will be available to watch on Channel 4. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Diane Keaton: 'I was told to become more feminine – it drove me crazy'
In 2017, Diane Keaton sat down with Ginny Dougary for Radio Times.
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2017, with the release of Hampstead, a comedy drama film starring Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson and Lesley Manville. Her outfit precedes her. By which I mean, the vision in front of you is so very "Keaton” that it is hard to see beyond her look, which is as singular now as it ever was. Since the late 1970s, when she redefined kookiness in her Oscar-winning performance as Annie Hall – written for her by ex-boyfriend Woody Allen and allegedly about their own relationship – her name has rarely been unyoked from the words “style icon”. Then, it was all about pulling off that girl-dressed-as-boy schtick, which on her was impossibly feminine and cool… the wide kipper tie and even wider bell-bottoms, the little waist-coat over crisp white shirt and the men’s fedora. The men’s hats remain her trademark – today it’s a pale one, with black trim around the tip and crown. The inspiration came from observing French actress Aurore Clément. “I remember her on the set of The Godfather [Keaton portrayed Kay, who married Michael Corleone, played by another ex, Al Pacino] and she was wearing one of the men’s hats, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta get a hat like that!’ So then I would buy them from the Goodwill [an American charity shop] or at the swap meet [flea market].” Now Keaton has them specially made at Baron Hats in Burbank. Her trousers are also quite Annie Hall – very tight around her pencil frame, fanning out around her high-heeled black sandals – cinched in with a belt as wide as a weightlifter’s, which a costume designer created for her. The black-and-white striped shirt with oversize cuffs and a stiff collar is one she has worn for a long time. What Keaton then does – which makes her so inimitable – is mess the whole thing up with huge knuckledusters on two or three fingers of both hands, leopard-skin patterned stick-on fingernails, and clunking great crucifixes (“Cheap chains – and I found the crosses and just put them together”) swinging around her neck. It’s as though Axl Rose has been dressed by Chanel. Her hair is shoulder-length and silver-grey, her eyes are well made-up behind black-rimmed spectacles, and she wears an expression that flits between amusement and bemusement. Part of her personality is to go big on self- deprecation and doubt, and that makes it hard for her to be good at publicity gush. She's a bit low-key when she talks about her new film, Hampstead, in which she plays a widow who connects with a recluse (Brendan Gleeson) who has built a house and lived self-sufficiently on the heath of the title for 17 years. “I liked the script by Robert Festinger because it was about a woman who is my age [71] and a lost soul, and then the miracle happens. Like it sometimes does to us. We do something and out of nowhere that becomes an opportunity to change. I love that.” I get the impression there is no romantic miracle in her life right now (she has never married) – although, perhaps, there is another kind of happiness in becoming a parent. Twenty years ago she adopted a daughter, Dexter, who is now 21, and later a son, Duke, who is 16. With all the ups and downs of motherhood, does she feel fulfilled? “Yes, but you also get moments of such concern and care,” she frowns. “It’s the strangest feeling. It’s making me sad thinking about it. Are they going to be all right?” She repeats, “Are they going to be all right?” Keaton is either monosyllabic in her responses – (Do you feel old? “Yes”) or discursive, and on awkward subjects is liable to turn into Annie Hall, with verbal advances and retreats and merry-go-round thinking. We talk about the bulimia she suffered from in her 20s when she was going out with Allen. “I was trying to fill a vast hole. I had a massive appetite for... everything. Just wanting a lot. I can’t explain it – I still don’t really know why. But I will tell you why I stopped. Because I went into analysis with a woman five days a week because it was real bad.” Did Allen know about it? “No, not at all. No one knew. I was really good at hiding. But I asked him about an analyst. Yeah, maybe he did know, but I don’t know for sure. I think it came up in a conversation like, ‘Maybe I should?’ and ‘Do you know someone?’… that kind of thing... “I didn’t tell my analyst for a year. One day I was lying on my back, not looking at her, and finally I’d had it with myself and I just blurted it out and I said, ‘You know what? I’m never going to change... I’m never going to stop...’ She didn’t say anything. She just let it pass and then I was able to stop because finally I confessed. I was a genius at hiding.” Her diet continues to be unusual. “I quit eating meat and fish so it’s a lot about nuts and cheeses. I do love cheese. It’s weird, once you have stopped being bulimic – and it was a habit for three years – you’re strange about food.” Keaton grew up in Santa Ana California, as the oldest of four siblings. Her father Jack Hall was a civil engineer, her mother Dorothy a keen photographer. At 13 years old, Keaton begged her mother to pay for her to take acting lessons with Kenny Aiken, who put on local productions. “But Kenny had no interest in me and he would never cast me in anything, and I was terribly disappointed,” she says. “So then Mom spoke to Kenny and he told her that I needed to go to modelling school because I didn’t look good. That I should become more refined and feminine and more groomed. This drove me crazy, so I didn’t do classes any more.” She talks about how her upbringing failed to prepare her for being able to socialise with ease. Therapy helped her to get over these antisocial tendencies but it was an effort. “I was never really quite ‘in’ – I think because it wasn’t a family trait. I like to be a little detached. I’m not a joiner-in. I did cultivate friends and like to do things with them but I still do spend a lot of time by myself.” A childhood memory resurfaces. The family would drive to Laguna Beach every weekend, as her father was a diver who loved the ocean. One day, they were on the beach and there was a party in a tent. “The people were drinking and laughing and I remember thinking, ‘Why aren’t we like that?’ And that was the beginning of my understanding that we were not really social. We were charming but not social.” In her 30s, while living in New York, Keaton found one way of being social that wasn’t too demanding: volunteering at a Jewish home and hospital for the aged. “I felt I had to do something, and these kinds of situations are easy for me because it’s a limited time span and you can be nice and charming and friendly and be interested and then – go.” Now she visits her brother, who is in the memory care area of an assisted living space in Culver City, near her home in the Palisades. “Not only am I seeing my brother but I’m meeting a lot of other people and that makes me feel of value.” Her mother, she says, was “extremely artistic and lovely and encouraging all the time”. It was Dorothy who was a co-conspirator in helping her eldest daughter create her idiosyncratic style. “I remember being teased at high school for a dress that Mom had made me out of black-and-white polka-dot material with a big skirt.” She has lived in London at various times and believes it to be the mecca for street fashion. “People don’t necessarily have a lot of money but they have brilliant imaginations and a lot of style.” In LA, by contrast, “none of it matters unless you’re Kim Kardashian. Then you’re going to get a lot of attention.” Is she still insecure about the way she looks? “You always are,” she says. “I don’t think it ever goes away. I don’t think anyone is not insecure, do you? I think everyone is a bit... What would be really great would be to just not... But, yeah, of course...” Sigh. We end with me asking if she considers herself to be happy now. She goes into a spectacular Annie Hall arc. “That’s just impossible – I don’t even know what that means when you ask someone if they’re happy – of course not. You’re not happy but you are engaged and there are things that are just miraculous, you know... A lot goes on in one day in our lives… You can be this and that… So I don’t know what to say about that.” She stops and starts again. “It’s a ridiculous question because no one can really be happy – if you’re happy, you’re mentally ill. I mean, there’s a lot of sad things going on.” Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Diane Keaton: 'They said I should be more feminine'
In 2017, Diane Keaton sat down with Ginny Dougary for RT. The subheading read: "Diane Keaton on Woody Allen, happiness and why she buys her clothes in charity shops."
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2017, with the release of Hampstead, a comedy drama film starring Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson and Lesley Manville. Add Hampstead to your watchlist Her outfit precedes her. By which I mean, the vision in front of you is so very "Keaton” that it is hard to see beyond her look, which is as singular now as it ever was. Since the late 1970s, when she redefined kookiness in her Oscar-winning performance as Annie Hall – written for her by ex-boyfriend Woody Allen and allegedly about their own relationship – her name has rarely been unyoked from the words “style icon”. Then, it was all about pulling off that girl-dressed-as-boy schtick, which on her was impossibly feminine and cool… the wide kipper tie and even wider bell-bottoms, the little waist-coat over crisp white shirt and the men’s fedora. The men’s hats remain her trademark – today it’s a pale one, with black trim around the tip and crown. The inspiration came from observing French actress Aurore Clément. “I remember her on the set of The Godfather [Keaton portrayed Kay, who married Michael Corleone, played by another ex, Al Pacino] and she was wearing one of the men’s hats, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta get a hat like that!’ So then I would buy them from the Goodwill [an American charity shop] or at the swap meet [flea market].” Now Keaton has them specially made at Baron Hats in Burbank. Her trousers are also quite Annie Hall – very tight around her pencil frame, fanning out around her high-heeled black sandals – cinched in with a belt as wide as a weightlifter’s, which a costume designer created for her. The black-and-white striped shirt with oversize cuffs and a stiff collar is one she has worn for a long time. What Keaton then does – which makes her so inimitable – is mess the whole thing up with huge knuckledusters on two or three fingers of both hands, leopard-skin patterned stick-on fingernails, and clunking great crucifixes (“Cheap chains – and I found the crosses and just put them together”) swinging around her neck. It’s as though Axl Rose has been dressed by Chanel. Her hair is shoulder-length and silver-grey, her eyes are well made-up behind black-rimmed spectacles, and she wears an expression that flits between amusement and bemusement. Part of her personality is to go big on self- deprecation and doubt, and that makes it hard for her to be good at publicity gush. She's a bit low-key when she talks about her new film, Hampstead (in cinemas from Friday 23 June), in which she plays a widow who connects with a recluse (Brendan Gleeson) who has built a house and lived self-sufficiently on the heath of the title for 17 years. “I liked the script by Robert Festinger because it was about a woman who is my age [71] and a lost soul, and then the miracle happens. Like it sometimes does to us. We do something and out of nowhere that becomes an opportunity to change. I love that.” I get the impression there is no romantic miracle in her life right now (she has never married) – although, perhaps, there is another kind of happiness in becoming a parent. Twenty years ago she adopted a daughter, Dexter, who is now 21, and later a son, Duke, who is 16. With all the ups and downs of motherhood, does she feel fulfilled? “Yes, but you also get moments of such concern and care,” she frowns. “It’s the strangest feeling. It’s making me sad thinking about it. Are they going to be all right?” She repeats, “Are they going to be all right?” Keaton is either monosyllabic in her responses – (Do you feel old? “Yes”) or discursive, and on awkward subjects is liable to turn into Annie Hall, with verbal advances and retreats and merry-go-round thinking. We talk about the bulimia she suffered from in her 20s when she was going out with Allen. “I was trying to fill a vast hole. I had a massive appetite for... everything. Just wanting a lot. I can’t explain it – I still don’t really know why. But I will tell you why I stopped. Because I went into analysis with a woman five days a week because it was real bad.” Did Allen know about it? “No, not at all. No one knew. I was really good at hiding. But I asked him about an analyst. Yeah, maybe he did know, but I don’t know for sure. I think it came up in a conversation like, ‘Maybe I should?’ and ‘Do you know someone?’… that kind of thing... “I didn’t tell my analyst for a year. One day I was lying on my back, not looking at her, and finally I’d had it with myself and I just blurted it out and I said, ‘You know what? I’m never going to change... I’m never going to stop...’ She didn’t say anything. She just let it pass and then I was able to stop because finally I confessed. I was a genius at hiding.” Her diet continues to be unusual. “I quit eating meat and fish so it’s a lot about nuts and cheeses. I do love cheese. It’s weird, once you have stopped being bulimic – and it was a habit for three years – you’re strange about food.” Keaton grew up in Santa Ana California, as the oldest of four siblings. Her father Jack Hall was a civil engineer, her mother Dorothy a keen photographer. At 13 years old, Keaton begged her mother to pay for her to take acting lessons with Kenny Aiken, who put on local productions. “But Kenny had no interest in me and he would never cast me in anything, and I was terribly disappointed,” she says. “So then Mom spoke to Kenny and he told her that I needed to go to modelling school because I didn’t look good. That I should become more refined and feminine and more groomed. This drove me crazy, so I didn’t do classes any more.” She talks about how her upbringing failed to prepare her for being able to socialise with ease. Therapy helped her to get over these antisocial tendencies but it was an effort. “I was never really quite ‘in’ – I think because it wasn’t a family trait. I like to be a little detached. I’m not a joiner-in. I did cultivate friends and like to do things with them but I still do spend a lot of time by myself.” A childhood memory resurfaces. The family would drive to Laguna Beach every weekend, as her father was a diver who loved the ocean. One day, they were on the beach and there was a party in a tent. “The people were drinking and laughing and I remember thinking, ‘Why aren’t we like that?’ And that was the beginning of my understanding that we were not really social. We were charming but not social.” In her 30s, while living in New York, Keaton found one way of being social that wasn’t too demanding: volunteering at a Jewish home and hospital for the aged. “I felt I had to do something, and these kinds of situations are easy for me because it’s a limited time span and you can be nice and charming and friendly and be interested and then – go.” Now she visits her brother, who is in the memory care area of an assisted living space in Culver City, near her home in the Palisades. “Not only am I seeing my brother but I’m meeting a lot of other people and that makes me feel of value.” Her mother, she says, was “extremely artistic and lovely and encouraging all the time”. It was Dorothy who was a co-conspirator in helping her eldest daughter create her idiosyncratic style. “I remember being teased at high school for a dress that Mom had made me out of black-and-white polka-dot material with a big skirt.” She has lived in London at various times and believes it to be the mecca for street fashion. “People don’t necessarily have a lot of money but they have brilliant imaginations and a lot of style.” In LA, by contrast, “none of it matters unless you’re Kim Kardashian. Then you’re going to get a lot of attention.” Is she still insecure about the way she looks? “You always are,” she says. “I don’t think it ever goes away. I don’t think anyone is not insecure, do you? I think everyone is a bit... What would be really great would be to just not... But, yeah, of course...” Sigh. We end with me asking if she considers herself to be happy now. She goes into a spectacular Annie Hall arc. “That’s just impossible – I don’t even know what that means when you ask someone if they’re happy – of course not. You’re not happy but you are engaged and there are things that are just miraculous, you know... A lot goes on in one day in our lives… You can be this and that… So I don’t know what to say about that.” She stops and starts again. “It’s a ridiculous question because no one can really be happy – if you’re happy, you’re mentally ill. I mean, there’s a lot of sad things going on.”
'Drink was their blessing and their curse'
Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell introduces her wealthy and wild family, whose brewery is at the heart of a new drama penned by Steven Knight
Add House of Guinness to your watchlist Ivana Lowell is the daughter of writer, beauty, muse (as she is always described, with the addition sometimes of “alcoholic”) and Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood; her stepfather was the blueblood American poet Robert Lowell and she grew up in a series of grand but austere homes. Steven Knight is the son of a blacksmith, one of seven children bunked up together in shared beds in more modest but warmer-hearted circumstances, in Birmingham. Knight is one of our most successful screenwriters – from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (as one of the quiz show’s three creators) to the dark grit of Peaky Blinders – and was recently announced as the writer of the next Bond film. Lowell has written a memoir of her extraordinary life, Why Not Say What Happened? (a line lifted from one of her stepfather’s poems) and, 15 years on, is deep into writing another. The two have come together to create The House of Guinness, which starts in 1868 in Dublin with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the astonishing success of his family’s brewery. The series is full of zip and brio, dash and panache, intrigue and violence – with Sean Rafferty, the family’s fixer (played by James Norton), striding down the streets in a long black coat, handing out punches and kisses in equal measure. There’s a strong musical score (à la Peaky), including controversial Irish group Kneecap’s song Get Your Brits Out thumping during a fight scene at the funeral procession. The first two (of eight) episodes introduce us to Sir Benjamin’s children, to whom he left a fortune equivalent to £100 million today (according to the helpful on-screen caption). But let’s just say that none of the four – Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Anne (Emily Fairn) and Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea) – is happy with the reading. It has taken some years for the drama to get to this point, which, Lowell explains, started with her 20-page treatment. Several writers had a bash at developing it unsuccessfully, before she had word that Knight might be interested, whereupon she finally became hopeful that it could take flight. The most useful research for Knight, he says, was meeting Lowell for the first time. “We talked about how the family works. Here is this family that is incredibly successful and driven, makes lots of money, but is different to any family anywhere else because they were always considered to be outsiders, having made their money in ‘trade’. “They had a desire to join the aristocracy, but at the same time a pull in the opposite direction, of equal strength, towards artists and renegades and a wilder sort of life. Each of them has inside them – this is how I see it – this Guinness thing [he has made their fatal flaw into a noun – “Guinnessness”: the act of being in a perfect situation, only to blow it all up] that was always going to make them go outside what was conventional. That’s what makes them charismatic, but also flawed and tragic. “They’ve got this juggernaut of a business, continuing among this group of people who are aware of their own absurdity – who are funny, who are creative and who are drawn to a sort of madness and wildness sometimes.” Knight loved the descriptions Lowell shared with him of the gloomy family houses in the country (which in her memoir are also terrifyingly alive in their decay): “They’re huge and cold, there’s no food... but there’s always a bottle. “And, yes, dark things happen and mistakes are made, but it’s all from the point of view of this incredibly successful family who are still outsiders and yet somehow – well, not somehow, the beer helps – are still kind of beloved by the ordinary people.” Picking up on Knight’s phrase “ordinary people”, I wonder whether Lowell would ever have met someone from Knight’s background growing up? However much her mother rebelled against the class aspirations and snobbery (not to mention unapologetic antisemitism) of her own mother, it’s hard not to be affected by years of these attitudes being drilled into you, even if deeply buried. “Of course,” she says, almost puzzled by the question, “because my mother loved artists. When she married Lucian Freud [Caroline Blackwood’s first husband – though the marriage was short, she is in some of the renowned artist’s most famous portraits], he was a penniless divorcee and he was Jewish, all three things that my grandmother absolutely hated. “Then she married Israel Citkowitz [Polish composer and pianist, also Jewish], who I didn’t really know [they had already separated when Ivana was born; her birth father was actually one of Caroline’s lovers, Ivan Moffat, screenwriter of Giant – the search for the identity of her real father was a defining part of her early life]. And then she married Robert Lowell, so there were always artists and writers, it was nothing to do with class. It was really to do with whether or not you were clever.” Knight gets where my question is coming from. Artists are one thing – Lucian Freud’s grandfather, for instance, was Sigmund Freud; Robert Lowell’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower – neither husband was from working-class stock. Knight starts by saying that the Guinness family had so much money that they didn’t have the same insecurities as the minor aristocracy, “to whom it is incredibly important to be seen as different to the people below, and where all sorts of barriers are put up to force their elevated position. “But also, there is something intrinsic, where there is an instant connection. You ask, ‘Would Ivana ever have met me?’ So, I would have gone shoeing horses with my dad and the crucial point is this… Usually we’d be in scrap metal yards with gypsies, but sometimes we would go to a place like a Guinness estate and whoever was in charge would be exactly like one of us. “Usually, it would be a bloke who owns all this land and horses, but he comes to the forge and he warms his hands; he’s just great and a laugh and he has a drink. And the way I wanted to write this – regardless of what they see as their curse as well as their blessing – is that there’s something about this family that isn’t the toff, it just isn’t.” Lowell agrees. “Growing up, I never felt that we were toffs. I hate that word! I thought we were like the poorest people ever. My mother didn’t like cars, so we’d have the most beaten-up old thing and my friends at school used to make fun of me. I was embarrassed when my mother picked me up from school. And she felt the same way about her mother picking her up from school. So I certainly didn’t feel we were rich – I didn’t even know what that was. There was no snobbery in my family apart from intellectually. And I really don’t think I’m snobby.” What about you, Steven? “Well, very appropriately, I’m a snob about beer – and I do drink Guinness,” he says, with a big laugh. “I used to own a brewery, such was my snobbery about beer. I cannot bear bad beer! And, weirdly, I employed my brother, so it was a family business. Our brewery made wonderful beer; we ran it for several years and then sold it. It’s called Freedom beer – it’s still going and very successful.” The Guinness who really deserves a show of her own is Lowell’s maternal grandmother, Maureen, for whom double-barrel aristos were clearly not enough; she married the lavishly titled Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Along with polishing her prejudices, the Marchioness was not shy about her friendship with the Queen Mother (throwing her an annual party at her home) and had a notably vulgar sense of humour. A memorable scene in 2021 BBC drama A Very English Scandal, about Margaret Duchess of Argyll’s hostile divorce, featured someone unleashing a mechanised penis at a dinner party. “I’m afraid that was my grandmother,” Lowell says, only a touch ruefully. “She did have a fake penis and would bring it out now and then. Sometimes she would put it on her nose. My mother was mortified. And she used to dress up as the maid [complete with a fake accent to greet her guests]. She was the most embarrassing... If she hadn’t been a Guinness, she would have been on the stage.” Does she share her grandmother’s sense of humour? “Not the vulgarity. She was too much. She used to have a fart machine which she put under her legs! My mother had a really dark sense of humour – we definitely share that. I love my family. They’re crazy, but I love them.” Lowell is talking on Zoom, in her cut-glass English accent, from a pale, chic-looking, light-filled drawing room in East Hampton, one of the Long Island resorts where wealthy Manhattanites retreat for the summer. I was surprised that she wasn’t still in her mother’s beloved Sag Harbor house, but she says that it had to be sold: “It was so run down; it was too much like our old houses, which I grew up in. I’m in a very normal house now.” There was nothing normal about Lowell’s upbringing and no doubt some of the more negative aspects have left their impact. When I say her mother’s husbands were like the holy trinity of artists, she answers drily: “Well, she was a great supporter of the arts, my mother.” I say “drily”, but Lowell’s tone is not always straightforward to read. She has an open, friendly, likeable way, but with a hint of an eagerness to please, which can be a consequence of having to shape-shift constantly around unpredictable, sometimes venomous, behaviour. Her mother was also her drinking buddy and what seems all too predictable, as she acknowledges, is that she, too, became an addict. One of the most painful passages in her book is the description of being grateful as a lonely little girl for the nocturnal visits from her nanny’s husband – at least it was attention and she could persuade herself it was affection. As a child, an accident resulted in boiling water scalding her nether regions, requiring long months in hospital and endless plastic surgery. Many years later, her psychotherapist suggested that this may have been a subconscious attempt to prevent the abuse by mutilating herself. Her 26-year-old daughter, Daisy (by her ex-husband, interior designer Matthew Miller), is upstairs while we are talking. Has she rebelled against the bohemian “craziness” of her family and become, say, a chartered surveyor? “Actually, she’s working in real estate, so that’s almost a chartered surveyor, isn’t it?” Lowell says. “She’s bossy and opinionated and very persuasive, so she’s a perfect real estate agent.” Mother and daughter were excited about being extras in the series, as they dressed in costume and went on set. “It was such fun! Daisy was so happy and excited but,” she says with a shrug, “I think the scene got cut.” How do Lowell’s many relatives feel about this project? “I thought there would be some pushback but everyone I’ve spoken to in the family is really excited. They’re like, ‘Oh my God! That’s amaaazing!’ They haven’t seen it yet, that’s another thing – but, in theory, they’re loving the idea.” They are already thinking about a second series. Knight can’t talk about it but will admit: “I’d like to keep it going to the 1960s and 70s.” “I want it to go to the present day.” Lowell adds. Knight: “I didn’t dare say that!” (Knight is 66, Lowell, 59 – so enough innings in them yet.) “All my cousins are like, ‘Can I be in it?’” she continues. “And I said, ‘No, it hasn’t come to you yet.’ It’s very funny. My grandmother and her two sisters could have a whole series just on them... they were known as ‘the Glorious Guinness Girls’. “What Steven was saying about the Guinnesses being outsiders is true: they always wanted to marry into the aristocracy and my grandmother didn’t really like the Guinness thing, she thought that it was a bit sort of – beer,” Lowell wrinkles her nose in faux disdain. “So, they all married men with titles, they had more money than God, but what they wanted was the cachet of being in society and being accepted.” I mustn’t finish the interview without mentioning Bond. “I can’t talk about it,” Knight says. While Lowell is an open book, Knight keeps his pages firmly shut. He never talks about his family, neither his wife nor his seven children (continuing the family tradition), other than saying they are engaged with the world. But his manner is appealing rather than prickly and he has a mellifluous turn of phrase, describing the way the Guinnesses “gather around their flaws”. Although he didn’t come from money, he must be worth a lot now – he is never not working. He says that writing is his hobby as well as his work. The epitaphs they choose for themselves seem apt – Knight: “He worked hard”; Lowell: “She tried”. And I have to keep trying to get something on Bond. Will he be taking the edginess of the Peaky and Guinness shows into this new territory, or would that be totally inappropriate for the world of shaken not stirred? “We’ll see, we’ll see…” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen until you start writing.” Do you even know yet who the new Bond is? “No.” So, you’re writing with no one in mind? “Er... yes.” Do you believe him, Ivana? “I believe everything Steven says.” I tease him for being as inscrutable as his new character, 007 – he is indeed a man of mystery himself, and Lowell cracks up. “That’s it, now we know why he’s not telling – he’s the new Bond!”
House of Guinness's real-life descendant reveals true family history - from royal parties to fart jokes and cheeky toys
Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell introduces her wealthy and wild family, whose brewery is at the heart of a new drama penned by Steven Knight.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Ivana Lowell is the daughter of writer, beauty, muse (as she is always described, with the addition sometimes of “alcoholic”) and Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood; her stepfather was the blueblood American poet Robert Lowell and she grew up in a series of grand but austere homes. Steven Knight is the son of a blacksmith, one of seven children bunked up together in shared beds in more modest but warmer-hearted circumstances, in Birmingham. Knight is one of our most successful screenwriters – from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (as one of the quiz show’s three creators) to the dark grit of Peaky Blinders – and was recently announced as the writer of the next Bond film. Lowell has written a memoir of her extraordinary life, Why Not Say What Happened? (a line lifted from one of her stepfather’s poems) and, 15 years on, is deep into writing another. The two have come together to create The House of Guinness, which starts in 1868 in Dublin with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the astonishing success of his family’s brewery. The series is full of zip and brio, dash and panache, intrigue and violence – with Sean Rafferty, the family’s fixer (played by James Norton), striding down the streets in a long black coat, handing out punches and kisses in equal measure. There’s a strong musical score (à la Peaky), including controversial Irish group Kneecap’s song Get Your Brits Out thumping during a fight scene at the funeral procession. View oEmbed on the source website The first two (of eight) episodes introduce us to Sir Benjamin’s children, to whom he left a fortune equivalent to £100 million today (according to the helpful on-screen caption). But let’s just say that none of the four – Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Anne (Emily Fairn) and Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea) – is happy with the reading. It has taken some years for the drama to get to this point, which, Lowell explains, started with her 20-page treatment. Several writers had a bash at developing it unsuccessfully, before she had word that Knight might be interested, whereupon she finally became hopeful that it could take flight. The most useful research for Knight, he says, was meeting Lowell for the first time. “We talked about how the family works. Here is this family that is incredibly successful and driven, makes lots of money, but is different to any family anywhere else because they were always considered to be outsiders, having made their money in ‘trade’. “They had a desire to join the aristocracy, but at the same time a pull in the opposite direction, of equal strength, towards artists and renegades and a wilder sort of life. Each of them has inside them – this is how I see it – this Guinness thing [he has made their fatal flaw into a noun – “Guinnessness”: the act of being in a perfect situation, only to blow it all up] that was always going to make them go outside what was conventional. That’s what makes them charismatic, but also flawed and tragic. “They’ve got this juggernaut of a business, continuing among this group of people who are aware of their own absurdity – who are funny, who are creative and who are drawn to a sort of madness and wildness sometimes.” Knight loved the descriptions Lowell shared with him of the gloomy family houses in the country (which in her memoir are also terrifyingly alive in their decay): “They’re huge and cold, there’s no food... but there’s always a bottle. “And, yes, dark things happen and mistakes are made, but it’s all from the point of view of this incredibly successful family who are still outsiders and yet somehow – well, not somehow, the beer helps – are still kind of beloved by the ordinary people.” Picking up on Knight’s phrase “ordinary people”, I wonder whether Lowell would ever have met someone from Knight’s background growing up? However much her mother rebelled against the class aspirations and snobbery (not to mention unapologetic antisemitism) of her own mother, it’s hard not to be affected by years of these attitudes being drilled into you, even if deeply buried. “Of course,” she says, almost puzzled by the question, “because my mother loved artists. When she married Lucian Freud [Caroline Blackwood’s first husband – though the marriage was short, she is in some of the renowned artist’s most famous portraits], he was a penniless divorcee and he was Jewish, all three things that my grandmother absolutely hated. “Then she married Israel Citkowitz [Polish composer and pianist, also Jewish], who I didn’t really know [they had already separated when Ivana was born; her birth father was actually one of Caroline’s lovers, Ivan Moffat, screenwriter of Giant – the search for the identity of her real father was a defining part of her early life]. And then she married Robert Lowell, so there were always artists and writers, it was nothing to do with class. It was really to do with whether or not you were clever.” Knight gets where my question is coming from. Artists are one thing – Lucian Freud’s grandfather, for instance, was Sigmund Freud; Robert Lowell’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower – neither husband was from working-class stock. Knight starts by saying that the Guinness family had so much money that they didn’t have the same insecurities as the minor aristocracy, “to whom it is incredibly important to be seen as different to the people below, and where all sorts of barriers are put up to force their elevated position. “But also, there is something intrinsic, where there is an instant connection. You ask, ‘Would Ivana ever have met me?’ So, I would have gone shoeing horses with my dad and the crucial point is this… Usually we’d be in scrap metal yards with gypsies, but sometimes we would go to a place like a Guinness estate and whoever was in charge would be exactly like one of us. “Usually, it would be a bloke who owns all this land and horses, but he comes to the forge and he warms his hands; he’s just great and a laugh and he has a drink. And the way I wanted to write this – regardless of what they see as their curse as well as their blessing – is that there’s something about this family that isn’t the toff, it just isn’t.” Lowell agrees. “Growing up, I never felt that we were toffs. I hate that word! I thought we were like the poorest people ever. My mother didn’t like cars, so we’d have the most beaten-up old thing and my friends at school used to make fun of me. I was embarrassed when my mother picked me up from school. And she felt the same way about her mother picking her up from school. So I certainly didn’t feel we were rich – I didn’t even know what that was. There was no snobbery in my family apart from intellectually. And I really don’t think I’m snobby.” What about you, Steven? “Well, very appropriately, I’m a snob about beer – and I do drink Guinness,” he says, with a big laugh. “I used to own a brewery, such was my snobbery about beer. I cannot bear bad beer! And, weirdly, I employed my brother, so it was a family business. Our brewery made wonderful beer; we ran it for several years and then sold it. It’s called Freedom beer – it’s still going and very successful.” The Guinness who really deserves a show of her own is Lowell’s maternal grandmother, Maureen, for whom double-barrel aristos were clearly not enough; she married the lavishly titled Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Along with polishing her prejudices, the Marchioness was not shy about her friendship with the Queen Mother (throwing her an annual party at her home) and had a notably vulgar sense of humour. A memorable scene in 2021 BBC drama A Very English Scandal, about Margaret Duchess of Argyll’s hostile divorce, featured someone unleashing a mechanised penis at a dinner party. “I’m afraid that was my grandmother,” Lowell says, only a touch ruefully. “She did have a fake penis and would bring it out now and then. Sometimes she would put it on her nose. My mother was mortified. And she used to dress up as the maid [complete with a fake accent to greet her guests]. She was the most embarrassing... If she hadn’t been a Guinness, she would have been on the stage.” Does she share her grandmother’s sense of humour? “Not the vulgarity. She was too much. She used to have a fart machine which she put under her legs! My mother had a really dark sense of humour – we definitely share that. I love my family. They’re crazy, but I love them.” Lowell is talking on Zoom, in her cut-glass English accent, from a pale, chic-looking, light-filled drawing room in East Hampton, one of the Long Island resorts where wealthy Manhattanites retreat for the summer. I was surprised that she wasn’t still in her mother’s beloved Sag Harbor house, but she says that it had to be sold: “It was so run down; it was too much like our old houses, which I grew up in. I’m in a very normal house now.” There was nothing normal about Lowell’s upbringing and no doubt some of the more negative aspects have left their impact. When I say her mother’s husbands were like the holy trinity of artists, she answers drily: “Well, she was a great supporter of the arts, my mother.” I say “drily”, but Lowell’s tone is not always straightforward to read. She has an open, friendly, likeable way, but with a hint of an eagerness to please, which can be a consequence of having to shape-shift constantly around unpredictable, sometimes venomous, behaviour. Her mother was also her drinking buddy and what seems all too predictable, as she acknowledges, is that she, too, became an addict. One of the most painful passages in her book is the description of being grateful as a lonely little girl for the nocturnal visits from her nanny’s husband – at least it was attention and she could persuade herself it was affection. As a child, an accident resulted in boiling water scalding her nether regions, requiring long months in hospital and endless plastic surgery. Many years later, her psychotherapist suggested that this may have been a subconscious attempt to prevent the abuse by mutilating herself. Her 26-year-old daughter, Daisy (by her ex-husband, interior designer Matthew Miller), is upstairs while we are talking. Has she rebelled against the bohemian “craziness” of her family and become, say, a chartered surveyor? “Actually, she’s working in real estate, so that’s almost a chartered surveyor, isn’t it?” Lowell says. “She’s bossy and opinionated and very persuasive, so she’s a perfect real estate agent.” Mother and daughter were excited about being extras in the series, as they dressed in costume and went on set. “It was such fun! Daisy was so happy and excited but,” she says with a shrug, “I think the scene got cut.” How do Lowell’s many relatives feel about this project? “I thought there would be some pushback but everyone I’ve spoken to in the family is really excited. They’re like, ‘Oh my God! That’s amaaazing!’ They haven’t seen it yet, that’s another thing – but, in theory, they’re loving the idea.” They are already thinking about a second series. Knight can’t talk about it but will admit: “I’d like to keep it going to the 1960s and 70s.” “I want it to go to the present day.” Lowell adds. Knight: “I didn’t dare say that!” (Knight is 66, Lowell, 59 – so enough innings in them yet.) “All my cousins are like, ‘Can I be in it?’” she continues. “And I said, ‘No, it hasn’t come to you yet.’ It’s very funny. My grandmother and her two sisters could have a whole series just on them... they were known as ‘the Glorious Guinness Girls’. “What Steven was saying about the Guinnesses being outsiders is true: they always wanted to marry into the aristocracy and my grandmother didn’t really like the Guinness thing, she thought that it was a bit sort of – beer,” Lowell wrinkles her nose in faux disdain. “So, they all married men with titles, they had more money than God, but what they wanted was the cachet of being in society and being accepted.” I mustn’t finish the interview without mentioning Bond. “I can’t talk about it,” Knight says. While Lowell is an open book, Knight keeps his pages firmly shut. He never talks about his family, neither his wife nor his seven children (continuing the family tradition), other than saying they are engaged with the world. But his manner is appealing rather than prickly and he has a mellifluous turn of phrase, describing the way the Guinnesses “gather around their flaws”. Although he didn’t come from money, he must be worth a lot now – he is never not working. He says that writing is his hobby as well as his work. The epitaphs they choose for themselves seem apt – Knight: “He worked hard”; Lowell: “She tried”. And I have to keep trying to get something on Bond. Will he be taking the edginess of the Peaky and Guinness shows into this new territory, or would that be totally inappropriate for the world of shaken not stirred? “We’ll see, we’ll see…” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen until you start writing.” Do you even know yet who the new Bond is? “No.” So, you’re writing with no one in mind? “Er... yes.” Do you believe him, Ivana? “I believe everything Steven says.” I tease him for being as inscrutable as his new character, 007 – he is indeed a man of mystery himself, and Lowell cracks up. “That’s it, now we know why he’s not telling – he’s the new Bond!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. House of Guinness is coming to Netflix on Thursday 25th September 2025. 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'I find it hard to believe I'm a sex symbol'
Stephen Mangan is rarely off our screens, whether it’s as an actor or a presenter – not bad for a bloke who thinks he looks like a donkey
Add The Fortune Hotel to your watchlist Everyone loves Stephen Mangan, don’t they? Handsome, funny, self-deprecating, talented. Married since 2007 to fellow actor Louise Delamere, with whom he has three boys, who he often talks about and plainly adores. Also, everyone feels they know him because of his ubiquity. What we want is for the person we admire to conform to the impression they have given us of themselves and not be a disappointment. So… When he turns up punctually at a London private members’ club without anyone in tow – how refreshing, how unusual – all crumpled linen and damp curls in the heat, we settle into a reassuringly amicable interview for 90 minutes, covering everything from prejudice to loss to class to religion – with some quite uncontrollable laughter, too (he is very funny). To the casual Mangan observer, the 57-year-old actor (add presenter, game show host, children’s author) can come across as a bit of a posho because of the way he speaks, his public-school background (Haileybury, where he boarded from 13), thence to Cambridge graduating with a law degree before pivoting to his first love, drama. After Rada, he toured the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company doing the classics and later moved on to a successful career in television and book writing. But dig just a little deeper and it’s a very different story. He is the only son, with two younger sisters (Anita and Lisa), of James and Mary, both born in County Mayo of large Catholic families: his father one of nine, his mother one of seven (Mangan has 52 first cousins). They came from impoverished backgrounds – “It wasn’t Angela’s Ashes,” he has said, “but not a million miles from it” – and both left school at 14 before emigrating to north London, at a time of extreme “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” prejudice. Mary was a barmaid and James a builder, and they met in the Camden pub where she worked. It was Mangan, a bright boy (he won a scholarship), who wanted to board at Haileybury. His parents were perplexed and resistant, and for his first two years there he was bullied. When he got into Cambridge, he was the first person in his family to go to university. Whatever impression this condensed biography may convey, Mangan speaks so beautifully to confound it – with a kind forbearance to me, and extreme tenderness towards his family. For instance, no, he wasn’t bullied because of what his parents did and who they were. It was mainly because of the way he responded to the taunting and his size – he’s six foot now but was a late developer. At 13, when he went away to board, Mangan says he was tiny. “So I was an easy target and I was also quite… chatty. Not very savvy about how to deal with things.” Did he cry? “Yeah.” Does he cry easily? “Yeah.” I introduce the subject of those classic books with outsiders wanting to be part of the insiders’ circle, from The Great Gatsby and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but there’s nothing useful to draw on from them to understand why Mangan wanted to go to boarding school. “No, there was no feeling of ‘I’m going to the seat of power’ or ‘I’m going to where the posh people are.’ ” He says it was more “the idea – that I would go off to this unknown place and it would be exciting and full of adventures, like a quest – with playing fields, a theatre, music rooms…” Also it would be his way of marking a territory: “My parents were very bright but uneducated so it was going to be my thing. I was going off to do something of which they had no experience – so I could own it and be in charge of it.” We move on to the second season of The Fortune Hotel, which is the reason we’re here. In the show, ten pairs of people arrive at a £500-a-night hotel in the Caribbean, all competing against one another with daily challenges, to go home with the jackpot of £250,000. Each night one duo ends up with the dreaded Check Out ticket, which they try to palm off in a suitcase switcheroo that takes place over cocktails in the Lady Luck Bar, with one pair getting the cash in the case. Among the pairs are couples, best friends and family members – all very different types and backgrounds. The reason for the popularity of these shows, Mangan says, is “because we all have a front and a mask and a way of trying to protect ourselves and especially if you’re playing a game like this, your personality is really important because you want people to like you. It’s fascinating how effortlessly some people project likeability or trustworthiness and other people are just naturally hilarious.” What would he do with £250,000? “Well, the boring answer is that I’d use it to help pay off the mortgage.” He lives in the same narrow terraced house in Primrose Hill he bought more than 30 years ago, with a tiny patch of garden – partly because he wanted to live in this attractive area of London but also it’s convenient for meetings and theatre work in Soho and the West End. Joan Bakewell, his co-presenter on the Sky Arts shows Landscape Artist and Artist of the Year for the past seven years now, is a close neighbour. His sister Anita lives half an hour away in Muswell Hill and is an illustrator who has worked on all seven of his children’s books; they’re now on their eighth – the heroes of the first three were named after Mangan and Delamere’s three sons, Jack (nine), Frank (14) and Harry (17). He leaves painting and drawing to others, although he does appreciate art. His wife has the stronger aesthetic sense of the two of them; she is more interested in colour and abstract work while he leans towards the figurative. “Even though both of us like to have a nice environment, we just haven’t mastered the art of feng shui, Marie Kondo glittering, clear surfaces… We don’t live in a vast house. We’re incredibly busy with three boys and everything is just piles of homework and football boots and endless stacks of books and, you know, stuff everywhere.” First appearing on the public radar in 2001 as the ageing Adrian Mole, Mangan was deemed by the writer Sue Townsend, as being acceptably unhandsome (admittedly, for his fans, her sight was going). Then there was the enjoyably loathsome, arrogant Swiss sleazeball anaesthetist Guy Secretan on the cult television sitcom Green Wing. (Who can forget his John Travolta Stayin’ Alive moves?) Two years earlier in 2002 he was Dan Moody on I’m Alan Partridge, and he, tryingly, still gets “Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan!” shouted at him in the street, after the increasingly desperate call of Partridge in the car park to get his new friend’s attention. “Yeah, it’s become an iconic bit of television… it’s odd how these things follow you around.” Episodes had the actor reunited with his Green Wing co-star Tamsin Greig, playing husband-and-wife comedy-writing team Sean and Beverly Lincoln, sent to Hollywood to make an American version of their successful British series, this time starring Matt LeBlanc. It ran for five seasons from 2011 to 2017 and, although the first series in particular was filmed in England, what Mangan saw of his industry in LA didn’t appeal to him. Next, he was co-starring opposite Nicola Walker in Abi Morgan’s divorce-lawyer drama, The Split, that ended its three seasons in 2022, with a reprise last December in Barcelona. And the on-again, off-again TV couple have just finished a West End run of Unicorn, the Mike Bartlett play about the travails of a throuple. He was approached to present shows before he worked with Sky Arts, “but when I was first asked I said, ‘No thanks, I’m an actor – I don’t want to present. I’ve done Have I Got News for You, but that’s as far as I want it to go.’ I did a news quizzy thing on Channel 4 but I didn’t really like the idea of ‘Hello, and welcome to…’ ” He puts on a breezy host’s persona. When he left Rada, he says, “Even going into musical theatre was like a big statement. If you did a West End musical, it was ‘Oh, no, you’re in a whole different branch of theatre now. By all means go off and do Mamma Mia!, but you won’t be allowed back.’ ” He adds, putting on a precious actorly voice, “You certainly don’t do a commercial if you want to be a proper actor.” In his case, he had no discernible qualms about boosting his repertory theatre work with filming advertisements. Now, he presents shows because it’s fun, doesn’t take up a huge amount of time and “it helps pay the mortgage and gives you greater choice in your acting work – such as if you want to go to the Donmar Warehouse [as he did in Private Lives a few years back] and earn not very much money for three months in a play.” He would love to be offered a part as an Irishman but it has never happened. His wife had elocution lessons when she was growing up to iron out her Scouse vowels “with Michael Sheen, weirdly” (she also comes from a large Catholic family), but Mangan never had an Irish accent. Can you do one, I ask? “No! I’m not doing one now!” Why not? “Because I’m shy.” His parents had quite gentle accents, he says. His dear mother, Mary, who died of colon cancer when she was only 45, would have been 80 three weeks prior to our interview, and the family held a big birthday lunch in her honour. He noticed a huge variety in the strength of the accents in her surviving brothers and sisters. Mangan was brought up Catholic and was an altar boy, but watching his mother die, when he returned home to care for her after coming down from Cambridge, was a brutal and permanent wrenching away of his faith. “To watch this very healthy, vibrant woman – she didn’t smoke or drink and even then she was into good food and eating well – go downhill that quickly… “It knocked religion out of me. It was just too hard to watch someone wither away in front of your eyes and believe that there’s a purpose and an afterlife and that somehow this is all good and part of some great plan and that you’re in the hands of a benign God. I just don’t buy it.” Mangan’s father, James, also died of cancer (a brain tumour) when he was 62, in 2005 and The Green Wing filming shut down while the actor went home to care for him. “All those experiences bring home to you this is going to happen to you as well,” he says. “It’s something we all know intellectually but to feel it viscerally, emotionally, is another thing.” It’s touching to hear him talk about his mum, with her very Celtic red hair and freckles (he looks more like his father) – how she used to take him to the theatre from an early age and what a great reader she was, how much she loved music and going to the cinema – “all those things she instilled in me but in her, it was very much all the things she hadn’t had access to growing up. I think she was keenly aware of her own lack of education and she would’ve loved to have had a decent one. She got married so young, she had children so young and there was never a question of going back to college – that just wasn’t on the cards.” I tell him about how an Irish nurse opened the window soon after my mother died in her hospice bed because she believed it helped to release the soul. “Oh, it’s very poetic and of course we all cling to those things to give us comfort and why not? I don’t claim to be right. That’s just what I believe. Or don’t believe. But what remains is love,” he says in a conscious echo of the famous ending of the Philip Larkin poem. “And all that love that was given to me by my parents is still there and I’m hopefully passing it on.” The more he is on our television screens, the greater the number of requests he receives for selfies when he’s out and about. He often mocks his looks but doesn’t he realise he’s considered to be a bit of a sex symbol? “I find that hard to believe. I don’t know what to say. You should look at the cover of Radio Times when I played Adrian Mole and tell me if that guy’s a sex symbol.” You do go on and on about your wonky face! “But that’s indisputable. I’m the donkey from Shrek, remember!” (He often jokes that he’s been likened to this cartoon character.) He says, more seriously, that he’d never considered his looks to be something that he has to offer. “I don’t think people are going to throw up when they look at me, but I also don’t think they’re going to swoon. I’ve never, ever seen myself as a leading man in that respect.” I roll my eyes and he says that he doesn’t want to come across as coy. “What? Little old sexy me?” Well, actually, Stephen, I’m afraid to say, “Yes.”
The Split star Stephen Mangan on being considered a sex symbol: “I find that hard to believe”
Stephen Mangan is rarely off our screens, whether it’s as an actor or a presenter – not bad for a bloke who thinks he looks like a donkey.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Everyone loves Stephen Mangan, don’t they? Handsome, funny, self-deprecating, talented. Married since 2007 to fellow actor Louise Delamere, with whom he has three boys, who he often talks about and plainly adores. Also, everyone feels they know him because of his ubiquity. What we want is for the person we admire to conform to the impression they have given us of themselves and not be a disappointment. So… When he turns up punctually at a London private members’ club without anyone in tow – how refreshing, how unusual – all crumpled linen and damp curls in the heat, we settle into a reassuringly amicable interview for 90 minutes, covering everything from prejudice to loss to class to religion – with some quite uncontrollable laughter, too (he is very funny). To the casual Mangan observer, the 57-year-old actor (add presenter, game show host, children’s author) can come across as a bit of a posho because of the way he speaks, his public-school background (Haileybury, where he boarded from 13), thence to Cambridge graduating with a law degree before pivoting to his first love, drama. After Rada, he toured the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company doing the classics and later moved on to a successful career in television and book writing. But dig just a little deeper and it’s a very different story. He is the only son, with two younger sisters (Anita and Lisa), of James and Mary, both born in County Mayo of large Catholic families: his father one of nine, his mother one of seven (Mangan has 52 first cousins). They came from impoverished backgrounds – “It wasn’t Angela’s Ashes,” he has said, “but not a million miles from it” – and both left school at 14 before emigrating to north London, at a time of extreme “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” prejudice. Mary was a barmaid and James a builder, and they met in the Camden pub where she worked. It was Mangan, a bright boy (he won a scholarship), who wanted to board at Haileybury. His parents were perplexed and resistant, and for his first two years there he was bullied. When he got into Cambridge, he was the first person in his family to go to university. Whatever impression this condensed biography may convey, Mangan speaks so beautifully to confound it – with a kind forbearance to me, and extreme tenderness towards his family. For instance, no, he wasn’t bullied because of what his parents did and who they were. It was mainly because of the way he responded to the taunting and his size – he’s six foot now but was a late developer. At 13, when he went away to board, Mangan says he was tiny. “So I was an easy target and I was also quite… chatty. Not very savvy about how to deal with things.” Did he cry? “Yeah.” Does he cry easily? “Yeah.” I introduce the subject of those classic books with outsiders wanting to be part of the insiders’ circle, from The Great Gatsby and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but there’s nothing useful to draw on from them to understand why Mangan wanted to go to boarding school. “No, there was no feeling of ‘I’m going to the seat of power’ or ‘I’m going to where the posh people are.’ ” He says it was more “the idea – that I would go off to this unknown place and it would be exciting and full of adventures, like a quest – with playing fields, a theatre, music rooms…” Also it would be his way of marking a territory: “My parents were very bright but uneducated so it was going to be my thing. I was going off to do something of which they had no experience – so I could own it and be in charge of it.” We move on to the second season of The Fortune Hotel, which is the reason we’re here. In the show, ten pairs of people arrive at a £500-a-night hotel in the Caribbean, all competing against one another with daily challenges, to go home with the jackpot of £250,000. Each night one duo ends up with the dreaded Check Out ticket, which they try to palm off in a suitcase switcheroo that takes place over cocktails in the Lady Luck Bar, with one pair getting the cash in the case. Among the pairs are couples, best friends and family members – all very different types and backgrounds. The reason for the popularity of these shows, Mangan says, is “because we all have a front and a mask and a way of trying to protect ourselves and especially if you’re playing a game like this, your personality is really important because you want people to like you. It’s fascinating how effortlessly some people project likeability or trustworthiness and other people are just naturally hilarious.” What would he do with £250,000? “Well, the boring answer is that I’d use it to help pay off the mortgage.” He lives in the same narrow terraced house in Primrose Hill he bought more than 30 years ago, with a tiny patch of garden – partly because he wanted to live in this attractive area of London but also it’s convenient for meetings and theatre work in Soho and the West End. Joan Bakewell, his co-presenter on the Sky Arts shows Landscape Artist and Artist of the Year for the past seven years now, is a close neighbour. His sister Anita lives half an hour away in Muswell Hill and is an illustrator who has worked on all seven of his children’s books; they’re now on their eighth – the heroes of the first three were named after Mangan and Delamere’s three sons, Jack (nine), Frank (14) and Harry (17). He leaves painting and drawing to others, although he does appreciate art. His wife has the stronger aesthetic sense of the two of them; she is more interested in colour and abstract work while he leans towards the figurative. “Even though both of us like to have a nice environment, we just haven’t mastered the art of feng shui, Marie Kondo glittering, clear surfaces… We don’t live in a vast house. We’re incredibly busy with three boys and everything is just piles of homework and football boots and endless stacks of books and, you know, stuff everywhere.” First appearing on the public radar in 2001 as the ageing Adrian Mole, Mangan was deemed by the writer Sue Townsend, as being acceptably unhandsome (admittedly, for his fans, her sight was going). Then there was the enjoyably loathsome, arrogant Swiss sleazeball anaesthetist Guy Secretan on the cult television sitcom Green Wing. (Who can forget his John Travolta Stayin’ Alive moves?) Two years earlier in 2002 he was Dan Moody on I’m Alan Partridge, and he, tryingly, still gets “Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan!” shouted at him in the street, after the increasingly desperate call of Partridge in the car park to get his new friend’s attention. “Yeah, it’s become an iconic bit of television… it’s odd how these things follow you around.” Episodes had the actor reunited with his Green Wing co-star Tamsin Greig, playing husband-and-wife comedy-writing team Sean and Beverly Lincoln, sent to Hollywood to make an American version of their successful British series, this time starring Matt LeBlanc. It ran for five seasons from 2011 to 2017 and, although the first series in particular was filmed in England, what Mangan saw of his industry in LA didn’t appeal to him. Next, he was co-starring opposite Nicola Walker in Abi Morgan’s divorce-lawyer drama, The Split, that ended its three seasons in 2022, with a reprise last December in Barcelona. And the on-again, off-again TV couple have just finished a West End run of Unicorn, the Mike Bartlett play about the travails of a throuple. He was approached to present shows before he worked with Sky Arts, “but when I was first asked I said, ‘No thanks, I’m an actor – I don’t want to present. I’ve done Have I Got News for You, but that’s as far as I want it to go.’ I did a news quizzy thing on Channel 4 but I didn’t really like the idea of ‘Hello, and welcome to…’ ” He puts on a breezy host’s persona. When he left Rada, he says, “Even going into musical theatre was like a big statement. If you did a West End musical, it was ‘Oh, no, you’re in a whole different branch of theatre now. By all means go off and do Mamma Mia!, but you won’t be allowed back.’ ” He adds, putting on a precious actorly voice, “You certainly don’t do a commercial if you want to be a proper actor.” In his case, he had no discernible qualms about boosting his repertory theatre work with filming advertisements. Now, he presents shows because it’s fun, doesn’t take up a huge amount of time and “it helps pay the mortgage and gives you greater choice in your acting work – such as if you want to go to the Donmar Warehouse [as he did in Private Lives a few years back] and earn not very much money for three months in a play.” He would love to be offered a part as an Irishman but it has never happened. His wife had elocution lessons when she was growing up to iron out her Scouse vowels “with Michael Sheen, weirdly” (she also comes from a large Catholic family), but Mangan never had an Irish accent. Can you do one, I ask? “No! I’m not doing one now!” Why not? “Because I’m shy.” His parents had quite gentle accents, he says. His dear mother, Mary, who died of colon cancer when she was only 45, would have been 80 three weeks prior to our interview, and the family held a big birthday lunch in her honour. He noticed a huge variety in the strength of the accents in her surviving brothers and sisters. Mangan was brought up Catholic and was an altar boy, but watching his mother die, when he returned home to care for her after coming down from Cambridge, was a brutal and permanent wrenching away of his faith. “To watch this very healthy, vibrant woman – she didn’t smoke or drink and even then she was into good food and eating well – go downhill that quickly… “It knocked religion out of me. It was just too hard to watch someone wither away in front of your eyes and believe that there’s a purpose and an afterlife and that somehow this is all good and part of some great plan and that you’re in the hands of a benign God. I just don’t buy it.” Mangan’s father, James, also died of cancer (a brain tumour) when he was 62, in 2005 and The Green Wing filming shut down while the actor went home to care for him. “All those experiences bring home to you this is going to happen to you as well,” he says. “It’s something we all know intellectually but to feel it viscerally, emotionally, is another thing.” It’s touching to hear him talk about his mum, with her very Celtic red hair and freckles (he looks more like his father) – how she used to take him to the theatre from an early age and what a great reader she was, how much she loved music and going to the cinema – “all those things she instilled in me but in her, it was very much all the things she hadn’t had access to growing up. I think she was keenly aware of her own lack of education and she would’ve loved to have had a decent one. She got married so young, she had children so young and there was never a question of going back to college – that just wasn’t on the cards.” I tell him about how an Irish nurse opened the window soon after my mother died in her hospice bed because she believed it helped to release the soul. “Oh, it’s very poetic and of course we all cling to those things to give us comfort and why not? I don’t claim to be right. That’s just what I believe. Or don’t believe. But what remains is love,” he says in a conscious echo of the famous ending of the Philip Larkin poem. “And all that love that was given to me by my parents is still there and I’m hopefully passing it on.” The more he is on our television screens, the greater the number of requests he receives for selfies when he’s out and about. He often mocks his looks but doesn’t he realise he’s considered to be a bit of a sex symbol? “I find that hard to believe. I don’t know what to say. You should look at the cover of Radio Times when I played Adrian Mole and tell me if that guy’s a sex symbol.” You do go on and on about your wonky face! “But that’s indisputable. I’m the donkey from Shrek, remember!” (He often jokes that he’s been likened to this cartoon character.) He says, more seriously, that he’d never considered his looks to be something that he has to offer. “I don’t think people are going to throw up when they look at me, but I also don’t think they’re going to swoon. I’ve never, ever seen myself as a leading man in that respect.” I roll my eyes and he says that he doesn’t want to come across as coy. “What? Little old sexy me?” Well, actually, Stephen, I’m afraid to say, “Yes.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out Tuesday – subscribe here. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Despite admitting she’s not a big fan of the genre, Phyllis Logan takes the lead in a new cosy crime drama – puzzling indeed…
Add Murder Most Puzzling to your watchlist Phyllis Logan may not be as wildly exuberant as her character Cora Felton in a new soft murder series, Murder Most Puzzling – for the first time in a long career she has the main role, playing a flamboyantly dressed, smoking, swearing, gun-toting, kinky-sex-loving, married-six-times, Bloody-Marys-for-breakfast kinda gal – but she’s no po-faced goody-goody bore either. The last time we met was in 2013, when I interviewed her for one of the later seasons of Downton Abbey. She was joined as Mrs Hughes by Jim Carter’s beloved Mr Carson and I was yet another pesky interviewer asking, “Will they, won’t they?” (spoiler alert, they did). She told me a joke so filthy it couldn’t be printed in a family magazine. There’s a heavy artillery of f-words in Murder Most Puzzling – does Logan swear as much as Cora in real life? Pause, a dry laugh and then, in her gently modulated Scottish accent: “Well, of course!” The strongest expletive I hear, for the most part of our interview, is when the doorbell rings and she mutters, “Oh blimey, oh Riley,” under her breath. However, when we talk about growing older – I’m 68, she is 69 – and I mention Jane Fonda in that fantastic series of unlikely friendship Grace and Frankie, Logan doesn’t hold back: “Now, she is well old. I know I’m old, but isn’t she in her 80s?” Are we having an aging competition now? “Well, we’re much younger than her!” And apropos of Mike Leigh, with whom she worked about 30 years ago on one of his most successful films, Secrets and Lies, she can’t resist a little dig: “With Mike you don’t have a script whatsoever. You make it up yourself, which would imply that you are one of the writers. But, of course, nobody ever gets a credit for that in any of his films!” We are talking on Zoom and the actor is sitting in the light-filled kitchen of the west-London home she shares with her husband of 14 years, fellow actor Kevin McNally. Behind her, a cast of different people come and go – grown-up children, friends including Lesley Nicol (aka Downton’s Mrs Patmore) whose dog, Freddie, Logan has been minding. Jim Carter had said that his co-star was an incredible hostess and her home was always full of people, so this background bustle seems par for the course. “We used to have endless people coming to stay, relatives and friends, there was always someone with us. It became a bit of a joke on the set at Downton – ‘So, who have you got in the house this week?’” She is easy and fun to be with and we exchange recipes –her current favourites are pasta with fennel, sausage meat and saffron, and a lentil soup with ginger, spinach and chilli: “I’ve given it to so many people but it’s not up my husband’s street. He’s a big snacker which… [I detect a slight pucker of disapproval – a flicker of Mrs Hughes] Snacking’s fine, but I do like to sit down to a proper dinner.” We also swap our top authors. “I like a substantial novel, something that’s not necessarily based on true life and not a murder mystery, like Val [McDermid] – I love her but that kind of book isn’t up my street. I love Kate Atkinson’s books, I’ve read them all. Inventive writing that’s very smart, very clever. I recommend her.” Then she remembers some of Atkinson’s early books, the Jackson Brodie series, which were turned into a TV series starring Jason Isaacs as a former soldier and police officer. “Having said that I don’t read that kind of book, those books were exactly that. He’s different, you see – his girlfriend is an actress, so that was intriguing to me.” Murder Most Puzzling, based on the books with the same name by American author Parnell Hall, is a classic “cosy crime” set-up where Cora, a famous puzzle-setter, insinuates herself into assisting the police and solves the murder – think The Marlow Murder Club, The Madame Blanc Mysteries and, of course, Ludwig, of which more anon. Cora Felton is running away from an abusive rock-star husband and seeks refuge with her niece Sherry Carter – basically Absolutely Fabulous’s Saffy to Cora’s Edina – in the market town of Bakerbury, once sleepy but now positively thrummingly alive with death. But Cora isn’t all she seems. When asked about home-baked biscuits she promotes as part of her brand, she says, “Oh, I don’t make them myself!” with a whiff of mock-horror, suggesting, “Do I look like someone who bakes?!” How does it feel to be the lead, does it feel different? An extra sense of responsibility for the show’s success? “It definitely does and I didn’t take it lightly. I was actually quite daunted by it – and I mentioned that to the director, Tom [Dalton] when I first met him and we spoke about the possibility that I might do it… “Just looking at all the scripts and my involvement in practically every scene [a small, amazed laugh] on every page, I thought – you know – physically I don’t know if I’ve got the stamina for something this big. So, it was daunting and because of taking the principal role… you obviously want the audience to relate to you and, yes, it’s all a big responsibility.” But once you started was it fun? “Oh God, yes – but it was hard work, Ginny, don’t get me wrong. I was exhausted.” Straight after filming Murder Most Puzzling, Logan went into filming another police procedural called A Taste for Murder (she rolls the ‘r’s with relish), for Britbox US (she thinks that it will air on ITV at a later date in the UK). Does she like watching soft murder or hard murder or no murder at all? “I’m not really into murders, I have to say – murder mysteries don’t really appeal to me.” While watching Murder Most Puzzling I was struck by the two-buses syndrome, since we have recently seen David Mitchell playing a crossword-creating sleuth in his cosy crime series, Ludwig. What are the chances? Logan says that she was filming the BBC series about the Lockerbie tragedy, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (available on iPlayer) at the same time as Colin Firth was filming his Sky series, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (available on Now), which must have been challenging for the community: “It still throws up a lot of unanswered questions – it’s horrific, actually. We shot it in the big Lockerbie Cemetery [and Garden of Remembrance] and there was one gravestone which was dedicated to people whose house had been directly hit and it said, ‘Bodies never recovered’. They were plainly just vaporised, this family. It’s horrible. Anyway, that’s just me saying that these two series on the same subject were also being filmed at the same time.” We talk about there being more interesting roles for older women now. “It’s encouraging that we’re not invisible any more. There are myriad different types of 69-year-olds and it’s nice to play Cora with her fabulous outfits. I just love it, so long may it continue. But whether it will or not…” Logan is such a talented actor, she doesn’t play her character just for laughs or as a cartoonish figure. Even in the first episode, she shows Cora’s vulnerability and how important it is for her to have purpose and be taken seriously. I wonder, though, is there a new stereotype for older women that they have to be quirky, a bit of “a character” and isn’t there a danger in this, that our life experience and even wisdom could get discounted? “I think it’s usually someone who you’d call eccentric who might also be called ‘a character’ – I don’t think Cora is herself eccentric. She might be in the way that she dresses but I think she, herself, is quite straightforward.” Cora’s earrings are notably gravity-defying; Logan says she used to wear such bold ones, too, but now – as she demonstrates, with her dainty studs – she’s more Inigo Jones to Cora’s Frank Gehry. Since graduating at 21, Logan has continued to act and feels grateful for having been able to sustain a long career. Her husband has been in every Pirates of the Caribbean film, and she has had Downton which, as she says, was a huge worldwide success, “and gave me lots of opportunities and is a great stroke of luck which has enabled me to be more picky, I suppose.” This September sees the release of the third and final Downton Abbey film and we cannot part ways without having a Downton moment or two. When she spoke to this magazine just before the sixth and final season of the television series, she talked about a sort of “grieving”. “Well, that is a bit overblown, isn’t it. I mean, come on! But, God, it was sad,” she says. Jim Carter was blubbing! “I remember standing by the make-up truck to get my wig on and Lesley – who just picked up her dog – that is, Mrs Patmore was there and Sophie [McShera, aka Daisy, the maid], we three were stood sobbing into each other’s necks for about 20 minutes. “And then Jim made a speech and started breaking up – and that’s not Jim at all – and so that set everybody off. There was a boom operator and one of the sparks – great big guys, you know, and they were sobbing behind him and I was, like [here it comes! Cursing alert], ‘Oh, for f**k’s sake, I can’t take this! “So that was sad – but we were so lucky that we got to do the three movies and we could all be together again.” Do you think you’ll get weepy again when the last film is screened? “No, because it’s probably – no, definitely – time to hang up our Downton keys and say goodbye. “I did love playing that character, so it’s sad in a way that I won’t be getting into that wig again and putting that chatelaine on…” She stops for a second, as though genuinely struck by a revelatory idea. “But I could always go shopping with them around my waist, now that would be weird.”
Model, businessman, movie star and exhausted victor of Netflix juggernaut Squid Game, South Korean megastar Lee Jung-jae returns to the deadly playground – and the global stage
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2025. Add Squid Game to your watchlist. The third instalment will be on Netflix from 27 June. It’s a funny thing, to conduct an interview in Korean through an interpreter. The question can be brief and to the point but the answer may be epic in length, interspersed with the odd outbreak of laughter that leaves the interviewer curious but ultimately none the wiser, since the interpreter’s answer is joke-free and short. The pace is also curious, with some extended longeurs as we play catch-up with one another. Throughout, however, Lee Jung-jae, the star of Squid Game – in which he plays hero Seong Gi-hun (whom we first meet as a dishevelled, hopelessly addicted gambler in massive debt) – is smiley, pleasant, courteous and engaged. I start by saying that I’m a great fan of the show – and that we have a lot of common interests: a shared passion for good coffee, interior design, clothes, Italian cooking (Lee has a keen interest in food and owns a chain of Italian restaurants in Seoul)… but maybe not so much his love of basketball. Translation; laughter. Our interview takes place via Zoom, with Lee speaking to me from his Seoul office. He collects art and has a gallery, so it’s no surprise that in the background hangs a large painting, a modern piece by an American artist. He doesn’t offer the name, but when I ask he lists some of his favourite US artists, including Ed Ruscha, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly and Jenny Holzer. Ever polite, and possibly conscious of RT’s readership, he also reels off favourite English artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and JMW Turner – he confirms that he has visited the fantastic collection of Turners at Tate Britain, as well as Marc Quinn’s monumental sculptures at Kew Gardens last year. Today, though, the main topic is a different kind of visual art. We’re meeting to talk about the third and final season of Squid Game, the dystopian mock-reality horror thriller (watched in the world of the show only by sinister masked billionaires in a private screening room) where desperate people are pitted against each other in the hope of winning a life-changing pot of prize money. To win, contestants must play twisted versions of children’s games, and if they put a foot wrong – the terror of that first game of “Red Light Green Light”, which we would know here as “Grandmother’s Footsteps”) – they die. The horrifying body count by the end of season one is a towering pile of 455 corpses – with Lee’s Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456, the victor and sole survivor. The first season of Squid Game, which made its debut in 2021, was created, written, directed and produced by Hwang Dong-hyuk who, not coincidentally, had studied film in the US. Its success-story statistics are worth quoting because they are so exceptional – it was Netflix’s biggest-ever show, number one in the Netflix top ten in 94 countries (including America, India and Brazil), with more than 142 million households spending over 1.65 billion hours watching the show in just the first 28 days of its release. The following year, Lee became the first Asian man to receive a Primetime Emmy for lead actor in a drama series and was, in addition, the first person to win it for a non-English speaking role. And – completing a double-whammy of Emmy history for Squid Game – Hwang was the first Asian person to win the outstanding director award for a drama series. Lee was already a well-known model and actor in Korea; a dashing figure playing debonair James Bond-type roles. Indeed, his legion of fans was so upset to see their hero looking bedraggled and pathetic in Squid Game, they started a campaign to restore his rightful image, as they saw it, saturating social media with glamorous photographs of the actor with a message that the sad-looking Player 456 was not at all how the real Lee looked. Still, they might have to get used to their hero being seen a different way. Squid Game has propelled Lee into worldwide recognition, leading him to his first English-speaking role (as Jedi Master Sol in the Star Wars spin-off series The Acolyte) last year, appearances on American TV entertainment staples such as The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, becoming a global brand ambassador for Gucci and having the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio eager to take selfies with him. Lee is an accomplished man. Apart from his acting, restaurants and art gallery, he co-founded the talent agency Artist Company (with fellow actor Jung Woo-sung, in 2016), which represents many of the major players in the Korean entertainment industry. He also has a real estate development company (Seorim C&D), set up in 2008, and owns a ten-floor building in Seoul, an apartment in the city and a two-million dollar home in Los Angeles. As a young man, Lee had wanted to become an artist but, encouraged by his parents, studied design. Last year, he collaborated with the French design company Paulin, Paulin, Paulin in an exhibition of functional sculpture and furniture in Seoul, the first of its kind in Korea. He has expressed a desire to explore putting on public art projects, inspired by the works and installations of Richard Serra and Marc Quinn, bringing in foreign artists to Seoul. Overall, it’s clear that with this newfound international fame, Lee sees himself as an ambassador for his own country. In conversation, he’s so appealingly enthusiastic about it as a desirable travel destination, he could be working for the Seoul tourist board: “I do feel a responsibility, as there are so many great things about Korea and I want people to know about that,” he explains. “So, I always tell people to come to Korea to visit, because it has a lot of good things including the fact that it is a very safe country to travel in. And people have very high standards when it comes to their morals – they’re very good people. “They’re friendly and willing to help if you’re in a situation where you need it. So, if Korea is a totally new place for you and you might be a little scared or nervous about travelling there, don’t worry! Because in Korea there will be a lot of people who would be willing to help you. Also, we have really good food!” The actor, as previously mentioned, has a deep interest in all cuisines. When I ask him what he does when he feels sad, he simply says, “I eat some great food.” I’m assuming that Italy and its cooking is one of his favourites, given that’s the focus of his Il Mare restaurants (named after his 2000 film) but, ever the diplomat, he says, “I really don’t have a favourite. I think all the cities and all the countries have their own charms. I really love London these days…” Returning to Squid Game, we discuss how there’s a profound change in Lee’s character, Gi-hun, from season one to season two. Look away if you haven’t watched Squid Game yet – if you have, you will have seen how the hopeless ne’er-do-well has transformed into a man of steel, determined to use his prize money (the equivalent of around £24.5 million) to build a small army to track down the ruthless rich behind the game and bring an end to their cruel exploitation of the weak. Gi-hun has gone from enfeebled anti-hero to strong hero, risking his life to re-enter the game’s nightmarish pastel-coloured playground and bring down the bad guys. As a resistance leader, he inspires other brave contestants to follow his lead and… well, let’s just say that if that plan had gone swimmingly, there wouldn’t be the need for a third season. So, what will happen next? Of course, it’s all top secret. All Lee will reveal is that, “when I read the script, there were so many twists and turns, it was full of surprises for me. I was, like, ‘Whaaat? Is this happening?’ “I was so curious about what choices these characters are going to make. It is full of things you would not expect. There are going to be lots of changes and transformations, and a lot of different characters from season two to season three.” Despite its quirky design and ultra-violence, Squid Game is an often thoughtful series that raises questions about humanity. I ask Lee if, as in Gi-hun’s story, he believes there is a possibility for people to change and become better versions of themselves. This provokes a particularly considered, serious response. “One of the main reasons I make TV shows and films is to provide entertainment,” he says. “But it’s also important for us to strive to create a better society. That is the meaning I take away from this whole industry. I know a lot of people in different sectors try to do this too, but so do we through these different characters and stories. I think it is very important for us to do that. Of course I believe that people can change. For me, that’s the main message of Squid Game, that we must all work together to create a better society. I hope that when people watch the show, even if they don’t believe that somebody can entirely change for the better, they can at least change their thoughts and their behaviour so we can move towards a better society.” I wonder if Lee is optimistic or pessimistic about life – does he believe that people are innately good, or selfish (we see a lot of the latter in Squid Game)? “It’s a difficult question,” he muses. “I actually think people are innately good, but there are circumstances that make them selfish. There could be people who are doing things that are morally or legally wrong. But even if they have done something wrong, if they show a lot of remorse and they don’t want to ever do it again, and they have apologised sincerely and genuinely, I think it’s important that we give them another chance. Remorse is important, and that people give them another chance is also very important.” Lee can also be political, although we don’t discuss the fractious current political situation in South Korea – last December, President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to enforce martial law leading to violent street protests and his removal from office, with his opposition leaders recently winning the snap election called on 3 June. In 2022, Lee made his directorial debut with Hunt, a South Korean spy action thriller set in the 1980s when the country was under a military dictatorship and there were massive pro-democracy protests. In the film, which Lee also wrote, he plays an agent trying to find a North Korean mole. He wanted to look at the political stories between the North and South, and has since said that he only took on the project because no one else wanted to tackle such a sensitive topic. Hunt had its world premiere at Cannes, where Lee talked about the parallels between the propaganda fed to the South Koreans by the government in that period and the fake news on social media now. He stressed how important it was for people to be vigilant about seeking accurate reporting – an even bigger problem, one would think, with the rise of “deepfake” AI videos. I would like to ask Lee how he feels about society going backwards, with Mark Zuckerberg and others making the decision to stop fact-checking on their social media platforms. But, to be honest, it just seems too difficult to broach such a subject when even a simple question takes such a long time to answer. But I sense that if we spoke the same language, his answers would be nuanced and complex. Squid Game isn’t the only piece of Korean media to make it big in the West, of course. We seem to be having an extended Korean moment, with Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 satire Parasite winning Oscars for best picture, director, original screenplay and international feature film; Korean restaurants gaining Michelin stars in London and New York; the V&A’s 2023 exhibition devoted to K-culture, and Korean fashion designers regularly featured in Vogue and ELLE. As well as exports from Korea of kimchi – the spicy relish made with fermented vegetables – more than doubling over the past decade. We had something similar with all things Scandi a while back, with everyone sporting the jumpers worn by Sofie Grabol in The Killing and lighting candles during the day to embrace our inner hygge. Does Lee recognise something similar is going on with Korean culture – and, if so, is he happy, or a bit irritated to see it reduced to what may be a passing trend? “I personally hope that this is just the beginning of people becoming aware of Korean culture and that it’s not just a fad that goes away,” he says. “When I go overseas, a lot of people are very curious about Korea and our culture and food. They ask me a lot of questions. I think we can go further and work harder to introduce more of our beautiful culture so that it becomes even more appealing to people. Again, I recommend that visiting Korea would be a good thing.” Is there a Korean word or catchphrase that he thinks could take off, in the way that hygge did – something recognisable to us Brits? “Yes – daebak”, he replies. “The literal translation is ‘jackpot’, but it means ‘really cool’. So whenever you see something that’s cool, you say daebak.” Conversely, he finds it hard to pinpoint what characterises Korean humour but thinks it tends to be less about making fun of a person and more about the situation they find themselves in when something goes wrong. So, can he tell us a typical Korean joke? “It’s very hard for me to think of one because I’m getting old [Lee is 52] so when I hear one, I laugh and then I instantly forget it,” he admits, smiling. Lee is currently in production on a romcom for Korean television as well as working on his own scripts. With his dozens of businesses keeping him busy, too, I wonder if he has any time or appetite left for more Squid Game. I jokingly suggest the idea of a Christmas spin-off – but it’s clear that the actor takes the suggestion seriously. “We definitely need to get Hwang Dong-hyuk on board, so can someone please lure him into creating that spin-off?” he says. “Or maybe just another season of Squid Game?” Now, that really would be daebak.
Squid Game is ending with season 3 – but star Lee Jung-jae wants it to continue
Lee spoke with Radio Times magazine about the Netflix hit's final season.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s a funny thing, to conduct an interview in Korean through an interpreter. The question can be brief and to the point but the answer may be epic in length, interspersed with the odd outbreak of laughter that leaves the interviewer curious but ultimately none the wiser, since the interpreter’s answer is joke-free and short. The pace is also curious, with some extended longueurs as we play catch-up with one another. Throughout, however, Lee Jung-jae, the star of Squid Game – in which he plays hero Seong Gi-hun (whom we first meet as a dishevelled, hopelessly addicted gambler in massive debt) – is smiley, pleasant, courteous and engaged. I start by saying that I’m a great fan of the show – and that we have a lot of common interests: a shared passion for good coffee, interior design, clothes, Italian cooking (Lee has a keen interest in food and owns a chain of Italian restaurants in Seoul)… but maybe not so much his love of basketball. Translation; laughter. Our interview takes place via Zoom, with Lee speaking to me from his Seoul office. He collects art and has a gallery, so it’s no surprise that in the background hangs a large painting, a modern piece by an American artist. He doesn’t offer the name, but when I ask he lists some of his favourite US artists, including Ed Ruscha, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly and Jenny Holzer. Ever polite, and possibly conscious of RT’s readership, he also reels off favourite English artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and JMW Turner – he confirms that he has visited the fantastic collection of Turners at Tate Britain, as well as Marc Quinn’s monumental sculptures at Kew Gardens last year. Today, though, the main topic is a different kind of visual art. We’re meeting to talk about the third and final season of Squid Game, the dystopian mock-reality horror thriller (watched in the world of the show only by sinister masked billionaires in a private screening room) where desperate people are pitted against each other in the hope of winning a life-changing pot of prize money. To win, contestants must play twisted versions of children’s games, and if they put a foot wrong – the terror of that first game of “Red Light Green Light”, which we would know here as “Grandmother’s Footsteps”) – they die. The horrifying body count by the end of season one is a towering pile of 455 corpses – with Lee’s Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456, the victor and sole survivor. The first season of Squid Game, which made its debut in 2021, was created, written, directed and produced by Hwang Dong-hyuk who, not coincidentally, had studied film in the US. Its success-story statistics are worth quoting because they are so exceptional – it was Netflix’s biggest-ever show, number one in the Netflix top ten in 94 countries (including America, India and Brazil), with more than 142 million households spending over 1.65 billion hours watching the show in just the first 28 days of its release. The following year, Lee became the first Asian man to receive a Primetime Emmy for lead actor in a drama series and was, in addition, the first person to win it for a non-English speaking role. And – completing a double-whammy of Emmy history for Squid Game – Hwang was the first Asian person to win the outstanding director award for a drama series. Lee was already a well-known model and actor in Korea; a dashing figure playing debonair James Bond-type roles. Indeed, his legion of fans was so upset to see their hero looking bedraggled and pathetic in Squid Game, they started a campaign to restore his rightful image, as they saw it, saturating social media with glamorous photographs of the actor with a message that the sad-looking Player 456 was not at all how the real Lee looked. Still, they might have to get used to their hero being seen a different way. Squid Game has propelled Lee into worldwide recognition, leading him to his first English-speaking role (as Jedi Master Sol in the Star Wars spin-off series The Acolyte) last year, appearances on American TV entertainment staples such as The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, becoming a global brand ambassador for Gucci and having the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio eager to take selfies with him. Lee is an accomplished man. Apart from his acting, restaurants and art gallery, he co-founded the talent agency Artist Company (with fellow actor Jung Woo-sung, in 2016), which represents many of the major players in the Korean entertainment industry. He also has a real estate development company (Seorim C&D), set up in 2008, and owns a ten-floor building in Seoul, an apartment in the city and a two-million dollar home in Los Angeles. As a young man, Lee had wanted to become an artist but, encouraged by his parents, studied design. Last year, he collaborated with the French design company Paulin, Paulin, Paulin in an exhibition of functional sculpture and furniture in Seoul, the first of its kind in Korea. He has expressed a desire to explore putting on public art projects, inspired by the works and installations of Richard Serra and Marc Quinn, bringing in foreign artists to Seoul. Overall, it’s clear that with this newfound international fame, Lee sees himself as an ambassador for his own country. In conversation, he’s so appealingly enthusiastic about it as a desirable travel destination, he could be working for the Seoul tourist board: “I do feel a responsibility, as there are so many great things about Korea and I want people to know about that,” he explains. “So, I always tell people to come to Korea to visit, because it has a lot of good things including the fact that it is a very safe country to travel in. And people have very high standards when it comes to their morals – they’re very good people. “They’re friendly and willing to help if you’re in a situation where you need it. So, if Korea is a totally new place for you and you might be a little scared or nervous about travelling there, don’t worry! Because in Korea there will be a lot of people who would be willing to help you. Also, we have really good food!” The actor, as previously mentioned, has a deep interest in all cuisines. When I ask him what he does when he feels sad, he simply says, “I eat some great food.” I’m assuming that Italy and its cooking is one of his favourites, given that’s the focus of his Il Mare restaurants (named after his 2000 film) but, ever the diplomat, he says, “I really don’t have a favourite. I think all the cities and all the countries have their own charms. I really love London these days…” Returning to Squid Game, we discuss how there’s a profound change in Lee’s character, Gi-hun, from season one to season two. Look away if you haven’t watched Squid Game yet – if you have, you will have seen how the hopeless ne’er-do-well has transformed into a man of steel, determined to use his prize money (the equivalent of around £24.5 million) to build a small army to track down the ruthless rich behind the game and bring an end to their cruel exploitation of the weak. Gi-hun has gone from enfeebled anti-hero to strong hero, risking his life to re-enter the game’s nightmarish pastel-coloured playground and bring down the bad guys. As a resistance leader, he inspires other brave contestants to follow his lead and… well, let’s just say that if that plan had gone swimmingly, there wouldn’t be the need for a third season. So, what will happen next? Of course, it’s all top secret. All Lee will reveal is that, “when I read the script, there were so many twists and turns, it was full of surprises for me. I was, like, ‘Whaaat? Is this happening?’ “I was so curious about what choices these characters are going to make. It is full of things you would not expect. There are going to be lots of changes and transformations, and a lot of different characters from season two to season 3.” Despite its quirky design and ultra-violence, Squid Game is an often thoughtful series that raises questions about humanity. I ask Lee if, as in Gi-hun’s story, he believes there is a possibility for people to change and become better versions of themselves. This provokes a particularly considered, serious response. “One of the main reasons I make TV shows and films is to provide entertainment,” he says. “But it’s also important for us to strive to create a better society. That is the meaning I take away from this whole industry. I know a lot of people in different sectors try to do this too, but so do we through these different characters and stories. I think it is very important for us to do that. Of course I believe that people can change. For me, that’s the main message of Squid Game, that we must all work together to create a better society. I hope that when people watch the show, even if they don’t believe that somebody can entirely change for the better, they can at least change their thoughts and their behaviour so we can move towards a better society.” I wonder if Lee is optimistic or pessimistic about life – does he believe that people are innately good, or selfish (we see a lot of the latter in Squid Game)? “It’s a difficult question,” he muses. “I actually think people are innately good, but there are circumstances that make them selfish. There could be people who are doing things that are morally or legally wrong. But even if they have done something wrong, if they show a lot of remorse and they don’t want to ever do it again, and they have apologised sincerely and genuinely, I think it’s important that we give them another chance. Remorse is important, and that people give them another chance is also very important.” Lee can also be political, although we don’t discuss the fractious current political situation in South Korea – last December, President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to enforce martial law leading to violent street protests and his removal from office, with his opposition leaders recently winning the snap election called on 3 June. In 2022, Lee made his directorial debut with Hunt, a South Korean spy action thriller set in the 1980s when the country was under a military dictatorship and there were massive pro-democracy protests. In the film, which Lee also wrote, he plays an agent trying to find a North Korean mole. He wanted to look at the political stories between the North and South, and has since said that he only took on the project because no one else wanted to tackle such a sensitive topic. Hunt had its world premiere at Cannes, where Lee talked about the parallels between the propaganda fed to the South Koreans by the government in that period and the fake news on social media now. He stressed how important it was for people to be vigilant about seeking accurate reporting – an even bigger problem, one would think, with the rise of “deepfake” AI videos. I would like to ask Lee how he feels about society going backwards, with Mark Zuckerberg and others making the decision to stop fact-checking on their social media platforms. But, to be honest, it just seems too difficult to broach such a subject when even a simple question takes such a long time to answer. But I sense that if we spoke the same language, his answers would be nuanced and complex. Squid Game isn’t the only piece of Korean media to make it big in the West, of course. We seem to be having an extended Korean moment, with Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 satire Parasite winning Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature Film; Korean restaurants gaining Michelin stars in London and New York; the V&A’s 2023 exhibition devoted to K-culture, and Korean fashion designers regularly featured in Vogue and ELLE. As well as exports from Korea of kimchi – the spicy relish made with fermented vegetables – more than doubling over the past decade. We had something similar with all things Scandi a while back, with everyone sporting the jumpers worn by Sofie Grabol in The Killing and lighting candles during the day to embrace our inner hygge. Does Lee recognise something similar is going on with Korean culture – and, if so, is he happy, or a bit irritated to see it reduced to what may be a passing trend? “I personally hope that this is just the beginning of people becoming aware of Korean culture and that it’s not just a fad that goes away,” he says. “When I go overseas, a lot of people are very curious about Korea and our culture and food. They ask me a lot of questions. I think we can go further and work harder to introduce more of our beautiful culture so that it becomes even more appealing to people. Again, I recommend that visiting Korea would be a good thing.” Is there a Korean word or catchphrase that he thinks could take off, in the way that hygge did – something recognisable to us Brits? “Yes – daebak”, he replies. “The literal translation is ‘jackpot’, but it means ‘really cool’. So whenever you see something that’s cool, you say daebak.” Conversely, he finds it hard to pinpoint what characterises Korean humour but thinks it tends to be less about making fun of a person and more about the situation they find themselves in when something goes wrong. So, can he tell us a typical Korean joke? “It’s very hard for me to think of one because I’m getting old [Lee is 52] so when I hear one, I laugh and then I instantly forget it,” he admits, smiling. Lee is currently in production on a romcom for Korean television as well as working on his own scripts. With his dozens of businesses keeping him busy, too, I wonder if he has any time or appetite left for more Squid Game. I jokingly suggest the idea of a Christmas spin-off – but it’s clear that the actor takes the suggestion seriously. “We definitely need to get Hwang Dong-hyuk on board, so can someone please lure him into creating that spin-off?” he says. “Or maybe just another season of Squid Game?” Now, that really would be daebak. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Squid Game seasons 1-2 are available to stream on Netflix. Season 3 arrives on Friday 27th June. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
'I don’t put any store in being the lead'
After standout performances in shows from Benidorm to Happy Valley, Siobhan Finneran takes centre stage in a new ITV drama about a cop in big trouble
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in March 2021. Add Protection to your watchlist There’s a scene in Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright’s electrifying West Yorkshire cop drama, where police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her sister, recovering addict Clare, played by Siobhan Finneran, are sitting on the back steps of the terraced house they share, each with a big mug of tea, having a chat. It’s such a lovely moment: the relaxed warmth between the two women and the sense of comfort that radiates from this most ordinary of routines. Is it too much to hope that some of that quality might permeate this interview with Finneran? She is an actor, after all, and in real life could turn out to be an entitled, pretentious diva, far from the approachable and down-to-earth character she plays in some of her most notable parts – even her smaller roles, such as the caring chaplain in Jimmy McGovern’s Time prison series, are memorably touching. But nothing could be further from the case. Phew. We’re here to talk about her new ITV drama, Protection, and start off in the jaunty spirit in which we finish. I have some minor tech issues with the Zoom camera and she could hardly be more understanding. Perhaps it’s an age thing – she’s 59 and I’m a decade older. “I can’t use my laptop, so I’m always delighted when it looks like someone else is struggling,” she says softly, but with a hard northern clang on the final g. As the camera reveals my backdrop, she says, “Is that your kitchen? It’s beautiful.” She is in the living room of “my fella’s flat” – her fella being the latest detective in Death in Paradise, Don Gilet. Finneran has a great range. She was, for instance, intriguing as the sour and conniving maid, Sarah O’Brien, in Downton Abbey. Then in 2014 came her peach of a role as Clare in Happy Valley – “When you get sent a script like that…” There had been a number of projects with Wainwright before, as well as with producer Nicola Shindler. “I remember reading the opening scene with Sarah in the playground reacting to a guy who was on top of a swing or a slide or whatever, threatening to set himself on fire. She leaves him, goes into a shop, buys a pair of cheap sunglasses, comes back and from just that scene alone I thought, ‘This is absolutely fantastic!’” She phoned her agent the next day. “It’s genius because you already love this woman [Catherine Cawood] because of her humour and the way she’s dealing with the situation, so whatever journey she’s about to go on, you want to go with her. You’ve bought your ticket and you’re on the bus.” And so to her new series, Protection, which sheds a light on the lives of witness protection officers who work – often undercover – in a special branch of the police that is firewalled from other departments. Even the smallest leak of information, we are instructed at the start of the show, could jeopardise witness safety. And in the first episode – indeed, in the first ten minutes – it looks like Finneran’s Detective Inspector Liz Nyles has been responsible for a fatal breach of trust, even if inadvertently. This is Finneran’s first time as the lead, right? “I think it might be, but I never think in those terms… I don’t put any store with that.” Her character is one of those plucky but embattled women that she plays so well – a single mum with a teenage daughter, a serious job, from a policing family, whose dad is unwell. Nyles has always gritted her teeth and held it all together. But now things are falling apart, on the back of her uncharacteristically seizing some pleasure for herself – a secret affair with a married junior colleague who may have compromised the integrity of her unit – and all is unravelling. When she’s acting in or watching a lot of gritty drama, does she sometimes yearn for something lighter, funny or romantic? “During lockdown, we rinsed every kind of Scandi thing there was – we couldn’t get enough of it. But you do reach the point of absolute overload and think, ‘I need to watch somebody painting a wall, or planting stuff.’ Not that I watch gardening shows. “And I can think, ‘I don’t want to have to do another angst-ridden, traumatised person’ – I’ve done a chunk of that. I would really like to play someone who’s having a lovely time. I was very lucky because at the end of shooting Protection, I went and did the second series of Alma’s Not Normal, which was absolutely just like a soothing balm.” When I confess to not having seen Sophie Willan’s comedy series she says, with sweet enthusiasm, “Please will you watch it? It’s one of the most beautiful TV series ever.” (Later, I do watch it and it is brilliant and funny and weirdly heartwarming, with her playing Alma’s hopeless drug-addict mum, Lin, “the Iggy Pop of the Psych Ward”.) I mention my love of the sitcom Benidorm – in which she starred for six of its ten series. The show, set in the all-inclusive Solana resort, was adored by millions – it was regularly voted best comedy programme by the audience at the National Television Awards – as much as it was derided by the critics. “Well, that will remain probably to the day I die as one of those jobs...” she pauses, with a great nostalgic sigh. “We used to pinch ourselves a little bit, the original cast – we’re still very much in touch and in love with each other.” The previous week, in fact, she went to see her Benidorm co-star Steve Pemberton in Inside No 9 Stage/Fright, the sold-out spin-off from his long-running but now ended TV series with Reece Shearsmith. Would she recommend it? “Yes, I would, darling. It’s a proper treat night out at the theatre.” She tells me about an embarrassing point in the play, “where I was obviously so invested, that I got nearly hysterical at a very quiet moment – I had one of those nervous laughs [she does a big gaspy eruption] that you think everyone else is going to do, and you realise it’s only you that’s done it. You know, because you are so into it. And that, for me, is the joy of theatre – because if they’ve got you and you’re with them, you are on your own and they are doing it just for you. Beautiful.” In 1978, when Finneran was 12, her maternal grandmother took her to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Glenda Jackson was playing the Egyptian queen in Antony and Cleopatra, directed by the legendary Peter Brook. What does she remember about the play? “Very, very little, darling. I really can’t, sadly. I remember going on the train with my grandma to Stratford, having really nice fish and chips and a cake, and going to the theatre. “The only play I can remember – I don’t know which one it was – is one where somebody came on nude and my grandma covered my eyes. We’re talking about the 1970s, so the RSC could have been doing anything in the nude then. They could have been doing As You Like It in the nude.” Finneran and her brother only met her paternal grandmother once, when her father took the family back to his home in Ireland; she died when Finneran was seven. Her mother was a primary school teacher and her father still drives a cab, having done lots of different jobs before. “At one point he taught and worked for the Catholic Rescue Society in their homes for ‘bad lads’ – but they weren’t bad lads. They were kids who maybe didn’t have parents to bring them up and they’d got themselves into a bit of trouble.” Her favourite family times growing up were going to the seaside with her aunt and uncle, who used to rent a caravan in Rhyl, where they would play for hours on the beach. “And my kids [she has two children with her ex-husband, actor Mark Jordon – Joseph, 27, and Poppy, 25] loved being on the beach when they were little. I once went to a festival in a camper van with them and that was great fun, too.” What was her childhood in Oldham like? “I have to correct this, because it’s always written that I was born in Oldham, but I was born in Manchester.” It’s important to her to get this right. “And I was brought up in Manchester for the first few years of my life. My mum’s of Irish and Scottish descent, but she was born in Salford and her family are Mancunians.” It was only when Finneran was six that her parents moved to Saddleworth, just outside Oldham. “We’re famous for the Moors murders, unfortunately, but it’s a very beautiful place.” Would she describe herself as a country girl? “Yes, darling, that’s the best way to put it – not a city girl at all. I do know Manchester very well because it’s where I was born, but I was brought up in the countryside, really.” Can she do Northern Soul dancing? The question comes on the back of my reading that she likes to go to live gigs and went to one in February by a band called Thee Sacred Souls that she’d heard on the radio, who have a bit of an old Northern Soul sound. “I wish I could, darling. It’s hard.” She says that she did have to learn some moves for a part in a BBC sitcom called The Other One, with one of the episodes involving a Northern Soul club night, and she remembers a wonderful teacher: “We learnt literally a couple of steps, pouring in sweat… But I would love to be able to do it because I was far too young to have learnt it at the time.” Does she go out dancing with Gilet? “We would do, given the opportunity. It would be great if we could both learn to do Northern Soul together.” I ask if we can have a few more minutes. “No worries, darling. As long as you don’t mind me doing this [vaping] every now and then.” Oh, were you a big smoker before? If so, how many? “As many as I could. Little rollies with liquorice papers.” I finish by asking if she has any unusual or surprising hobbies. “Oh my God, noooo,” drawn out magnificently. “I’m so boring! Wouldn’t it be great if I said that I knitted characters that I’d played! But I don’t do anything that exciting. My mum did buy me some Lego for Christmas and I’m delighted with that. You can make bunches of flowers out of Lego now!”
Siobhan Finneran on taking the lead in Protection – and memories of Happy Valley
Finneran spoke with this week's issue of Radio Times magazine.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. There’s a scene in Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright’s electrifying West Yorkshire cop drama, where police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her sister, recovering addict Clare, played by Siobhan Finneran, are sitting on the back steps of the terraced house they share, each with a big mug of tea, having a chat. It’s such a lovely moment: the relaxed warmth between the two women and the sense of comfort that radiates from this most ordinary of routines. Is it too much to hope that some of that quality might permeate this interview with Finneran? She is an actor, after all, and in real life could turn out to be an entitled, pretentious diva, far from the approachable and down-to-earth character she plays in some of her most notable parts – even her smaller roles, such as the caring chaplain in Jimmy McGovern’s Time prison series, are memorably touching. But nothing could be further from the case. Phew. We’re here to talk about her new ITV drama, Protection, and start off in the jaunty spirit in which we finish. I have some minor tech issues with the Zoom camera and she could hardly be more understanding. Perhaps it’s an age thing – she’s 59 and I’m a decade older. “I can’t use my laptop, so I’m always delighted when it looks like someone else is struggling,” she says softly, but with a hard northern clang on the final g. As the camera reveals my backdrop, she says, “Is that your kitchen? It’s beautiful.” She is in the living room of “my fella’s flat” – her fella being the latest detective in Death in Paradise, Don Gilet. Finneran has a great range. She was, for instance, intriguing as the sour and conniving maid Sarah O’Brien in Downton Abbey. Then in 2014 came her peach of a role as Clare in Happy Valley – “When you get sent a script like that…” There had been a number of projects with Wainwright before, as well as with producer Nicola Shindler. “I remember reading the opening scene with Sarah in the playground reacting to a guy who was on top of a swing or a slide or whatever, threatening to set himself on fire. She leaves him, goes into a shop, buys a pair of cheap sunglasses, comes back and from just that scene alone I thought, ‘This is absolutely fantastic!’” She phoned her agent the next day. “It’s genius because you already love this woman [Catherine Cawood] because of her humour and the way she’s dealing with the situation, so whatever journey she’s about to go on, you want to go with her. You’ve bought your ticket and you’re on the bus.” And so to her new series, Protection, which sheds a light on the lives of witness protection officers who work – often undercover – in a special branch of the police that is firewalled from other departments. Even the smallest leak of information, we are instructed at the start of the show, could jeopardise witness safety. And in the first episode – indeed, in the first ten minutes – it looks like Finneran’s Detective Inspector Liz Nyles has been responsible for a fatal breach of trust, even if inadvertently. This is Finneran’s first time as the lead, right? “I think it might be, but I never think in those terms… I don’t put any store with that.” Her character is one of those plucky but embattled women that she plays so well – a single mum with a teenage daughter, a serious job, from a policing family, whose dad is unwell. Nyles has always gritted her teeth and held it all together. But now things are falling apart, on the back of her uncharacteristically seizing some pleasure for herself – a secret affair with a married junior colleague who may have compromised the integrity of her unit – and all is unravelling. When she’s acting in or watching a lot of gritty drama, does she sometimes yearn for something lighter, funny or romantic? “During lockdown, we rinsed every kind of Scandi thing there was – we couldn’t get enough of it. But you do reach the point of absolute overload and think, ‘I need to watch somebody painting a wall, or planting stuff.’ Not that I watch gardening shows. “And I can think, ‘I don’t want to have to do another angst-ridden, traumatised person’ – I’ve done a chunk of that. I would really like to play someone who’s having a lovely time. I was very lucky because at the end of shooting Protection, I went and did the second series of Alma’s Not Normal, which was absolutely just like a soothing balm.” When I confess to not having seen Sophie Willan’s comedy series she says, with sweet enthusiasm, “Please will you watch it? It’s one of the most beautiful TV series ever.” (Later, I do watch it and it is brilliant and funny and weirdly heartwarming, with her playing Alma’s hopeless drug-addict mum, Lin, “the Iggy Pop of the Psych Ward”.) I mention my love of the sitcom Benidorm – in which she starred for six of its 10 series. The show, set in the all-inclusive Solana resort, was adored by millions – it was regularly voted best comedy programme by the audience at the National Television Awards – as much as it was derided by the critics. “Well, that will remain probably to the day I die as one of those jobs...” she pauses, with a great nostalgic sigh. “We used to pinch ourselves a little bit, the original cast – we’re still very much in touch and in love with each other.” The previous week, in fact, she went to see her Benidorm co-star Steve Pemberton in Inside No 9 Stage/Fright, the sold-out spin-off from his long-running but now ended TV series with Reece Shearsmith. Would she recommend it? “Yes, I would, darling. It’s a proper treat night out at the theatre.” She tells me about an embarrassing point in the play, “where I was obviously so invested, that I got nearly hysterical at a very quiet moment – I had one of those nervous laughs [she does a big gaspy eruption] that you think everyone else is going to do, and you realise it’s only you that’s done it. You know, because you are so into it. And that, for me, is the joy of theatre – because if they’ve got you and you’re with them, you are on your own and they are doing it just for you. Beautiful". In 1978, when Finneran was 12, her maternal grandmother took her to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Glenda Jackson was playing the Egyptian queen in Antony and Cleopatra, directed by the legendary Peter Brook. What does she remember about the play? “Very, very little, darling. I really can’t, sadly. I remember going on the train with my grandma to Stratford, having really nice fish and chips and a cake, and going to the theatre. “The only play I can remember – I don’t know which one it was – is one where somebody came on nude and my grandma covered my eyes. We’re talking about the 1970s, so the RSC could have been doing anything in the nude then. They could have been doing As You Like It in the nude.” Finneran and her brother only met her paternal grandmother once, when her father took the family back to his home in Ireland; she died when Finneran was seven. Her mother was a primary school teacher and her father still drives a cab, having done lots of different jobs before. “At one point he taught and worked for the Catholic Rescue Society in their homes for ‘bad lads’ – but they weren’t bad lads. They were kids who maybe didn’t have parents to bring them up and they’d got themselves into a bit of trouble.” Her favourite family times growing up were going to the seaside with her aunt and uncle, who used to rent a caravan in Rhyl, where they would play for hours on the beach. “And my kids [she has two children with her ex-husband, actor Mark Jordon – Joseph, 27, and Poppy, 25] loved being on the beach when they were little. I once went to a festival in a camper van with them and that was great fun, too.” Read more: Happy Valley's James Norton confirmed to lead Wavewalker adaptation What was her childhood in Oldham like? “I have to correct this, because it’s always written that I was born in Oldham, but I was born in Manchester.” It’s important to her to get this right. “And I was brought up in Manchester for the first few years of my life. My mum’s of Irish and Scottish descent, but she was born in Salford and her family are Mancunians.” It was only when Finneran was six that her parents moved to Saddleworth, just outside Oldham. “We’re famous for the Moors murders, unfortunately, but it’s a very beautiful place.” Would she describe herself as a country girl? “Yes, darling, that’s the best way to put it – not a city girl at all. I do know Manchester very well because it’s where I was born, but I was brought up in the countryside, really.” Can she do Northern Soul dancing? The question comes on the back of my reading that she likes to go to live gigs and went to one in February by a band called Thee Sacred Souls that she’d heard on the radio, who have a bit of an old Northern Soul sound. “I wish I could, darling. It’s hard.” She says that she did have to learn some moves for a part in a BBC sitcom called The Other One, with one of the episodes involving a Northern Soul club night, and she remembers a wonderful teacher: “We learnt literally a couple of steps, pouring in sweat… But I would love to be able to do it because I was far too young to have learnt it at the time.” Does she go out dancing with Gilet? “We would do, given the opportunity. It would be great if we could both learn to do Northern Soul together.” I ask if we can have a few more minutes. “No worries, darling. As long as you don’t mind me doing this [vaping] every now and then.” Oh, were you a big smoker before? If so, how many? “As many as I could. Little rollies with liquorice papers.” I finish by asking if she has any unusual or surprising hobbies. “Oh my God, noooo,” drawn out magnificently. “I’m so boring! Wouldn’t it be great if I said that I knitted characters that I’d played! But I don’t do anything that exciting. My mum did buy me some Lego for Christmas and I’m delighted with that. You can make bunches of flowers out of Lego now!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Protection starts at 9pm on Sunday 16th March on ITV1 and ITVX. Episode 2 airs at 9pm on Monday 17th March on ITV1 and ITVX. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
It’s been 21 years since Keira Knightley delighted viewers with a festive offering – but her new series written by Joe Barton is altogether darker…
Black Doves is on Netflix from Thursday. Add it to your watchlist Funnily enough, one of Britain’s favourite festive films, Love Actually, has not and will never be watched by Keira Knightley and her family at Christmas. The actor has seen the classic romantic comedy – written and directed by Richard Curtis – in which she starred as an 18-year-old, only once, at its premiere in 2003 – “and I’ve never seen it since”. Perhaps she’s missing out? “I’m not in it that much… Maybe I could just fast forward through that bit.” It was Love Actually that, around the same time as it was released, influenced Joe Barton when he was a young student, doing a film course at the University of Westminster with aspirations of being a director. “I was aware that Richard Curtis had been a screenwriter and now he was directing something,” Barton recalls, “and I was, like, ‘Oh well, if that guy’s done it maybe I could, too.’ ” View oEmbed on the source website Barton tells me that he started writing stories as a child and made little films from a young age, and says that he’s happy to have stuck with writing rather than try his hand at directing. His best-known television shows are Sky’s time-travel science-fiction The Lazarus Project and the BBC’s Japanese crime co-production Giri/Haji, with its mesmerising rooftop dance-fight finale. We’re talking yuletide films because Barton has written a new spy thriller series, Black Doves, starring Knightley in the lead, set in London and opening in a pub with the familiar, slurring warble of Fairytale of New York. “Yes, it’s a Christmas series,” Knightley exclaims, brightly. “So maybe this is the new Love Actually… but we kill everyone!” “Death Actually,” deadpans Barton. This is typical of the tone of jolly banter in this Zoom interview – Barton in what looks like a study, whose backdrop is a moody, dark green wall, covered in art; Knightley in a pale, rather elegant-looking room, with one of her young daughters clamouring to come in. Black Doves is the name of the spy organisation Knightley’s character Helen works for. Helen’s cover, which she has maintained for ten years, is as the doting wife of high-ranking politician Wallace, played by Andrew Buchan, who is heading for the top job of prime minister. All the while she has been feeding government secrets to Reed, the Black Doves boss, played by Sarah Lancashire. The six-part series starts with the assassination of Helen’s lover Jason (Andrew Koji), leaving her breathless with grief but having to mask it while continuing to juggle her many roles and avoid being bumped off herself. Meanwhile, an old friend and colleague, Sam (Ben Whishaw), is recalled to duty from Rome – where he has been sauntering down the Spanish Steps and sipping champagne in cosy bars in his attempt at living la dolce vita – to protect Helen. There’s a tremendously tense, black-comedy moment, when Helen is hiding behind a door, as two female assassins thump up the stairs brandishing guns, and her small daughter flashes up on her mobile phone, asking: “Mummy, where are you?” The actor married musician James Righton, of the possibly permanently paused band the Klaxons, in 2013 in the south of France; they live in north London with their daughters Edie, nine, and Delilah, five. Has Knightley’s experience of being a working mother – while not encountering quite such sinister clashes, presumably – informed her understanding of how to colour Helen? “Yes,” she says. “One of the things I liked about Helen is taking that thing you experience a lot, particularly as a mother or a father – you’re in the car doing the school drop off, you’re screaming at your children, you’re so angry, you’re all screaming at each other and you get out of the car, and there’s all the mums at the school gate and it’s instantly, ‘Oh, hi!’ [perky voice; mega-watt grin]. And in life it’s those double faces that you have. “Then suddenly you’re at work and you’ve got your work face on and then you’ve got your kid on the phone and you’re, ‘Oh baby, are you OK?’ So it’s that thing I think we all know and that we all do, but ramped up to ten, or 11 or 12. And that’s what I liked. It made me giggle. Particularly that scene you’re talking about. “We all do it. For me, I’m on a film set and then it’s, ‘Oh, you passed your spelling test – I love you so much!’ Whereas this is, ‘Darling, I love you so much and they’re just about to kill me. Kiss darling, goodbye.’ ” Knightley is pleased to share that there were many discussions about “The Juggle” on the shoot, because several people from the production had small children at home, including Barton, who lives in Brighton with his partner, Alice, and their two boys, aged 13 and seven. He wrote the first episode of Black Doves (he appropriated the name from his local pub) in the quiet week after Christmas in 2022. “I wrote it on a whim, to be honest,” he recalls. “I started it on Boxing Day and finished it on New Year’s Day – it irritated the people I live with!” It’s got all the things he likes in it: “Spies, Christmas and London.” There were two sparks for the idea – one, he was in a “spy kind of mood”, as he puts it, after a friend of his had worked on A Spy among Friends, based on the book by Ben Macintyre about double agent Kim Philby. And then, he read an article in a newspaper, where a woman was talking about the man with whom she’d been having a clandestine affair, who had died – “there was something about the idea of being in a secret relationship when one of you is gone and you can’t talk to people about it, which was really interesting to me.” It’s Knightley’s first television series – “or is it called long-form streaming [on Netflix]?” she asks – since she played Lara in the 2002 ITV mini-series of Doctor Zhivago. She’d been looking for the right project for a while, but nothing had come to fruition. Fortuitously finessed by their mutual manager in America, the actor said she was interested in seeing Barton’s new script, having loved his Giri/Haji. She fell for Black Doves as soon as she read it. Then Sister Productions, the company co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, Stacey Snider and Jane Featherstone and known for taking creative risks (Eric, Kaos), wanted in and, just like that, Knightley was on board. Barton can still tap into the swooning vertigo of receiving an email from his manager very early on in the proceedings, where the subject line was simply: “Keira Knightley”. Once he knew she was committed, they met up and developed the rest of the series. It’s pretty common now for major actors to have anexecutive producer credit. How meaningful was that title in her case? “Because you’re coming on so early, it’s a leap of faith to go, ‘I’m signing up for six episodes, and I’m willing to commit to it financially and all the rest of it,’ when I’ve only seen one,” she explains. “It’s a different thing to a film where you go, ‘I know exactly what this is and everyone is in place.’ This, in contrast, is, ‘OK, where are we taking this? What’s going to happen? How is this going to work?’ And as an executive it gives you a little bit more power to have approval over a lot of stuff.” We talk about the dream-like finale of Giri/Haji, which the actor is not alone in adoring: “Oh, my God, how he finishes it all with an interpretive dance! It’s amazing. Joe, can we finish season two [of Black Doves] with – well, just give me a dance routine!” Barton: “Yes, the whole of the second series will be one long…” “Tango!” interrupts Knightley. “It will be Strictly Come Spies,” smiles Barton. It was only a month before our interview that Barton was told that Netflix would be renewing Black Doves for a second season, which came as a shock: “It’s never happened before. Most things I work on get cancelled almost instantly. “So, I was all prepared to have a really nervous Christmas this year. I was on holiday, and in an Italian supermarket, when I got a call from the producers saying, ‘Come home, you need to start writing, we’re doing more.’ ” He says it’s wonderful to have “everyone feeling very, very confident about the show and that we’ve made something that we can all stand behind and can’t wait for people to watch.” Barton’s The Lazarus Project was cancelled after two seasons; Giri/Haji after only one. Then there was the firing from HBO Max’s television spin-off from The Batman. I ask Barton how he found Hollywood and he laughs grimly: “A marvellous place to be!” Before adding, “I’ve got mixed experiences because every time I’ve worked in Hollywood I’ve ended up being fired, so…” Knightley: “Happens to most people.” Barton: “Yes, par for the course.” What about you, Keira? “I haven’t been for an awfully long time. I’ve had some good experiences and some not-so-good – like anywhere.” He doesn’t want to push his luck by even thinking about a third season, “although that would be lovely”. They both loved Kaos, a mythological black comedy series, starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus (Keira binged it), only for it to be cancelled by Netflix, to much fan outcry. Her favourite TV series include The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy: “I didn’t do it all, but I did a lot of seasons when breastfeeding in the night – that was for both the children. I don’t know why, but it’s a great middle-of-the-night, breastfeeding watch and for that, it holds a special place in my heart.” There’s some droll and distinctly saucy repartee in Black Doves – it’s slightly James Bond-like in innuendo (although filthier), as well as dryness. Are they fans of the franchise? “I am – I like Q,” says Barton. Well, it is Ben Whishaw, after all. “I’ve liked some of them,” Knightley says. “They’re fun. Good to watch at Christmas.” So in the spirit of the countdown to Christmas, how do they celebrate? Barton: “I have lots of Christmas traditions, even down to where the individual decorations are in the house. It’s basically ‘A Thing’. Lots of food and drink – pretty standard. My partner is vegetarian, as is her whole family, but I’m not. I cook Christmas dinner and buy a little chicken for myself and one of my sons and then make a big nut roast for the 15 other vegetarians that come round.” Charades? “No, there’s too many of us, it’s too loud and the children won’t sit still for it. I hope to be able to do that one day, but for now the decibel level would be too much.” Knightley: “Lots of food, lots of wine, no charades – although I might bring that in, could be a good thing. Lots of Christmas movies.” It’s always The Godfather Parts 1 and 2, apparently – but perhaps this year it will also be Love Actually.
His grandfather may have been a spy in the Second World War, but Ben Whishaw is far happier playing one on screen
Black Doves is on Netflix from Thursday. Add it to your watchlist He may have played Q, the hi-tech briefing Quarter- master of 007, with a boffin-like knowledge of life-saving gadgets that is legendary, but Ben Whishaw himself is the polar opposite. We are discussing how ageing it is when one’s fingers don’t race swiftly over the keyboard of a mobile phone. How quick are his? “I can do it quite fast, but if I look at my niece and nephew, they’re on a whole other level of aptitude.” So he isn’t a technological whizz? “Not at all,” he says. “No, I’m very bad with technology, sadly.” He actually does sound mournful. Does it genuinely bother him? “Not really, but sometimes you do feel inadequate. I should probably have a better grasp of it all.” View oEmbed on the source website Whishaw is gentle and engaging and has a great range as an actor. There’s something subtle about his performances, whether as the tragic young poet John Keats in Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, or his fantastic, constantly shifting portrayal – from slyly manipulative, to fragile, to courageous, as well as inadvertently comedic – of Norman Scott, the lover of Jeremy Thorpe, in 2018 BBC mini-series A Very English Scandal. The actor had standout acclaim for his 2004 Hamlet at the Old Vic, at the age of 23, only a year after leaving Rada – with much being made in the build-up of him being an unknown, state-educated youth from Bedfordshire. And, then, there are his adorable voiceovers for the Paddington films and the clumsy bear’s encounter with the late Queen Elizabeth II for her Platinum Jubilee weekend, in June 2022. Did he meet the Queen? He didn’t go to Buckingham Palace for the filming, but had met her when she visited Rada as patron of the drama school: “She came and shook our… No, no,” he corrects himself with a grin – “we didn’t shake, we genuflected to Her Majesty. I did think she was lovely in that sketch.” It was only three months later that she died at the age of 96, so she must have been quite frail. “Yes, it was touching, actually, as well as kind of amazing.” He is reminded that Keats – “I often think about him” – died when he was only 25; Whishaw has just turned an elfin 44. How does he feel about ageing? “I feel great. I mean, what can you do? It’s inevitable, so we need to accept it, don’t you think?” In April 2023, he was sent the script to two episodes of Black Doves; they started shooting in October, finishing in March. He is tremendously attractive in the role of Sam Young; cool, laconic, deadpan, mysterious, sexy, with a secret sadness, coupled with his luminous skin, green eyes and coal-black hair. What drew him to the part? “I enjoyed that it trod a line between being vaguely ludicrous and thrilling and funny and dark. I liked that it has this combination of things. I was up for something fun – and a queer assassin had a certain interest for me. I wanted to read more.” He’s talked quite a lot about how his paternal grandfather served in the German army during the Second World War, while working as a spy for the British government. “Yes, our real family name is Stellmacher and he was Russian-German – actually, he had a Ukrainian mother,” the actor corrects himself, “and a German father.” He says that, regrettably, he doesn’t speak any other languages. His grandfather’s name was originally Jean Vladimir Stellmacher, which he changed to John Victor Whishaw: “I knew him, but he died when I was about 13. He was quite a scary man – very silent, very forbidding, and I mostly remember him sitting in an armchair, smoking. He had an ashtray in the shape of a skull, which he flicked his ash into. He was a troubled soul, but then his was a troubled generation and they were difficult times.” He’s been in some other spy thrillers, like the BBC’s London Spy in 2015 and, of course, with his grandfather having been an actual spy, one wonders whether he could imagine himself as one? “No, no, no – you have to be so clever and… I guess it must require a certain coldness in your deepest self. Or some kind of strange, profound conviction or something. You’d have to have a kind of steel that I couldn’t say I have.” We are drawing to a close and my Christmas questions loom. “I go to see my mum [he describes her as being “very beautiful”] and as she is also a twin [he has a fraternal twin, James], I usually spend Christmas Day with her and her twin sister, my Auntie Carol. And then on Boxing Day, I go to see my dad. I also see my brother and I do enjoy Christmas for my niece and nephew.” How was this time for you when you were little? “I remember loving Christmas as a child and finding it a very magical time.” As for Christmas telly: “I’m going to say my favourite television, because for some reason it’s what I frequently revert to – Victoria Wood. I love to watch her. I think she was a great genius and I spent a lot of my childhood watching her. I still find her hilarious and strangely comforting. “I’m in a show at the moment [one of the masterpieces of modern theatre, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett] and Sunday is such a day of exhaustion, before it begins on Monday, that I’m just on the couch – and I watch Victoria Wood repeats.” And as for Black Doves, the television show he’s promoting now, he’s happy there’s a second series and, yes, I do know whether he’s going to be in it or not. But, to quote the famous spy line – I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.
Keira Knightley: 'Black Doves is a Christmas series – like Love Actually, but we kill everyone!'
Knightley and Black Doves creator Joe Barton spoke with Radio Times magazine about their new spy thriller series.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Funnily enough, one of Britain’s favourite festive films, Love Actually, has not and will never be watched by Keira Knightley and her family at Christmas. The actor has seen the classic romantic comedy – written and directed by Richard Curtis – in which she starred as an 18-year-old, only once, at its premiere in 2003 – "and I’ve never seen it since". Perhaps she’s missing out? "I’m not in it that much… Maybe I could just fast forward through that bit." It was Love Actually that, around the same time as it was released, influenced Joe Barton when he was a young student, doing a film course at the University of Westminster with aspirations of being a director. “I was aware that Richard Curtis had been a screenwriter and now he was directing something,” Barton recalls, “and I was, like, ‘Oh well, if that guy’s done it maybe I could, too.’ ” Barton tells me that he started writing stories as a child and made little films from a young age, and says that he’s happy to have stuck with writing rather than try his hand at directing. His best-known television shows are Sky’s time-travel science-fiction The Lazarus Project and the BBC’s Japanese crime co-production Giri/Haji, with its mesmerising rooftop dance-fight finale. We’re talking yuletide films because Barton has written a new spy thriller series, Black Doves, starring Knightley in the lead, set in London and opening in a pub with the familiar, slurring warble of Fairytale of New York. “Yes, it’s a Christmas series,” Knightley exclaims, brightly. “So maybe this is the new Love Actually… but we kill everyone!” “Death Actually,” deadpans Barton. This is typical of the tone of jolly banter in this Zoom interview – Barton in what looks like a study, whose backdrop is a moody, dark green wall, covered in art; Knightley in a pale, rather elegant-looking room, with one of her young daughters clamouring to come in. Black Doves is the name of the spy organisation Knightley’s character Helen works for. Helen’s cover, which she has maintained for ten years, is as the doting wife of high-ranking politician Wallace, played by Andrew Buchan, who is heading for the top job of prime minister. All the while she has been feeding government secrets to Reed, the Black Doves boss, played by Sarah Lancashire. The six-part series starts with the assassination of Helen’s lover Jason (Andrew Koji), leaving her breathless with grief but having to mask it while continuing to juggle her many roles and avoid being bumped off herself. Meanwhile, an old friend and colleague, Sam (Ben Whishaw), is recalled to duty from Rome – where he has been sauntering down the Spanish Steps and sipping champagne in cosy bars in his attempt at living la dolce vita – to protect Helen. There’s a tremendously tense, black-comedy moment, when Helen is hiding behind a door, as two female assassins thump up the stairs brandishing guns, and her small daughter flashes up on her mobile phone, asking: “Mummy, where are you?” The actor married musician James Righton, of the possibly permanently paused band the Klaxons, in 2013 in the south of France; they live in north London with their daughters Edie, nine, and Delilah, five. Has Knightley’s experience of being a working mother – while not encountering quite such sinister clashes, presumably – informed her understanding of how to colour Helen? “Yes,” she says. “One of the things I liked about Helen is taking that thing you experience a lot, particularly as a mother or a father – you’re in the car doing the school drop off, you’re screaming at your children, you’re so angry, you’re all screaming at each other and you get out of the car, and there’s all the mums at the school gate and it’s instantly, ‘Oh, hi!’ [perky voice; mega-watt grin]. And in life it’s those double faces that you have. “Then suddenly you’re at work and you’ve got your work face on and then you’ve got your kid on the phone and you’re, ‘Oh baby, are you OK?’ So it’s that thing I think we all know and that we all do, but ramped up to ten, or 11 or 12. And that’s what I liked. It made me giggle. Particularly that scene you’re talking about. “We all do it. For me, I’m on a film set and then it’s, ‘Oh, you passed your spelling test – I love you so much!’ Whereas this is, ‘Darling, I love you so much and they’re just about to kill me. Kiss darling, goodbye.’” Knightley is pleased to share that there were many discussions about “The Juggle” on the shoot, because several people from the production had small children at home, including Barton, who lives in Brighton with his partner, Alice, and their two boys, aged 13 and seven. He wrote the first episode of Black Doves (he appropriated the name from his local pub) in the quiet week after Christmas in 2022. “I wrote it on a whim, to be honest,” he recalls. “I started it on Boxing Day and finished it on New Year’s Day – it irritated the people I live with!” It’s got all the things he likes in it: “Spies, Christmas and London.” There were two sparks for the idea – one, he was in a “spy kind of mood”, as he puts it, after a friend of his had worked on A Spy among Friends, based on the book by Ben Macintyre about double agent Kim Philby. And then, he read an article in a newspaper, where a woman was talking about the man with whom she’d been having a clandestine affair, who had died – “there was something about the idea of being in a secret relationship when one of you is gone and you can’t talk to people about it, which was really interesting to me.” It’s Knightley’s first television series – “or is it called long-form streaming [on Netflix]?” she asks – since she played Lara in the 2002 ITV mini-series of Doctor Zhivago. She’d been looking for the right project for a while, but nothing had come to fruition. Fortuitously finessed by their mutual manager in America, the actor said she was interested in seeing Barton’s new script, having loved his Giri/Haji. She fell for Black Doves as soon as she read it. Then Sister Productions, the company co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, Stacey Snider and Jane Featherstone and known for taking creative risks (Eric, Kaos), wanted in and, just like that, Knightley was on board. Barton can still tap into the swooning vertigo of receiving an email from his manager very early on in the proceedings, where the subject line was simply: “Keira Knightley”. Once he knew she was committed, they met up and developed the rest of the series. It’s pretty common now for major actors to have an executive producer credit. How meaningful was that title in her case? “Because you’re coming on so early, it’s a leap of faith to go, ‘I’m signing up for six episodes, and I’m willing to commit to it financially and all the rest of it,’ when I’ve only seen one,” she explains. “It’s a different thing to a film where you go, ‘I know exactly what this is and everyone is in place.’ This, in contrast, is, ‘OK, where are we taking this? What’s going to happen? How is this going to work?’ And as an executive it gives you a little bit more power to have approval over a lot of stuff.” We talk about the dream-like finale of Giri/Haji, which the actor is not alone in adoring: “Oh, my God, how he finishes it all with an interpretive dance! It’s amazing. Joe, can we finish season two [of Black Doves] with – well, just give me a dance routine!” Barton: “Yes, the whole of the second series will be one long…” “Tango!” interrupts Knightley. “It will be Strictly Come Spies,” smiles Barton. It was only a month before our interview that Barton was told that Netflix would be renewing Black Doves for a second season, which came as a shock: “It’s never happened before. Most things I work on get cancelled almost instantly. “So, I was all prepared to have a really nervous Christmas this year. I was on holiday, and in an Italian supermarket, when I got a call from the producers saying, ‘Come home, you need to start writing, we’re doing more.’ ” He says it’s wonderful to have “everyone feeling very, very confident about the show and that we’ve made something that we can all stand behind and can’t wait for people to watch.” Barton’s The Lazarus Project was cancelled after two seasons; Giri/Haji after only one. Then there was the firing from HBO Max’s television spin-off from The Batman. I ask Barton how he found Hollywood and he laughs grimly: “A marvellous place to be!” Before adding, “I’ve got mixed experiences because every time I’ve worked in Hollywood I’ve ended up being fired, so…” Knightley: “Happens to most people.” Barton: “Yes, par for the course.” What about you, Keira? “I haven’t been for an awfully long time. I’ve had some good experiences and some not-so-good – like anywhere.” He doesn’t want to push his luck by even thinking about a third season, “although that would be lovely”. They both loved Kaos, a mythological black comedy series, starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus (Keira binged it), only for it to be cancelled by Netflix, to much fan outcry. Her favourite TV series include The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy: “I didn’t do it all, but I did a lot of seasons when breastfeeding in the night – that was for both the children. I don’t know why, but it’s a great middle-of-the-night, breastfeeding watch and for that, it holds a special place in my heart.” There’s some droll and distinctly saucy repartee in Black Doves – it’s slightly James Bond-like in innuendo (although filthier), as well as dryness. Are they fans of the franchise? “I am – I like Q,” says Barton. Well, it is Ben Whishaw, after all. “I’ve liked some of them,” Knightley says. “They’re fun. Good to watch at Christmas.” So in the spirit of the countdown to Christmas, how do they celebrate? Barton: “I have lots of Christmas traditions, even down to where the individual decorations are in the house. It’s basically ‘A Thing’. Lots of food and drink – pretty standard. My partner is vegetarian, as is her whole family, but I’m not. I cook Christmas dinner and buy a little chicken for myself and one of my sons and then make a big nut roast for the 15 other vegetarians that come round.” Charades? “No, there’s too many of us, it’s too loud and the children won’t sit still for it. I hope to be able to do that one day, but for now the decibel level would be too much.” Knightley: “Lots of food, lots of wine, no charades – although I might bring that in, could be a good thing. Lots of Christmas movies.” It’s always The Godfather Parts 1 and 2, apparently – but perhaps this year it will also be Love Actually. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Black Doves is available to stream on Netflix from 5th December. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Ben Whishaw on Black Doves: "A queer assassin had a certain interest for me"
Whishaw spoke with Radio Times magazine about his character Sam in the new Netflix spy thriller.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. He may have played Q, the hi-tech briefing Quarter-master of 007, with a boffin-like knowledge of life-saving gadgets that is legendary, but Ben Whishaw himself is the polar opposite. We are discussing how ageing it is when one’s fingers don’t race swiftly over the keyboard of a mobile phone. How quick are his? “I can do it quite fast, but if I look at my niece and nephew, they’re on a whole other level of aptitude.” So he isn’t a technological whizz? “Not at all,” he says. “No, I’m very bad with technology, sadly.” He actually does sound mournful. Does it genuinely bother him? “Not really, but sometimes you do feel inadequate. I should probably have a better grasp of it all.” Whishaw is gentle and engaging and has a great range as an actor. There’s something subtle about his performances, whether as the tragic young poet John Keats in Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, or his fantastic, constantly shifting portrayal – from slyly manipulative, to fragile, to courageous, as well as inadvertently comedic – of Norman Scott, the lover of Jeremy Thorpe, in 2018 BBC mini-series A Very English Scandal. The actor had standout acclaim for his 2004 Hamlet at the Old Vic, at the age of 23, only a year after leaving Rada – with much being made in the build-up of him being an unknown, state-educated youth from Bedfordshire. And, then, there are his adorable voiceovers for the Paddington films and the clumsy bear’s encounter with the late Queen Elizabeth II for her Platinum Jubilee weekend, in June 2022. Did he meet the Queen? He didn’t go to Buckingham Palace for the filming, but had met her when she visited Rada as patron of the drama school: “She came and shook our… No, no,” he corrects himself with a grin – “we didn’t shake, we genuflected to Her Majesty. I did think she was lovely in that sketch.” It was only three months later that she died at the age of 96, so she must have been quite frail. “Yes, it was touching, actually, as well as kind of amazing.” He is reminded that Keats – “I often think about him” – died when he was only 25; Whishaw has just turned an elfin 44. How does he feel about ageing? “I feel great. I mean, what can you do? It’s inevitable, so we need to accept it, don’t you think?” In April 2023, he was sent the script to two episodes of Black Doves; they started shooting in October, finishing in March. He is tremendously attractive in the role of Sam Young; cool, laconic, deadpan, mysterious, sexy, with a secret sadness, coupled with his luminous skin, green eyes and coal-black hair. What drew him to the part? “I enjoyed that it trod a line between being vaguely ludicrous and thrilling and funny and dark. I liked that it has this combination of things. I was up for something fun – and a queer assassin had a certain interest for me. I wanted to read more.” He’s talked quite a lot about how his paternal grandfather served in the German army during the Second World War, while working as a spy for the British government. “Yes, our real family name is Stellmacher and he was Russian-German – actually, he had a Ukrainian mother,” the actor corrects himself, "and a German father". He says that, regrettably, he doesn’t speak any other languages. His grandfather’s name was originally Jean Vladimir Stellmacher, which he changed to John Victor Whishaw: “I knew him, but he died when I was about 13. "He was quite a scary man – very silent, very forbidding, and I mostly remember him sitting in an armchair, smoking. He had an ashtray in the shape of a skull, which he flicked his ash into. He was a troubled soul, but then his was a troubled generation and they were difficult times.” He’s been in some other spy thrillers, like the BBC’s London Spy in 2015 and, of course, with his grandfather having been an actual spy, one wonders whether he could imagine himself as one? "No, no, no – you have to be so clever and… I guess it must require a certain coldness in your deepest self. Or some kind of strange, profound conviction or something. You’d have to have a kind of steel that I couldn’t say I have." We are drawing to a close and my Christmas questions loom. “I go to see my mum [he describes her as being “very beautiful”] and as she is also a twin [he has a fraternal twin, James], I usually spend Christmas Day with her and her twin sister, my Auntie Carol. And then on Boxing Day, I go to see my dad. I also see my brother and I do enjoy Christmas for my niece and nephew.” How was this time for you when you were little? “I remember loving Christmas as a child and finding it a very magical time.” As for Christmas telly: “I’m going to say my favourite television, because for some reason it’s what I frequently revert to – Victoria Wood. I love to watch her. I think she was a great genius and I spent a lot of my childhood watching her. I still find her hilarious and strangely comforting. “I’m in a show at the moment [one of the masterpieces of modern theatre, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett] and Sunday is such a day of exhaustion, before it begins on Monday, that I’m just on the couch – and I watch Victoria Wood repeats.” And as for Black Doves, the television show he’s promoting now, he’s happy there’s a second series and, yes, I do know whether he’s going to be in it or not. But, to quote the famous spy line – I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Black Doves is available to stream on Netflix from 5th December. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Wolf Hall returns with a fiery Henry VIII and wise counsellor Thomas Cromwell by his side… star Damian Lewis and director Peter Kosminsky slip into character for RT
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in November 2024. Add Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to your watchlist So this is a first. My interviewee has walked out. Not in a flounce or in uncontrolled anger but dead casually, as though it’s no real biggy. But it is. Our one-hour interview, agreed in writing, was to be done remotely – as many are since Covid – with our cameras on and an agreement that RT will use clips to promote the return, after almost ten years, of the BBC historical drama Wolf Hall. However, this fellow turns up ten minutes late, no apology offered, with his camera off. Then, when asked if he would mind making up the time at the end, he announces that not only will he not do that but, as a matter of fact, as he mentioned just before the interview started, he will have to “bail” 15 minutes early, thereby cutting our agreed time by half (reduced yet further when he pulls the plug). View oEmbed on the source website It’s cunning to do it on the spot when there’s not a lot that can be done about it. Capricious, because that’s how his behaviour comes across. Controlling, generally. It’s interesting that these traits are shared by Henry VIII, the character he plays in BBC1’s six-part adaptation of the last part of the late Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. Is it method acting in reverse with Damian Lewis, perhaps? And if so, then it’s tempting to say that his co-interviewee today, director Peter Kosminsky, who is as reasonable in his manner as Lewis is brusque, is his Cromwell, not only enabling his star’s behaviour but left to clear up the departed despot’s mess. To start with, the invisible Lewis is not happy about the positioning of my camera. “Can you alter your framing a bit?” You don’t like the way I have the camera? “No.” I make an adjustment. “That’s better.” While acknowledging the truism that great writing makes the universal out of all characters regardless of time and place, my first question –both innocuous and straightforward enough – is to ask them what they consider the relevance of Henry VIII today. Kosminsky: “Damian should probably speak since he’s playing Henry…” Lewis: “Well, I think that someone as historically significant as Henry VIII will always remain significant,” he starts and then suddenly turns. “Unless your question is suggesting such an un-woke character as Henry VIII, shot through a sort of contemporary prism, should no longer be seen on TV? But I’d obviously have to reject that idea.” Come on now, do I look like a Generation Z-er? “Well, it’s a bit of an odd question as to whether it’s relevant or not…” Of course, the question was to ask the ways in which the character and series are relevant, not to question his relevance per se. Fortunately, Cromwell – I mean Kosminsky – steps in to smooth things over and gives an eloquent and lengthy reply. “Let me dive in for a second. You know what, Ginny, I think it couldn’t be more relevant,” he says. “Look around the world: Vladimir Putin to take an example. There are despots springing up all over the world. We might have another despot back in the White House in the next two or three months, if we’re very unlucky, who’s promising to be a dictator from day one. “And we see the same tendency in Europe and our own country as we watch the Conservatives decide which extreme right-winger they should have as their leader. I think it’s a very relevant time to look at one of the last periods of English history where we effectively had an all-powerful ruler, and a capricious individual at that. “And I should tell you, Damian plays him brilliantly and chillingly in the series. And therein lies Cromwell’s downfall really – that Henry takes changeable to a ludicrous level. He is both all-powerful and almost impossible to second-guess. You never know which Henry you’re going to encounter each morning or when you come in after lunch. It’s the most destabilising and terrifying state of affairs. Cromwell’s trying to manage and handle this guy and he just never knows what’s going to face him. So, I think it’s a fantastically relevant time to take a look at the politics of despotism.” Damian, is there anything freeing or exhilarating about playing such a badly-behaved character? “Well, acting is therapeutic, for sure, but I don’t think you’d want to be playing these kinds of people too often because they do wear you down over time. So, yes, there is a freedom, there is something therapeutic to be able to behave in whatever way you want, because any good drama most of the time explores us in extremis – our excesses, our greatest conflicts and our greatest triumphs – and life isn’t always like that. Life can be a bit more grey and a bit more dithering. “So to be in dramas in which you are playing characters who excel or exceed or surpass, who destroy or are in some way living life at a zenith, that is fun and therapeutic to do, yeah.” Or just to be bad? I’m also thinking of Gary Oldman here, playing a character in Slow Horses where everything is greasy, from his hair to his food to his farts. There’s a baseness in all of us that might be fun to exaggerate and embody? “No,” Lewis says. “I think that’s a generalisation. It might be upsetting to some people.” Has it been upsetting to you? “No, because Henry is someone to be played with relish, because that’s who he was himself. He played his own life with relish, so you have to engage with him at that level.” Henry VIII must be a great character to get your teeth into. I understand you have become a bit of a Tudor specialist; have you always been a history buff? “Oh, yes. I enjoyed history very much. I enjoy the university of acting. You can continue to put yourself through an education if you’re careful and clever in your choice of roles; if you’re fortunate enough to have choice in the first place. So, yes, playing someone like Henry VIII does open an opportunity to read extensively about Tudor history and that is certainly partly what interests me about the roles I take.” We talk about music for a bit as, like Henry, Lewis is a keen sportsman and musician. When Lewis, now 53, left Eton, he busked in London Tube stations and in France. During lockdown, he took up playing the guitar again. Following the death of his wife, Peaky Blinders actor Helen McCrory, of breast cancer at the age of 52 in April 2021, Lewis wrote some very personal songs in his grief which feature on his debut album, Mission Creep, released last year. Lewis enjoys touring and hanging out with musicians, and as long as there’s interest from the public – “it has to wash its own face,” he says – he will keep at it. As a fellow music lover, I’m intrigued by his busking days and which song pulled in the most money. “I did a smorgasbord of greatest hits from back in the day. The Elvis medley went down very well.” What was your Tube station? Might I have seen you? “No, you won’t have seen me.” Why not? Not even randomly, as a commuter? “You might have done – 30 years ago.” Even in this awkward interview, Lewis then kindly agrees to listen to the new album of a former prisoner I know through my charity Liberty Choir who has released an album in the same vein as his “roots” music. Getting back to Wolf Hall, my thoughts are that they will both have opinions on the monarchyitself, then and now, considering they have spent so much time studying one of England’s most famous royals. Are you a monarchist, republican or indifferent, Peter? “With the greatest of respect, Ginny, I don’t think that’s relevant at all. I’m happy to talk about the show, but I don’t want to talk about my own personal political views one way or the other. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to respond on that.” OK. What about you, Damian? “I think I’m going to take the same view as Peter. Stick to Wolf Hall will probably be the best way.” OK, here’s a question that cannot offend, surely: does working on such a project shift your opinion, or deepen your understanding and respect – or otherwise – of the monarchy? Kosminsky: “For me, not at all.” He then begins a long and fascinating discourse about barbaric practices in the name of religion. The director undertook extensive research on the Islamist militant group Isis for The State, his 2017 Channel 4 series that dramatised the experiences of four young British Muslims who fly to Syria to join the extremists. “We rightly condemn that, but it’s interesting that when Christianity was at a similar stage of development, 500 years ago, similar things were done in this country in the name of religion.” He talks about the hanging, drawing and quartering, pulling the entrails out of people, beheading them and burning them alive in public. This is followed by Kosminsky explaining his fascination with the way that religious worship evolved so swiftly in Cromwell’s time. “We see the beginnings of Protestantism really, and Cromwell and Henry were at the vanguard of that. And I’m thinking, actually, it’s the issue of religion and persecution of religion that for me were the biggest lessons to be learned. I don’t know what Damian has to say about that. I’m not sure we’ve ever discussed it…” Kosminsky continues, following an unfilled pause, talking about the modernisation of the Church of England and expounding on the democratisation of religion. “The fact that ordinary English people could attend church and understand what was being said in their own language by a priest that faced them, rather than facing the altar, was a revolutionary change. And Anne Boleyn was also a great religious reformer.” Damian, are you a religious or spiritual person? “That’s a personal question I don’t want to answer either, really.” Kosminsky: “We’re both quite private people. We’d love to talk to you about the show, but I don’t think either of us particularly thought this was going to be an interview about our own personal views and opinions.” Oh, but we don’t do interviews that are just about the show. Surely, I think to myself, they must realise journalism is not the same as public relations. The joy of interviewing person-to-person, even remotely, is that you learn something, hopefully new, about that person. Readers want to know more about those behind the art and their inspirations. Lewis: Ginny, there’s been a misunderstanding. I was very clear that I wasn’t doing any profiles and it’s starting to feel a bit like a profile, so… Peter, will you forgive me, I’ve got to go at quarter past, so I’m going to jump off and leave you with Peter, who’s… Kosminsky: You pop off, Damian. Lewis: “…very eloquent about the show, which is the best way to go forward.” Kosminsky: “OK, mate, good talking to you.” I’m very pleased to speak to you, Peter, but this is not how I do interviews. Kosminsky: “I’m not trying to be difficult, Ginny. I love your journalism.” But then you know my approach? “There’s nothing wrong with asking these questions. They’ve just taken Damian and me by surprise and, as I say, we’re both quite private people. But ask the questions and I’ll see if I can answer them.” It’s Cromwell (Kosminsky) again doing damage control for Henry (Lewis). It’s amusing in a way to consider that in the books and the series Henry VIII is sort of the minor figure; all our interest is focused on clever Cromwell, played by Mark Rylance. “Henry’s not a minor figure in history, of course; he’s a far greater figure for every single one of us who was educated in England. And although Cromwell is the central character in the way you say, his entire life is defined by how the hell you deal with this seriously capricious,ungovernable individual. I mean, Henry killed off all the various people who served him. “Cromwell wasn’t the only one and he spent ten years trying to survive and make some changes that he thought were important in English society at that time. So, yes, it all starts and ends with Cromwell, but Cromwell’s life is defined by Henry.” The Mirror and the Light covers the last four years of Cromwell’s life, from 1536 to 1540. “What’s interesting is that it’s [almost] ten years since the last television series and the two series cover a ten-year period in Thomas Cromwell’s life from when he comes to the attention of Henry VIII to the point where Henry VIII executes him. “Hilary Mantel’s brilliance was to take someone who has always been portrayed as a villain, a doer of evil from Elizabethan times, and after five years of research, before she put pen to paper, say, ‘Hang on, this person has their own story, and they were the hero of their own lives.’ “The one thing she taught me was that these people don’t know they are figures in history. Anne Boleyn doesn’t know she is going to be one of six [the new series begins with scenes of her on the way to her execution and Henry marrying Jane Seymour]. She does not know that she is going to be beheaded by a swordsman from Calais. And obviously for us, the story ends the moment Cromwell is extinguished.” It’s clearly still painful for Kosminsky to have lost someone whose friendship, as well as working partnership, meant so much to him. Mantel, who had suffered ill health most of her life, died in September 2022, aged 70, from complications in the aftermath of a stroke that struck her down three days earlier. The last part of the Cromwell trilogy had been published two and a half years earlier in March 2020. Mantel was open about how the original television series, adapted from the first two novels in the series, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, had influenced her writing of the last book – she even sent Kosminsky sections of it, in 100-page instalments, as she completed them for his comments. When Kosminsky was first approached to direct the BBC adaptation he thought that it was a wind-up “and so it was already a matter of some astonishment that I would be entrusted with something like this”. Kosminsky, at this point, was a respected maker of dramas about big issues that had their roots in real life. “But then to develop a close relationship with a literary genius, a double Booker Prize winner, an ex-documentary-maker like myself, I had to pinch myself, really. “But then she said to me, ‘I always imagined this shot with a hand-held camera, almost as if the boom dropped into shot from time to time... It shouldn’t be a stuffy, proscenium-arch costume drama. It needs to feel of the moment and real.’ Then I started to think that I did legitimately have a role here.” He goes on to say that the writer was never precious about her “much garlanded” material. “Her attitude was, ‘I’m here to act as a resource for you. Ask me what you want.’ And she would respond to emails within a couple of hours maximum, at great length and in great detail as we were preparing the show.” The script work by Peter Straughan had all been done when Mantel died. “It was a horrible shock, so completely out of the blue. She was a close friend and we were all devastated. And this was her last completed novel – and probably the acme of her working life – so you feel the weight of responsibility to bring that last novel to the screen in a way that she would have been pleased with and that’s what I have been living and breathing for the last ten years.” I can see your emotion. “Well, yes, I miss her. We missed her every day of the shoot when we couldn’t consult with her or check in with her. It’s been tough, but not as tough as for her family, obviously.” Just as it is a close relationship with a writer, it’s the same with an actor, he says: “It’s almost a love affair, Ginny.” When the actors are cast, it’s not a question of asking them to do the lines a bit faster. “You’re talking about emotion, you’re peeling away the layers of the onion and saying, ‘Where’s that line coming from? What’s the emotional drive behind that line?’ Mark Rylance received a Bafta for his Cromwell in the first series of Wolf Hall, but Kosminsky thinks this second part will be the actor’s defining role. “The original, where he got so many accolades, is the story of a man on the rise with nothing to lose; a man who is almost on the streets who sees an opportunity and grasps it with both hands. It’s a real exercise in chutzpah. “But The Mirror and the Light is something different. In the original, Cromwell was the rebel fighting the establishment, clawing his way up and clawing them aside. In this series, he is the establishment and the only way is down. And he falls spectacularly. “I can’t speak for actors – although they are my life’s study – but I would have thought to play developing darkness, developing despair, clinging on with your fingertips, is a more challenging experience than playing the rambunctious rise. And I think this is the most powerful performance ever by Sir Mark Rylance, as I should call him, who rises to the challenge brilliantly. “You get very close to these people. They trust you to go on that journey with them. So your emotions are engaged and if they are hurting, if they’re down – and Cromwell goes down a very dark tunnel in this series – my job was to go down that tunnel with Mark. And, yes, of course it has an impact. You don’t just take that off like an overcoat and go off for a beer. You know, it ripples on.” There’s so much respect, and tenderness almost, here between the director and his actors who are trying to create something worthwhile. Which is, in the end, what we are all trying to do: shed some light on the mirror.
"There are lots of irritating things and I like them"
Subtitles, new versions of Cluedo, mint KitKats, loud social gatherings… David Mitchell takes delightful exception to them all
Add Ludwig to your watchlist Imagine the exhilaration of having a one-man comedy show performed for you as the only VIP guest. Not a tiresome, “wacky”, trying-too-hard, parade-of-funny-voices performance, not even a conscious performance, either – more a gentle glide into a delicious rant here, a quietly witty observation there and an effortless scattering of bons mots everywhere. David Mitchell – the actor, writer, comedian, sometime Observer columnist, panel and quiz show host and guest – starts by acknowledging that, as in his new BBC series Ludwig, he has been in the fortunate, audition-free position of having all of his roles created for him. “It’s never happened as directly before,” he says, “but every major part I’ve played before has been written for me. “Peep Show was written for me and Rob [Webb], and then when Ben Elton wrote Upstart Crow [with Mitchell as Shakespeare], he sent the script to the BBC and initially said, ‘I’m looking for a younger David Mitchell.’” We both laugh, a touch ruefully... tempus fugit, and all that. “But with make-up and figuring that in the 16th century by the time you were 30, you looked like you were 50, it was fine.” View oEmbed on the source website Mitchell’s instinctive brake if he feels he’s steering too close to self-serving waters is humour: “It’s the best way of being cast. I would advise it to all actors. If they’ve got you in mind already, you’re ahead of the pack, because no one is going to be as much like you as you are.” We move onto the co-creator and writer (with Sam Bain) of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong, and his more recent global hit series all about the appalling behaviour at the heart of an American media empire family, Succession. Both shows share great writing but could hardly be more different, could they? “It’s definitely there in the whole sense of the futility and laughability of human endeavour,” Mitchell observes. “What he’s had the imagination to create is a world where you realise these people in positions of enormous power and influence are just like the people in the flat in Croydon who can’t get their relationships right. “People in positions of power may in general have above-average intelligence, but they’re still flawed, feeble, self-interested, disappointing humans, a lot of the time. I think taking the warm but also contemptuous view of humanity that he has in Peep Show, and putting that on the huge stage of these incredibly wealthy, entitled people was brilliant. So there is a continuity thread. And obviously the dialogue – and he wrote a lot of it – is superb throughout.” Did he want a part in Succession? “I probably wouldn’t have said no.” A quick pivot away for ironic distance… “It would have been amazing to have been in Succession but I couldn’t have played any of the parts better than the people in it, unfortunately. You don’t look at any of those actors and think, ‘Oh, they’ve dropped the ball there.’ I always worry I’d look British and s**t in that context.” John “Ludwig” Taylor – Mitchell’s new character – is a solitary puzzle-setter whose identical twin brother James, a sociable family man and DCI in Cambridge’s Major Investigations Team, has gone missing. James’s wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell-Martin), a friend of the twins since childhood, has summoned John to assume the identity of his brother and – highly challenging for anyone, let alone a reclusive oddball – go into the office police headquarters to solve the mystery. The problem for Lucy is that Ludwig (John’s chosen nom de plume after his favourite composer since childhood) can’t help but solve murders in each episode, using puzzles, which distracts him from the job at hand. On set he will do a crossword when waiting – “although not on Ludwig,” a giggle, “because it would be a bit like a busman’s holiday.” What personality traits does he share with his character? “I think the fundamental thing is that both he and I are risk-averse. In lots of ways I am a shy, introverted person. But I’m also a professional performer and that’s a very extrovert thing to do. However, there is a side of me that fully empathises with the life John wants [as a hermit]. But it wouldn’t make me happy and I suspect that means I’m not a real introvert. “A lot of performers have that oscillation between tremendous self-confidence and tremendous self-loathing. The self-loathing is the thing to emphasise when you’re talking about yourself because the self-confidence sounds unbearable. So sometimes I feel like I’ve failed myself and I want to do better, but also sometimes I feel, ‘That was amazing! They all clapped!’” He is sweetly delighted when I confess that my wife and I love “soft murder” – “That’s a great phrase,” he says, adding slightly dreamily, “soft murder is ‘fun’ murder, ‘puzzle’ murder, not traumatising ‘a child has disappeared’ murder.” Yes, Miss Marple, Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise… “Scandi murder, though, that’s hard.” One of the appealing things about Mitchell is that his self-deprecation is so recognisable and authentic. He jokes several times that he would like to present an image of himself as someone different to who he is – the fantasy Mitchell is a bien-pensant intellectual who always has a novel on the go (he loves reading but is slow at it; “I’m embarrassed by how few books I’ve read”), a devoted theatre-goer whose taste in cinema is intense and foreign. When I say he should watch the Professor T detective series in the original (Belgian) before our one starring Ben Miller (also excellent), his wary response is: “But it’s subtitles, isn’t it?” Is that a problem? “It’s... not an advantage. It’s not a deal breaker, but it just means you can’t watch it while you’re eating dinner because if you look down... “I know I ought to love subtitles and I would like to project myself as ‘That is where I am in the culture’ – somebody who loves nothing more than a wonderful piece of foreign language cinema. And what a terrible disadvantage it is for it to be in our horrible vernacular. So officially I am on Team Subtitle, but I just find it slightly impractical, not being able to understand what they’re f***ing saying.” His parents Ian and Kathy are still alive and Mitchell, who turned 50 this summer, recalls his childhood with an amused affection. He has a brother Daniel, younger by seven years, almost the same gap as that between his daughters – Barbara, born in 2015, and June Violet in October last year – with Victoria Coren of Only Connect fame. The Mitchells Senior were hotel managers for Trusthouse Forte and it’s part of their family folklore that David, as a baby, would be put in a large cupboard where the cleaning equipment was kept because in those days there was also a telephone there: “You could get a baby-minding service from the reception, but what you did was leave your phone off the hook and the person in reception would hear if the baby cried. “Not something that today would be considered sufficiently safe. And, anyway, the family mythology is that I was in this cleaning cupboard and that my first word was ‘Hoover’. ” As he grew older, his parents moved to the Oxford suburb of Headington to lecture in hotel management at what was then Oxford Polytechnic – “I grew up in the house my parents still live in. They always described it as: ‘We stopped managing hotels to be there for you.’ But my dad found it quite stressful, and my mum I think always missed it.” From childhood on, he has always been fascinated by murder stories – the Joan Hickson Miss Marples, David Suchet’s Poirot, Holmes – both Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. “Growing up in Oxford, of course we loved watching Inspector Morse – it was one of the last programmes I watched with my parents as a teenager. These shows, such as Only Murders in the Building, are my complete comfort zone for television.” He reminisces about family holidays in Brittany, getting the ferry from Portsmouth to Cherbourg to stay in a static caravan, later graduating to gites. An abiding memory is of the family in the car, he and his baby brother listening to a tape of Bernard Cribbins reading an abridged version of Swallows and Amazons. “I remember the hot car, the long journey and this tape that we’d listen to again and again to the extent that Daniel could do the tune of the words. It would go ‘Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome’ [ he recites in a bright RP voice] and he would go, with the exact same intonation, ‘Swarrrann and Aranaaans by Artharrransaan.’ It was adorable.” A typical Coren Mitchell family activity at the moment is playing Cluedo. “It’s brilliant! We’ve started playing it a lot with the eldest – the youngest is not quite up to it yet but will hopefully be persuaded to play in her little fenced-off zone.” He doesn’t like the way there have been efforts to modernise the game – “It was set in an idealised 1930s country house murder scenario – the golden age of crime. So, to bring it up to date is to miss the point.” Does it irritate him a lot? “Yes, I don’t think they understand the appeal of the product they’re trying to ‘improve’ and that’s often the way. I don’t approve of mint KitKats, either.” Oooh, who doesn’t love a Mitchell irritability jag. “There are lots of irritating things and I quite like them,” he says. “I’ve always found, as somebody who tries to find something funny to say, that a lot of that comes from things that irritate me.” Can he give me some more? “Well, you say ‘give me’ – that’s like doing the prep for an episode of Room 101. What you’re asking for is dense comic material. Blimey, if I could do it that quickly I’d be touring in a one-man show!” I still remember Tracey Emin’s two bugbears: clowns and cocaine. “Well, I’ve never had cocaine so I don’t think it would be fair of me to speak ill of it,” – which may be just the funniest line in more than four decades of interviewing – “for all I know, it’s great!” He settles on the “Cluedo thing”, before – boom – he lands on one and takes off on a magnificent rant… “I know I’m not going to sound young when I say this, but it has always irritated me that a large number of social gatherings – when the entire purpose of them is for people to chat – are drowned out by music. “Now, I understand there are social gatherings where a key part is to dance. And I’m fine with that – and the music needs to be loud for that. But you go to parties and there’s no dancefloor, no one is going to dance, it would be absurd to dance, it’s just about chatting and you can’t hear a thing. Now that, I think, is so unnecessary and I don’t understand it. I mean, you must be familiar with this? “It’s quite often, like, a BBC drinks do. They’ve given the organisation to someone who organises such events and people like that think what people want is to be drowned out by music all the time. Because they come from a different milieu than the middle-aged people who are coming out generally to have a chat. I’m not sure it would be worthy of the one-man show, it might not be funny enough, but it’s definitely exquisitely annoying.” Do millennials annoy him? “I would try not, in any circumstances – particularly in an interview, to dismiss a whole generation. I just don’t know if that’s a way to push DVDs. Not that millennials buy DVDs [which he still watches]. But it does feel, for the first time in a while,” he concedes, “that there is a generational divide.” The back story to David and Victoria’s marriage in 2012 is quite well known. They met at a party, he was instantly smitten, but she, alas, chose Another Suitor, leaving him – a man who likes nothing more than to amuse – pining for three long years of melancholia. But eventually Victoria was ready for him and – so far so good, a happy ending. We must assume that he does believe, in his case, in love at first sight? “Oh yes, but the complication there is that I think I met her briefly several years earlier.” Really? “Victoria disputes that, and then she gets irritated with me for not having fallen in love with her on the first occasion when we met – when I say we met,” he corrects himself. As well as being a quiz show presenter, Coren Mitchell is a poker champion and David accompanied her to big and small poker tournaments – the first one in Nottingham and another in a place he least expected to go, Las Vegas – which he, also unexpectedly, completely fell for. He’s extremely proud that his wife is the first woman to have won the European Poker Tournament and is the only person – man or woman – at this point to have won two. Mitchell has over the years been notably uxorious about his wife. Does he believe there is a lover and a lovee in any relationship and if so, is he the former? “Oh, I don’t think so. One of the things I love about her is – I think she really loves me. For a relationship to carry on and succeed, it’s got to be mutual. “She’s obviously my favourite person in the world and very bright, but if I were to try and define it more, the thing I find incredibly attractive is that she has the intellectual self-confidence not to project her self-confidence all the time. “This is sort of vital as to why we’ve got a good marriage – she thinks intelligence should primarily be used for jokes. And I completely agree with that.” If I were to interview Victoria, would she speak about him with a similar heartfelt eloquence? “The thing about it is – in an interview people often ask about her. And when I’m asked about her, I’m going to say that I love her and she’s amazing. But I wouldn’t have brought her up. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. She’s often on my mind. At the same time, I think I have a very happy marriage to a wonderful person, but I don’t consider that to be of broader interest. “And so I always feel in this situation that I don’t want to be coy and say, ‘I refuse to discuss my wife – let’s talk about scene 15, it’s such a wonderful puzzle.’ But at the same time, by answering the implication can be that, ‘He can’t stop going on about his wife – OK. You like your wife. Get over it.’” David Mitchell – the one-man show on tour? He should definitely do it.
David Mitchell on new detective series Ludwig, his career so far and what irritates him
The Ludwig leading actor chats to Radio Times about the upcoming series, Succession's Jesse Armstrong and not being a "real introvert".
Imagine the exhilaration of having a one-man comedy show performed for you as the only VIP guest. Not a tiresome, “wacky”, trying-too-hard, parade-of-funny-voices performance, not even a conscious performance, either – more a gentle glide into a delicious rant here, a quietly witty observation there and an effortless scattering of bons mots everywhere. David Mitchell – the actor, writer, comedian, sometime Observer columnist, panel and quiz show host and guest – starts by acknowledging that, as in his new BBC series Ludwig, he has been in the fortunate, audition-free position of having all of his roles created for him. “It’s never happened as directly before,” he says, “but every major part I’ve played before has been written for me. “Peep Show was written for me and Rob [Webb], and then when Ben Elton wrote Upstart Crow [with Mitchell as Shakespeare], he sent the script to the BBC and initially said, ‘I’m looking for a younger David Mitchell.’” We both laugh, a touch ruefully... tempus fugit, and all that. “But with make-up and figuring that in the 16th century by the time you were 30, you looked like you were 50, it was fine.” Mitchell’s instinctive brake if he feels he’s steering too close to self-serving waters is humour: “It’s the best way of being cast. I would advise it to all actors. If they’ve got you in mind already, you’re ahead of the pack, because no one is going to be as much like you as you are.” We move onto the co-creator and writer (with Sam Bain) of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong, and his more recent global hit series all about the appalling behaviour at the heart of an American media empire family, Succession. Both shows share great writing but could hardly be more different, could they? “It’s definitely there in the whole sense of the futility and laughability of human endeavour,” Mitchell observes. “What he’s had the imagination to create is a world where you realise these people in positions of enormous power and influence are just like the people in the flat in Croydon who can’t get their relationships right. “People in positions of power may in general have above-average intelligence, but they’re still flawed, feeble, self-interested, disappointing humans, a lot of the time. I think taking the warm but also contemptuous view of humanity that he has in Peep Show, and putting that on the huge stage of these incredibly wealthy, entitled people was brilliant. So there is a continuity thread. And obviously the dialogue – and he wrote a lot of it – is superb throughout.” Did he want a part in Succession? “I probably wouldn’t have said no.” A quick pivot away for ironic distance… “It would have been amazing to have been in Succession but I couldn’t have played any of the parts better than the people in it, unfortunately. You don’t look at any of those actors and think, ‘Oh, they’ve dropped the ball there.’ I always worry I’d look British and s**t in that context.” John “Ludwig” Taylor – Mitchell’s new character – is a solitary puzzle-setter whose identical twin brother James, a sociable family man and DCI in Cambridge’s Major Investigations Team, has gone missing. James’s wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell-Martin), a friend of the twins since childhood, has summoned John to assume the identity of his brother and – highly challenging for anyone, let alone a reclusive oddball – go into the office police headquarters to solve the mystery. The problem for Lucy is that Ludwig (John’s chosen nom de plume after his favourite composer since childhood) can’t help but solve murders in each episode, using puzzles, which distracts him from the job at hand. On set he will do a crossword when waiting – “although not on Ludwig,” a giggle, “because it would be a bit like a busman’s holiday.” What personality traits does he share with his character? “I think the fundamental thing is that both he and I are risk-averse. In lots of ways I am a shy, introverted person. But I’m also a professional performer and that’s a very extrovert thing to do. However, there is a side of me that fully empathises with the life John wants [as a hermit]. But it wouldn’t make me happy and I suspect that means I’m not a real introvert. “A lot of performers have that oscillation between tremendous self-confidence and tremendous self-loathing. The self-loathing is the thing to emphasise when you’re talking about yourself because the self-confidence sounds unbearable. So sometimes I feel like I’ve failed myself and I want to do better, but also sometimes I feel, ‘That was amazing! They all clapped!’” He is sweetly delighted when I confess that my wife and I love “soft murder” – “That’s a great phrase,” he says, adding slightly dreamily, “soft murder is ‘fun’ murder, ‘puzzle’ murder, not traumatising ‘a child has disappeared’ murder.” Yes, Miss Marple, Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise… “Scandi murder, though, that’s hard.” One of the appealing things about Mitchell is that his self-deprecation is so recognisable and authentic. He jokes several times that he would like to present an image of himself as someone different to who he is – the fantasy Mitchell is a bien-pensant intellectual who always has a novel on the go (he loves reading but is slow at it; “I’m embarrassed by how few books I’ve read”), a devoted theatre-goer whose taste in cinema is intense and foreign. When I say he should watch the Professor T detective series in the original (Belgian) before our one starring Ben Miller (also excellent), his wary response is: “But it’s subtitles, isn’t it?” Is that a problem? “It’s... not an advantage. It’s not a deal breaker, but it just means you can’t watch it while you’re eating dinner because if you look down... “I know I ought to love subtitles and I would like to project myself as ‘That is where I am in the culture’ – somebody who loves nothing more than a wonderful piece of foreign language cinema. And what a terrible disadvantage it is for it to be in our horrible vernacular. So officially I am on Team Subtitle, but I just find it slightly impractical, not being able to understand what they’re f***ing saying.” His parents Ian and Kathy are still alive and Mitchell, who turned 50 this summer, recalls his childhood with an amused affection. He has a brother Daniel, younger by seven years, almost the same gap as that between his daughters – Barbara, born in 2015, and June Violet in October last year – with Victoria Coren of Only Connect fame. The Mitchells Senior were hotel managers for Trusthouse Forte and it’s part of their family folklore that David, as a baby, would be put in a large cupboard where the cleaning equipment was kept because in those days there was also a telephone there: “You could get a baby-minding service from the reception, but what you did was leave your phone off the hook and the person in reception would hear if the baby cried. “Not something that today would be considered sufficiently safe. And, anyway, the family mythology is that I was in this cleaning cupboard and that my first word was ‘Hoover’. ” View oEmbed on the source website As he grew older, his parents moved to the Oxford suburb of Headington to lecture in hotel management at what was then Oxford Polytechnic – “I grew up in the house my parents still live in. They always described it as: ‘We stopped managing hotels to be there for you.’ But my dad found it quite stressful, and my mum I think always missed it.” From childhood on, he has always been fascinated by murder stories – the Joan Hickson Miss Marples, David Suchet’s Poirot, Holmes – both Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. “Growing up in Oxford, of course we loved watching Inspector Morse – it was one of the last programmes I watched with my parents as a teenager. These shows, such as Only Murders in the Building, are my complete comfort zone for television.” He reminisces about family holidays in Brittany, getting the ferry from Portsmouth to Cherbourg to stay in a static caravan, later graduating to gites. An abiding memory is of the family in the car, he and his baby brother listening to a tape of Bernard Cribbins reading an abridged version of Swallows and Amazons. “I remember the hot car, the long journey and this tape that we’d listen to again and again to the extent that Daniel could do the tune of the words. It would go ‘Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome’ [ he recites in a bright RP voice] and he would go, with the exact same intonation, ‘Swarrrann and Aranaaans by Artharrransaan.’ It was adorable.” A typical Coren Mitchell family activity at the moment is playing Cluedo. “It’s brilliant! We’ve started playing it a lot with the eldest – the youngest is not quite up to it yet but will hopefully be persuaded to play in her little fenced-off zone.” He doesn’t like the way there have been efforts to modernise the game – “It was set in an idealised 1930s country house murder scenario – the golden age of crime. So, to bring it up to date is to miss the point.” Does it irritate him a lot? “Yes, I don’t think they understand the appeal of the product they’re trying to ‘improve’ and that’s often the way. I don’t approve of mint KitKats, either.” Oooh, who doesn’t love a Mitchell irritability jag. “There are lots of irritating things and I quite like them,” he says. “I’ve always found, as somebody who tries to find something funny to say, that a lot of that comes from things that irritate me.” Can he give me some more? “Well, you say ‘give me’ – that’s like doing the prep for an episode of Room 101. What you’re asking for is dense comic material. Blimey, if I could do it that quickly I’d be touring in a one-man show!” I still remember Tracey Emin’s two bugbears: clowns and cocaine. “Well, I’ve never had cocaine so I don’t think it would be fair of me to speak ill of it,” – which may be just the funniest line in more than four decades of interviewing – “for all I know, it’s great!” He settles on the “Cluedo thing”, before – boom – he lands on one and takes off on a magnificent rant… “I know I’m not going to sound young when I say this, but it has always irritated me that a large number of social gatherings – when the entire purpose of them is for people to chat – are drowned out by music. “Now, I understand there are social gatherings where a key part is to dance. And I’m fine with that – and the music needs to be loud for that. But you go to parties and there’s no dancefloor, no one is going to dance, it would be absurd to dance, it’s just about chatting and you can’t hear a thing. Now that, I think, is so unnecessary and I don’t understand it. I mean, you must be familiar with this? “It’s quite often, like, a BBC drinks do. They’ve given the organisation to someone who organises such events and people like that think what people want is to be drowned out by music all the time. Because they come from a different milieu than the middle-aged people who are coming out generally to have a chat. I’m not sure it would be worthy of the one-man show, it might not be funny enough, but it’s definitely exquisitely annoying.” Do millennials annoy him? “I would try not, in any circumstances – particularly in an interview, to dismiss a whole generation. I just don’t know if that’s a way to push DVDs. Not that millennials buy DVDs [which he still watches]. But it does feel, for the first time in a while,” he concedes, “that there is a generational divide.” The back story to David and Victoria’s marriage in 2012 is quite well known. They met at a party, he was instantly smitten, but she, alas, chose Another Suitor, leaving him – a man who likes nothing more than to amuse – pining for three long years of melancholia. But eventually Victoria was ready for him and – so far so good, a happy ending. We must assume that he does believe, in his case, in love at first sight? “Oh yes, but the complication there is that I think I met her briefly several years earlier.” Really? “Victoria disputes that, and then she gets irritated with me for not having fallen in love with her on the first occasion when we met – when I say we met,” he corrects himself. As well as being a quiz show presenter, Coren Mitchell is a poker champion and David accompanied her to big and small poker tournaments – the first one in Nottingham and another in a place he least expected to go, Las Vegas – which he, also unexpectedly, completely fell for. He’s extremely proud that his wife is the first woman to have won the European Poker Tournament and is the only person – man or woman – at this point to have won two. Mitchell has over the years been notably uxorious about his wife. Does he believe there is a lover and a lovee in any relationship and if so, is he the former? “Oh, I don’t think so. One of the things I love about her is – I think she really loves me. For a relationship to carry on and succeed, it’s got to be mutual. “She’s obviously my favourite person in the world and very bright, but if I were to try and define it more, the thing I find incredibly attractive is that she has the intellectual self-confidence not to project her self-confidence all the time. “This is sort of vital as to why we’ve got a good marriage – she thinks intelligence should primarily be used for jokes. And I completely agree with that.” If I were to interview Victoria, would she speak about him with a similar heartfelt eloquence? “The thing about it is – in an interview people often ask about her. And when I’m asked about her, I’m going to say that I love her and she’s amazing. But I wouldn’t have brought her up. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. She’s often on my mind. At the same time, I think I have a very happy marriage to a wonderful person, but I don’t consider that to be of broader interest. “And so I always feel in this situation that I don’t want to be coy and say, ‘I refuse to discuss my wife – let’s talk about scene 15, it’s such a wonderful puzzle.’ But at the same time, by answering the implication can be that, ‘He can’t stop going on about his wife – OK. You like your wife. Get over it.’” David Mitchell – the one-man show on tour? He should definitely do it. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Ludwig is coming to BBC One and iPlayer on BBC One and iPlayer at 9pm on Wednesday 25th September. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The Sherwood stars on playing saints and sinners in the hit BBC drama
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in August 2024. Add Sherwood to your watchlist. Monica Dolan Monica Dolan plays Ann Branson, a formidable crime-family matriarch who is out to avenge her son’s murder. You’ve been in so many terrific series, from BBC parody W1A to playing serial killer Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult — and then there’s the recent Mr Bates vs the Post Office and now Sherwood. How do you choose your roles? It’s intuitive and instinctive. I look at what’s in front of me and I think, “Do I want to do this?” I didn’t have to audition, playing Ann Branson – by the way, it’s Ann with no “e”, which I kind of like. Makes her a bit meaner somehow. And I didn’t audition for Marion Thorpe [opposite Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal]. But I definitely did have to audition to play Rosemary West. Your performances are brilliantly subtle and you are transformed in each role. Do you get recognised? What I found, particularly after The Post Office, is that people think they know me from somewhere… but what’s extraordinary is how quickly they fill in the blanks of how they know me. Not long ago, I was walking my dog, and this woman said, “I know you. You told me I wasn’t controlling my dog properly.” And I was thinking, “I’ve never met you before in my life and I’ve never told anyone how to control their dog.” Then quite recently I met another woman and she said, “Oh, how’s Philip?” And she started filling in all the people and the relationships of how she knew me. And it’s a bit embarrassing to explain, “I think you might just have seen me on telly”, because it sounds really bigheaded! Sometimes it’s just easier to go, “Yes, that was me with your dog.” You seem to have perfected the banality of evil — in Sherwood, when we first meet you, you’re talking about vegetables but have murder on your mind… Sometimes very unnerving people who are capable of actions that are unthinkable to the rest of us are inclined to give very different things a similar emotional weight. So, when she’s talking about the vegetables, I think she might talk about a body in a similar way. I must say I looked at those lines about the vegetables and thought “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I’ll just say them and see…” Also, I remember when I was reading about Fred West, one of the things that struck me, often when he was talking about inanimate objects, he would call them “he” or “she”. And with people, he would call them “it”. How did you feel about Rosemary West before you played her? I probably approach things in a fairly clinical way. I look at what a person does and think, “Why do they do that?” I don’t judge anyone’s behaviour because it gets in the way and that’s when I get in the way of what the character’s doing. It is challenging, but it’s not going to serve the piece and it’s not going to serve the public if I’m in the way of Rosemary West, saying, “This isn’t a very nice person”. I think people know that. Also, that isn’t my role in the drama. David Harewood David Harewood plays kind and considerate Denis Bottomley, who finds his run-of-the-mill life suddenly turned upside down. Were you a fan of the first series of Sherwood? I only watched it when I was offered the job because I’d been in North America for ten years, going back to Homeland. Sherwood writer James Graham has the ability to paint complex characters but land them in socially conscious dramas that really speak to people. Who’d have thought we could look at the miners’ strike in a new way? Do you remember the strikes? I was a little young to understand what was happening, but I think the way James has written about them brings them back to life. You have played strong, authoritative figures, but in this you’re more vulnerable... Denis is an ordinary man living in extraordinary circumstances. It was something I’d never done before. It was about turning off all the bright lights and fancy stuff, and just being real and normal and quiet. You’ve spoken about people of colour getting big roles in the US. Have things changed in the UK? It’s changing and it’s great to see the younger generation being successful and having the opportunities that we never got. Speaking of which, you recently became president of Rada, your alma mater… I’ve taken it to prove that I’m not simply a diversity man. When I was at Rada, Richard Attenborough was president and we never saw him; previous presidents were also more of a figurehead. My own personal history and the difficulty I had transforming from a student to a professional actor… I think it’s common knowledge that I had a breakdown. My goal is to be hands on, be visible and really help students. It’s a tough business. As you know from experience… I wasn’t prepared for the outside world. At Rada, I was free to play whatever – Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, Chekhov... I loved the classics and I loved being able to turn up on stage and disappear into these characters. Suddenly, when I came out of drama school, I was told, “You can’t do that because you’re black.” Reviewers were brutal. In my first job, I played Romeo and one reviewer said, “He looks more like Mike Tyson than Romeo.” It was personal, it was racist and it was tough to read those things. What have you learnt that you could pass onto the students? That one day you’re in drama school, the next day you’re out in the real world. And personal criticism is difficult to deal with. But criticism is tough for everyone… It is – except when you’re an actor, it’s not a criticism of your work, it’s a criticism of you. You start losing confidence in yourself, your art and talent. When that starts to happen is when you really start to be very vulnerable. Building resilience in young actors is very important. How do you hope to do that? Just by talking. When they come out of drama school, the goal isn’t to get famous or be successful, it’s to work. Find the work, do it to the best of your ability, and what will be will be. We all have difficult times and sometimes it’s the difficult times that are more rewarding, because they teach you resilience. What makes you sad? Thinking of myself before I had my breakdown. Thinking of the little boy, the innocent child I was. What makes you happy? Riding my motorbike.
David Morrissey is famous for taking his work seriously. But sometimes the lad from Liverpool lets the mask slip…
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in August 2024. Add Sherwood to your watchlist. David Morrissey and I start our conversation with some graveyard banter. I share my epitaph with him: ‘Too much is not enough.’ What would his be? “Don’t dance.” Quick as a flash. You don’t like dancing? “No, as in Don’t Dance on my Grave.” (At least one of us has their wits about them.) Has he considered it before? “No, I just thought of it now.” Wow, he’d be good on Have I Got News for You! He loves the show (along with Gogglebox and many others), has never been on it and… yes, come on BBC, of course he would go on if he were asked. Well, this is David Morrissey as rarely seen: a man of smiles and laughter animatedly talking about baking, love, growing into yourself as you age and no longer feeling the need to impress at dinner parties. He’s like a big, playful pussycat – not coiled but alert – with a slow, sideways grin. There’s something beguiling about him, too – an impression of self-awareness about how he might be seen to take himself as seriously as he does his acting and the world beyond, alongside a willingness to toy with that image. He’s currently on screen displaying this lighter side in critically acclaimed BBC sitcom Daddy Issues alongside Aimee Lou Wood, but we’re meeting to talk about the return of Sherwood, the intense crime drama series, written by James Graham and inspired by two actual murders in Nottinghamshire in 2004. It’s set in an ex-mining village, much like the one Graham grew up in. The locals live under long shadows cast by the bitter divisions from the 1984 miners’ strike, with characters still spitting “Scab!” over their pints to former co-workers who breached picket lines. It’s also an investigation into the so-called “spy cops” thought to have infiltrated the mining communities, in the same way they did the women’s protest camps at Greenham Common. The finale of the first season was one of the most watched British dramas of 2022 and exposed the police informer who married, had a family and continues to live in the village where their covert action led to a tragic loss of life. Morrissey’s DCS Ian St Clair – one of only two people who knew the spy’s identity – is, by the start of series two, divorced, has left the police force and is running the Violence Prevention Unit, trying to persuade social services to communicate effectively with one another. Attentive viewers of season one may have noticed that the upright St Clair visibly softened when in the company of Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville in a subtle, multi-layered performance). This tendresse develops at the start of season two in a promising way. Morrissey talks about how in the first series his character is uncomfortable and under pressure, but when he walks into Julie’s house, something changes. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had this,” he says, a propos of the first stirrings of feelings for another person, “but he walks into her house and something about her and her environment means he can relax for the first time. He doesn’t want to drink but he has one because he feels OK in her presence, he feels safe. And later, when they’re on the sofa before watching Pointless, you just see him go, ‘Ahhhh.’” He sighs, decompressing his shoulders. “And there’s something about that sort of pheromone thing or whatever it is…” It’s stronger than love, he says. St Clair’s face crumples at the start of the second season, at the thought of losing Julie. “What he feels in that moment is that he’s losing a connection to his past,” Morrissey’s native Liverpool accent clangs heavily on the “g”. “It might be dangerous, actually, because he’s sort of in love with the time and with an ideal.” But isn’t love always like that, David? When you fall in love, doesn’t that person also, always, represent something more to you? “It is, but it’s also many other things as well. And I think analysis can be paralysis – there’s a sense where you go: ‘I want to dig into this and find the whys and wherefores of it.’ But there’s another bit of you that says: ‘It feels nice; just leave it alone.’ “So my job as an actor,” he says switching from the personal to the professional, “is to question the whys and wherefores.” St Clair is in trauma having lost his marriage and home, so there’s an almost visceral need for him to grab onto Julie: “How it grows and what it becomes is a different thing but at the moment, it’s about love but also her representing a ballast for him.” Is there a chance that Ian St Clair is actually going to be happy? “Oh,” he says. “That’s a big question. I think he gets to a place of… a little contentment and hope. He definitely gets to that. But he’s quite a cautious person.” Oh, go on, jump, Ian! Just jump! Morrissey was married to the writer Esther Freud, sharing their time between homes in Hampstead, London and Walberswick, Suffolk. They have three children: Albie (29, with whom he does a music radio show), Anna (26) and Gene (20). They got together in 1993, married in 2006 and separated in 2020 – spending three decades as a couple before, as a friend explained, “they just couldn’t make it work any longer.” Esther is the daughter of the late painter, Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud; David’s father was a shoe repairman and key cutter who died when the actor, the youngest of four, was 14. His mother worked for Littlewoods. The Morrissey family lived in Knotty Ash, famously the lifelong home of Ken Dodd. David failed his 11-plus and left school at 16 to study at the Everyman Theatre, inspired to act by Ken Loach’s film Kes, thence to Rada. They both have new partners. Morrissey is known for his deep research before he takes on a role: reading Gitta Sereny’s book on Albert Speer and the history of the Hitler Youth to prepare for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; shadowing Peter Mandelson to learn more about Westminster for the thriller, State of Play, which was helpful when he was cast as Gordon Brown, with Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, in The Deal. He has talked about his regret in not attending university. Is this painstaking studying a version of that for him? “It’s an inner-geeky thing,” he says. “I get as much information as I can about the profession my character is working in, and the people I’m representing. I probably only use about ten per cent of the research because you have to forget about it. But you want it inside you at your core.” At 60, he says it’s unlikely he will go to university now: “What I regretted – and don’t any more – was missing out on that sense of being in a big educational establishment; having time and resources to give yourself over to that. I never had that or any higher education, having left school at 16. “Also, there’s two things going on – you do something in the pursuit of knowledge; and you do something because it connects with you and informs you about yourself and how you are in the world. And for me it was the former and it’s now the latter. The former was saying, ‘I need to know more about this so I can talk to people at dinner parties,’ and I don’t have that now. Now it’s more, ‘Oh, that makes sense of where I am and makes sense about us and the human condition and challenges my thinking.’ ” Growing up, he says, “I loved to learn things but I hated being taught. If someone said to me, ‘OK, sit down. This is how you’re going to do this…’ I’d get really antsy. I’d hear them patronising me; I’d hear snobbery; I’d hear a lot of negativity that might not have been there but was to do with chips on my shoulder. But, you know, it might have been there, too.” Morrissey has spoken in the past about the influence his then wife had on both his work ethic and reading tastes, introducing him to writers such as Rachel Cusk and Julie Myerson. He always has a fiction and non-fiction book on the go: he’s just finished Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan’s recent auto-fiction Question 7 and is reading Janet Malcolm’s 1990 book on the ethics of her profession, The Journalist and the Murderer with its notorious opening: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” He also rates Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives, which he must have read with surely some familial interest. He uses London for theatre, which he goes to a lot (he loved the Richard Hawley musical, set in Sheffield, Standing on the Sky’s Edge, seeing it twice in one week), art galleries and gigs, and enthuses about a recent one with the Irish singer CMAT. Do you sing? “No, I speak in tune,” he laughs. “Like Richard Harris.” He returns to Liverpool all the time. “It’s where all my family are; it’s where I grew up; it gave me everything.” The way he pauses between each phrase, the cadence of his speech, makes this love letter to Liverpool sound like a poem. “It’s the city that formed me. For good or bad, it is me.” In a Bafta interview, in 2013, he talked about the dichotomy that is needed as an actor who has to be sensitive and alive to their character while also growing a thick skin to cope with the criticisms they’ll receive. He went on to mention the terrible things people say, not just the critics but the general public, and that male actors as much as female actors are now self-conscious about their bodies. “The insecurities mustn’t stop you walking forward bravely... but it doesn’t get easier, the insecurity… I suffer from it today.” Not to be superficial, but what I really notice are his threads. He’s wearing a sharp suit in what looks like a Prince of Wales check. At 6ft 3in, with endless legs, he is a good clothes’ horse. Yes, he says, “I like clothes. This is Paul Smith, actually, from an old collection.” Does he happily spend money on clothes? “Yes, I do.” He tends to buy more vintage than new nowadays. He points to his navy shirt and we both bend in to peer at his chest to try to make out the designer label but without success. What’s the most frivolous thing about him? He looks stumped. And then with all the world-weary pondering of a Hamlet soliloquy, interrogates himself. “What is my frivolity? I do like working a lot, it’s true – but it’s because I’m interested in the human condition. And in what makes people laugh as much as cry. I mean, I’m not totally serious all the time. I like being with friends and family and having a laugh. I like watching everyone on Gogglebox, I’m a big fan of Lee Mack and I love Have I Got News for You.” Does he enjoy dancing? “I can dance. I can do Northern soul. Not well, but I can throw some shapes.” And, of course, he likes to bake. He’s clearly as chuffed now as he was the day that he won Star Baker on Celebrity Bake Off. He talks about how he made “a very beautiful quiche”, some Bourbon biscuits and a classic red and white marble sponge, which “looked like a dog’s dinner but tasted fantastic…and I got a handshake from Paul!” Not a hug? “Not on camera,” he says, with a final smile and joke, “but I can’t go there.”
Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent talk The Duke and future of the BBC: "It's a fine, fine institution"
"If Kempton was around now, he’d have been fighting to save the BBC; he’d be on the side of the BBC against the Government."
Dame Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent star in The Duke, a film about the life of Kempton Bunton who was charged with stealing Goya's Duke of Wellington portrait from the National Gallery. Kempton (played by Broadbent) strongly and truly believes in the common man, and is vehemently against paying a TV licence as he sees it as a tax he shouldn't have to pay as an elderly man - a debate which rumbles on in 2022, still. Radio Times magazine spoke exclusively with Helen Mirren (who plays Kempton's wife) and Jim Broadbent about The Duke, the BBC, and what's next for the acting royalty. Helen Mirren Dame Helen Mirren, looking like a slightly wayward prima ballerina just back from some barre work – thick pigtail to one side of her pale face, framed by a wide leopardskin scarf as a hairband, and leotard-like T-shirt – throws back her head and roars with laughter. This comes à propos of my making a glancing reference to her as an old glamour-puss. “It’s so interesting that you should say that, Ginny, and I will now confess something to you… one minute before our interview [on Zoom, from her home in Italy], I checked myself and I looked so awful that I went running off to the bathroom to put lipstick on and mascara and I was in such a rush [acts daubing her face in a frenzied way] that I missed my mouth and the mascara went all over the place and now – I just look like a mad old lady. So I’m not really glamorous!” We may all beg to disagree – even pushing 70 (she’s 76 now), she was still being described as a sex-pot, which, incidentally, irritated her – but what is unarguable is that Mirren is definitely far from glamorous in her new role. In The Duke, the final film from director Roger Michell, who died last September, she plays charlady Dorothy Bunton, the drab, worn-down, perpetually on her hands and knees wife of real-life character Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent). What attracted her to play Dorothy? “I loved the character and because the Queen is sticking to me like an old Band-Aid…” Sorry? We both collapse into laughter. “While I am profoundly honoured,” Mirren adjusts herself and does a little bow, “and I honestly couldn’t think of a more interesting and profound person to be stuck on me, nonetheless I am an actress and so I did want to break free a little bit.” Mirren has played the “old Band-Aid”, aka the Queen, to award-winning effect – landing an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta for The Queen, and a Tony and Laurence Olivier Award for The Audience on stage. She also played Elizabeth I (the only actress to have played both Elizabeths on screen) in the eponymous 2005 television series. “But the minute I saw the first scene, of Dorothy on her knees scrubbing out the fireplace,” Mirren says, “I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s a great role,’ and obviously working with Jim is absolutely delightful.” The story of The Duke is that of a real-life Newcastle cab driver prosecuted in 1965 for the theft, four years earlier, from the National Gallery of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Kempton Bunton is an infuriating but rather wonderful man of 60 – working-class, self-educated (he’s forever writing plays and sending them to the BBC, only to be rejected) with strong beliefs and many bug-bears, chief of which is that the television licence is “an unfair tax on ordinary people for those who can’t afford it”. In the film, he creates placards with the slogan “FREE TV FOR THE OAP” and tries to get people to sign petitions and agitate with him. The stolen painting is part of the plot (which has a twist) to raise awareness of the loneliness of the elderly and their need of a TV set for company. The subject of the BBC’s licence fee could hardly be more topical. Mirren says that she “strongly believes that the BBC has to be protected… it’s such an amazing thing, especially when you live in a country – like I do in America a lot of the time [with her American film director husband, Taylor Hackford] – which doesn’t have anything like the BBC. Well, it has PBS, which is full of BBC programmes, but that just scrapes along with a lot of investment by very kind wealthy people. “It would be terrible if that were to become the fate of the BBC. It’s a fine, fine institution. It’s so interesting,” she says, with a definite glint in her eyes, “that as politicians find themselves teetering on the pinnacle of their ambition, they all turn their beady eyes on the BBC because the BBC is turning its beady eyes on them! And they can’t stand it. One after the other, they attack the BBC – and that is exactly why we need the BBC!” When I speak to Broadbent, he says, “If Kempton was around now, he’d have been fighting to save the BBC; he’d be on the side of the BBC against the Government.” He also says that he is prouder of this film than anything he has been in. Mirren smiles when I tell her. “And he’s right, because he’s absolutely wonderful in it. I’d always known at the back of my mind that Jim and I would be a pretty good pairing, although it’s an unlikely pairing – but sometimes the best pairings are the most unlikely.” Is there anyone else she longs to share the screen with? I’d love to see her in a British remake of Netflix hit Grace and Frankie… “It’s not really my sort of thing – I watch documentaries. But if I was Grace, I’d have a real Frankie – Frankie [Frances] de la Tour, because I sort of grew up with her. She was my colleague at the Royal Shakespeare Company and I used to stand in the wings and watch her on the stage – she’s just standing there talking and the audience is loving it and laughing and I could never do that. I always watched her with absolute wonder and admiration.” And how would she like someone like Phoebe Waller-Bridge to write something for her? View oEmbed on the source website “Well, you know, of course!” she says. She recalls sitting at a table with her at the Golden Globes in 2018 when Waller-Bridge was there with her boyfriend, Martin McDonagh, who’d written, produced and directed the film Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, which won two Golden Globes. “Fleabag had been on television in England but no one in America knew her. So I was very excited to be sitting next to her and her guy kept winning everything so our table filled up with Globes. Just as we were leaving, one of the major American comedians recognised her and went up to her so I could see the beginning of the huge success she eventually experienced, and is still experiencing.” I seem to be creating quite a lot of future work for you. “You are, but it’s all comedy! I would rather it was tragic. I’m Russian [she was born Mironov, to an aristocratic Russian émigré and a working-class Englishwoman] and I do have this melodramatic bent.” She gently nudges us back to The Duke “because although it absolutely has comedy –that wonderful, gentle, realistic comedy – it also has real tragedy and feeling in it. I’m hoping that it will become a film that people love as we have loved it.” She talks about seeing Roger Michell, the film’s director, just two weeks before he died, at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. “We lost a really great British film talent there.” Mirren has played unglamorous women before in her long career; going back to her standout role as DCI Jane Tennison in Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect. Then there was her housekeeper in Robert Altman’s period mystery Gosford Park, where, she points out, “I had no make-up on and was very restrained” – but her Dorothy is Mirren as we’ve never seen her before: drudge-y and joyless with the pressure of having to cater to her maddening, idealist husband Kempton. “Yes, it’s frustrating for the pragmatic person who has to put food on the table. That’s the position women have been put in so often – forced into pragmatism. They don’t necessarily want to be pragmatic and realistic and practical but they’re forced into it because if they’re not, then their family’s not going to eat,” she says. “Women are always on the front lines in wars. It’s women you see running to get the water, trying to escape the snipers, and the men are the snipers. So women have always been on the front lines, in a way – just without a gun in their hands, and with no means of defence.” Front lines may be on her mind as she has recently been filming Golda, in which she plays Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, with the Yom Kippur War of 1973 at the centre of the story. The film has drawn controversy around whether a Jewish actress should be playing Meir, prompted by Maureen Lipman, among others. Previously Mirren played a Mossad agent in 2010 thriller The Debt, immersing herself in studies of Hebrew writing and the Holocaust when she was in Israel. She also mentions her character, a Jewish refugee, in 2015 drama Woman in Gold, “so I’ve done it a couple of times, but I think this discussion absolutely has to be had, because it is in the context of playing a very high-profile, highly committed Israeli Jewish woman.” The Israeli director Guy Nattiv insisted that Mirren was the actress he wanted for Golda, when she gave him the opportunity to withdraw the offer. “I said, ‘Look, I’m not Jewish – and really, really think about it because if you want to withdraw the offer to me, I have absolutely no hard feelings. I would absolutely understand if you want to go another route.’ “He did think about it and he said, ‘Yes, I want you to do it,’ and so that gave me, in a way, the confidence to go forward.” She adds that the whole issue of casting has “sort of exploded from the inside out… but I do agree that if you have, say, a brilliant disabled actor and there’s a great disabled role, maybe we should start talking about it – because it’s all about opportunity. And without opportunity, you can do nothing. And if the discussion has to be had around my performance then – oh my God – I hope that I’m all right as Golda, because if I’m not…” Loved this Big RT Interview? Check out these… Louis Theroux on Forbidden America and why the US is appealing for documentary makers Jamie Oliver on The Great Cookbook Challenge and how a bin liner changed his life Jamie Demetriou on The Afterparty and the future of Stath Lets Flats Jim Broadbent Jim Broadbent appears on the screen, blinking and as gently off-beam as the characters he plays; more reserved, if anything, with his voice occasionally sinking into a mumble like a verbal shuffle. In the background of his London study, a fire is blazing, walls of books on either side, with curious puppet sculptures in glass domes on the mantelpiece or perched on the edge of shelves. His late parents, Doreen and Roy, were both artists as well as keen amateur actors, and their son inherited both interests and talents, as well as their love of Lincolnshire where he was born in 1949 and, until recently, owned a house himself. Broadbent and his wife Anastasia Lewis, a painter and former theatre designer, spent their entire lockdown there but sold the house recently to move back to London: “It simplifies life to take away responsibilities as you get older.” The dearly loved actor has done some amazing work and, like Mirren, has won awards galore: an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his supporting role as Iris Murdoch’s husband John Bayley in Richard Eyre’s Iris; a BAFTA and Golden Globe for playing Lord Longford in the television film Longford, as well as being in a roll-call of practically any cherished British film you care to mention. The Duke, in which Broadbent plays the lead role of Kempton Bunton, is one of those slightly deceptive English feel-good films with appealing characters and wry, sometimes sly humour, but which is, au fond, about important issues. “I loved every aspect of the script [by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman],” Broadbent says. “The humour, the characters and the story. And the fact that there is a point to it. It’s a dig at the Establishment, which is always fun, and is always needed. The Establishment is portrayed beautifully. They get a good kicking!” Do you admire Bunton? “I sort of loved him. His heart is so much in the right place and he’s so flawed and he’s such a muddle. He loves his wife but he lies to her. “But then I’ve been fairly selfish myself with my career and putting myself out there. I’ve been obsessed with acting to the exclusion of other people’s interests. I must have been extremely frustrating to my wife an awful lot. Hopefully, I haven’t lied blatantly,” he says, with a sound somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle. “Well, I’m not anything like the degree of obsessive I used to be but it’s something I recognised in Kempton.” I point out that his wife seems to have stuck by him for a long time (they’ve been married for over 30 years), and she was in the business, so… “Yes, she knew what she was in for!” Broadbent says that the BBC is very important to him, but he doesn’t have any of the answers as to how it should be funded. He agrees with David Dimbleby’s comments that you can’t have public service broadcasting without paying for it, but the poorest shouldn’t be charged the same fee as the richest – “That seems reasonable to me.” Kempton Bunton seemed to go to prison on something of a regular basis for his principles: has Broadbent ever been to prison himself? He says that as a student he performed at Holloway and when preparing the role of Lord Longford (the great champion of prisoners’ rights, including, controversially, those of Myra Hindley) visited several different prisons in Lancashire. “I did spend a night in prison once when I was a student,” he admits. “I was with some student friends and I’d had too much to drink so I said I would lie in the back of a friend’s car to sleep it off. But as I was getting in, I was arrested. Helen Mirren speaks out on Golda Meir casting controversy Helen Mirren on the shift in roles for women on TV:"It’s taken much too long, but it's finally happened" Jim Broadbent: “I love the idea of actors being rogues and vagabonds, picking at the weaknesses of the powerful” “I said, ‘What are you arresting me for?’ And the policemen said, ‘For being drunk and incapable.’ And I said, ‘What am I incapable of?’ And they said, ‘Looking after yourself!’ and that’s when my argument stopped! It was just one night, so I was in and out.” I ask him if he considers himself rebellious? “In a sort of understated way,” he says. “I’ve taken risks in the work I’ve chosen to do – with Ken Campbell and Mike Leigh in the early days, when it was a strange thing to go into rehearsals with no script to create your own character.” At 72, he says his health is all right, but memory loss is annoying. Nowadays he makes sure he learns his lines well in advance, whereas he used to wait until rehearsals started. His mother suffered from dementia in her early 80s and he played a character with dementia in Paul Abbott’s 2011 mini series Exile with John Simm. “I think it’s something that worries everyone,” he says, “like when you can’t remember the name of someone you know so well.” Is he given now more to hope or despair? “Despairing hope.” Finally, we talk about how he declined an OBE, saying that there were more deserving recipients than actors. “We get treated well all the time. Actors who get these awards have all won lots of treats along the way doing what they love doing – they don’t need more presents.” And then he adds, with a glimmer of mischief: “But the main reason for turning it down is this. Richard Eyre, when asked why he accepted his knighthood, said, ‘Vanity’, and when I’m asked why I turned it down, I say the same. ‘Vanity. Not a good look. Didn’t suit me.’ ” If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide. This edition of The Big RT Interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
Jimmy McGovern on new BBC prison drama Time: "I didn’t want to write an easy villain"
Time stars Stephen Graham and Sean Bean.
When Jimmy McGovern was growing up in his beloved Liverpool – where he and the remaining seven of his siblings still live, with nephews and nieces galore – it was a source of pride to his family and their neighbours that only one of the residents on their street had gone to prison. “It’s a working-class boast,” the writer laughs wryly. “You say this to a middle-class person who doesn’t understand and they go, ‘The fact that one went to prison is shameful.’ But you couldn’t imagine the street I was born in. They were two-up, two-down rat-ridden slums, they really were. And my poor mother brought up nine kids and that was nothing, that was small. There were Irish Catholic families of 13…” It’s beginning to sound a little like a Monty Python sketch, I dare to joke (McGovern is the most approachable and warm of interviewees). “Yeah, born in a shoe and all that!” he cracks back. “But, you know, it isn’t shameful. In a poverty-stricken area you do get people ending up in prison. I can only speak for myself, but as a young man when I was skint, I did things that were very naughty in order to survive.” What sort of things? “Just pinching and stealing things. Nothing major. I wasn’t brave enough to do a big bank robbery or anything like that – but I could’ve ended up on the wrong side of the law. I could have, but I didn’t and I was lucky.” The much-garlanded writer of TV dramas cut his teeth on the Channel 4 soap Brookside before going on to create ITV’s Cracker in the 1990s: “I found the only way to write Cracker was to be like Cracker – yeah, ‘method writing’ – so I was smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish.” As with BBC One’s The Lakes, The Street and The Accused and ITV’s BAFTA-winning Hillsborough, the docu-drama widely credited for sparking a fresh inquiry into the football stadium tragedy, his new three-part BBC One drama is powerful, affecting and urgent. View oEmbed on the source website The aptly named Time is set in a prison and revolves principally around two characters from either side of the cell doors: decent prison officer Eric McNally (Stephen Graham), who is forced into corruption to ensure the safety of his imprisoned son, and prisoner Mark Cobden (Sean Bean), a teacher who has killed a man when drunk-driving and is seeking atonement while learning how to avoid getting murdered himself while inside. It’s McGovern’s third time working with both actors and he created their characters expressly for them: “I love the two of them – they’re my favourite actors along with Chris Eccleston.” The writer only recently learnt that Graham’s father is Black, which fascinated him: “I said, ‘You’re not Black,’ and he said, ‘I am!’” Does Graham identify as a Black person? “I don’t know how he identifies but he’s the most relaxed, unburdened man you’ll ever meet in your life.” If you tell me Sean Bean is too, I won’t believe you! “Oh, Sean’s not Black,” McGovern says, misunderstanding me. “Sean’s a white working-class Yorkshire man.” But if you’re about to tell me he’s completely chilled and relaxed... “No, he’s OK, Sean – he’s a lovely man. I love him to bits, like.” McGovern first stepped into a prison to conduct writing workshops shortly after he moved from teaching to scripting. Recently he’s worked with the Sycamore project, which, under the auspices of the prison chaplaincy and led by volunteers, teaches the principles of restorative justice by focusing on victim awareness. As someone who works in prisons myself, with Liberty Choir UK (a charity I helped found seven years ago), I was struck by how accurately Time captures their institutional inhumanity. What civilised society would tolerate conditions that you wouldn’t accept for animals, where two men in a tiny cell built in Victorian times for one are forced to eat and defecate virtually on top of one another? But I was also touched by how McGovern caught those rare, surprising moments of grace that can and do offer tiny shafts of light in a very dark place: the kindness and concern of an educated prisoner discreetly teaching an illiterate but proud fellow inmate to read and write; a caring and imaginative chaplain (Siobhan Finneran; the Time cast is a roll call of great British television actors) transforming the intolerable into something almost transcendent when she offers a prisoner the chance to experience a virtual funeral after he is denied the right to attend his father’s in person. “I’m really proud of that scene,” he says. “I’m so glad you picked that out. I loved that sequence. I’ve never seen that done before, have you? It came to me and it’s amazing, isn’t it?” I’ve witnessed similar moments of reprieve in prison – how hard men can show emotion and even weep if they feel safe; alongside terrible events, made more terrible by how commonplace they are: suicide and self-harming, which has increased by 24 per cent in female prisons during COVID. Prisoners have been locked in their cells for 23 hours or more. Mental health has always been a major problem in prisons and has dramatically deteriorated in the pandemic due to deprivation of fresh air, education, work, exercise, visits from family and activities, such as choirs, that offer relief from despair and can give prisoners the strength to survive another week. Of course, McGovern sings from the same songbook as I do – not literally; he insists his voice is terrible – and it’s hard at times to remember that this is supposed to be an interview, not a meeting between like-minded people searching for a solution to an inhumane institution no longer fit for purpose. The main answer to making prisons work better is to empty them, he says: “If you decriminalised drugs, you’d have empty prisons. And I’d do something about the cells; you shouldn’t eat and s**t in the same room. There should also be a lot more meaningful activity, education and training. If only there was a way of altering the minds of the British public when it comes to sentencing. It’s so easy for any political party to say ‘tough on crime’ and get elected. It’s ridiculous.” Also ridiculous is the endless turnover of justice ministers: “I think there’s been about 10 just in the last few years!” He singles out Michael Gove and Rory Stewart as ministers of justice who have actively attempted to implement positive change. The dynamic between prison officer and prisoner – both trapped in different ways – came to McGovern early on. During his research and in his various stints working in prison, he never encountered what he calls “a real baddie” of a prison officer. “I thought they were people doing s**tty jobs in s**tty circumstances with very little money and so I can see the temptation is there. But I never came across an out-and-out b*****d – that’s probably because I wasn’t allowed to see the out-and-out b*****ds!” he grins. “I didn’t want to write an easy villain. And yet stuff [contraband] does get into British prisons through staff. That is one way it does get in and I had that story early on.” Graham delivers a multi-layered subtle portrait of a prison officer who is a man of honour and integrity until he can’t be. Bean’s story is, McGovern says, “my kind of story – a man who needs to atone, but can’t even begin to, who’s paralysed with guilt and grief and suffering. And of course he gets picked on. The only thing he does know about prison – having seen what happens to the other grass [who gets scalded horribly] – is that he knows he cannot grass.” In one of several hard-to-stomach scenes, a prisoner bites the ear off another. “Yes. I always had that in mind – the kind of level you’ve got to sink to in order to protect yourself.” The brutalising nature of being in the belly of the beast, as prison has been called, is conveyed by the deafening cacophony of heavy doors slamming, men shouting at the top of their voices, banging of metal bars. This is given an arresting counterpoint by the gentle melancholic music of Elgar-like strings suggesting the sadness, confusion and regret that are nearly always present when the men are alone in their cells, unmasked from the bravado and the bluster of their strut in the wings. McGovern knew the prison drama clichés he would avoid, such as homosexual rape in the showers. Some of these, he says, are not even based on reality. “You know how they always show a riot in the prison canteen? I have a very good friend who I’ve known for 50 years and only the other day I said to him, ‘You do know that prisoners don’t eat in canteens.’ He was shocked when I told him they pick up their food and take it back to eat in their cell – one person sitting on the lavatory, the other one on the lowest bunk. He was absolutely gobsmacked.” There are some viscerally graphic scenes around self-harm in the first episode – how did he feel when he saw them? “It’s funny because it always happens to me and maybe to all writers – what we see in our mind’s eye is often less graphic than what appears on the screen. Having said that, I was served by a brilliant director [Lewis Arnold, Des, Broadchurch] so I’m not knocking him on this, but it was maybe a little more graphic than I envisaged it to be – but not that much more.” Liberty Choir holds regular concerts in non-COVID times in HMP Wandsworth, in which prisoners perform with the volunteers who come together for weekly sessions in a mixed choir, in front of an audience of prisoners’ families and friends. The dynamic in the hall, with children running up to hug their fathers and where partners and wives, parents, grandparents or just supportive friends get to see their loved one in a different, joyous light, transforms a harsh environment. Time shows a similarly radiant moment when a child runs across the room at visiting time and everything changes in an instant: “It’s a beautiful meeting scene that, isn’t it? All you see is love.” Or when Mark’s mother (Sue Johnston) – his parents visit him regularly – says, “You’re here as punishment, not for it.” Is that yours? “No, it’s not mine. I’ve heard it said before about British prisons and I can’t remember where, but I clocked it when I heard it.” He’s talking on a Zoom call set up by his wife Eileen – they’ve recently celebrated their golden wedding anniversary – in his office across the lawn from their home. Behind him is a blue plaque that he takes down to show me, which says: “JIMMY McGOVERN Grandad since 2002, Health & Safety Expert Lives Here.” The McGoverns have three children, all of whom are in their late 40s, Nicky, Joanne and Jimmy, and four teenage grandchildren: Hannah, Nancy, Tom and Jimmy Jr. “I’m a typical grandad,” he says. “Every time they come, I worry about their safety so they call me the health and safety expert.” Despite the serious subjects we tackle, there’s often an air of merriment to the proceedings because of McGovern’s frequent laughter and the twinkle in his eyes. The short vowels and Scouse thud are still very much intact, as is the occasional ghost of his childhood stutter when the odd word stubbornly sticks. He talks about his memories of the 11 members of his family living in their little house, four boys to a bedroom until he was 10, the numbers thinning out as his older siblings married and left home: “Me mam would be singing Nat King Cole’s When I Fall in Love [he breaks into song, tunefully, despite his earlier protestations] as she washed the oilcloth over the table.” Greenside is still there, he says, “but now it’s got these pretty little houses built by the much-maligned Militant Tendency in the 80s.” McGovern has always worn his politics on his sleeve, and his loyalty to the BBC, with its lack of advertisements and public broadcasting ethos, is well known. So what does he make of new director-general Tim Davie being a Tory who donated more than £400,000 to the Conservatives? “I don’t wanna get into that,” he says hurriedly. “That’s the one thing I’m not prepared to answer. It sounds corny, but I do love the BBC and I’d always work for them, I suspect – no matter who’s in charge.” He’s sensitive to the criticism levelled at him for supposedly perpetuating the negative stereotype of the Scouser: “You know, ‘What do you call a Scouser in a suit?’ ‘The accused.’ ‘What do you call a Scouser in a big house?’ ‘A burglar.’ When a drama works, it’s because it’s about flawed characters and because I shoot in this city, giving jobs to my own people, I get accused of reinforcing that negative stereotype by the Liverpool Echo who can’t even be a***d to print here, which is unfortunate. “I love this city and the older I get, the more I love it. The architecture is second to none and you walk along the river and you see a proper river. I’m sorry but Manchester hasn’t got a river like the Mersey, you know what I mean?” He reads each of his character’s lines out loud so they have a Scouse inflection. “I don’t think I’ve ever written a character who hasn’t been part of me. Even the psychopaths in Cracker would be some deep and horrible part of me.” He may have drunk and smoked more to get into the head of Robbie Coltrane’s criminal psychologist Fitz, but the gambling addiction wasn’t a stretch at all: “I was a terrible gambler. I nearly lost everything to gambling.” For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. McGovern used to pride himself on his discipline for writing, but now he can be distracted by the smallest things, such as fixing his lawn. Is it because, at 71, he gets tired easily? “I don’t know,” he smiles, with a sort of rueful bemusement. “I think it’s a lack of hunger. I’m more successful now than I was – when you’re younger you want success and appreciation. I don’t particularly go after that now. I don’t really go for the baubles.” If anything deserves baubles it’s Time, I say. “Do you think so?” A modest laugh. “Well, of course, I would love that.” If you want to see what we thought of the series, you should read our Time review. Time airs tonight on BBC One at 9pm. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our handy TV Guide. This edition of The Big RT Interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
Emily Mortimer on the importance of The Pursuit of Love today: "You have to live as if there’s no tomorrow"
Emily Mortimer speaks about her directorial debut in The Pursuit of Love.
Emily Mortimer grew up with the Mitfords, in a manner of speaking. In the white 1930s house with its pale-green slate roof in Turville Heath on the edge of the Chiltern Hills – which her father, the late QC and Rumpole of the Bailey writer John Mortimer, had inherited from his blind barrister father Clifford – there would be frequent talk about that eccentric family, with its six famous daughters (and one son) of Lord and Lady Redesdale, known as Farve and Muv. “My dad was mad about the Mitfords,” says the actor, who makes her directorial debut with a three-part adaptation of the cherished Nancy Mitford novel The Pursuit of Love. Stepping into the BBC One Sunday slot vacated by Line of Duty, it offers an entirely different experience from the adrenaline-rush of the past seven weeks. Mortimer also plays “the Bolter” in the series, a mother forever leaving her daughter behind for new lovers. Published in 1945, Mitford’s witty, thinly veiled account of her eccentric upbringing was an instant success, and an enduring one. Mortimer read the novel as a teenager and remembers her father planning to adapt Hons and Rebels, the 1960 memoir of Nancy’s sister Jessica, the political activist, former Communist, investigative journalist and unlikely late-blooming pop star. That book describes Jessica’s aristocratic childhood and her difficult relationship with her sisters Unity and Diana, who were enthusiastic supporters of Nazism. John had also written a radio play about Unity: “So I grew up hearing him talk about these incredible characters and exciting, wonderful, dangerous people,” says Emily. “They were part of my life.” Jessica – “Decca” to family and friends – emigrated to the US in 1939, settling in California, where she remained until her death in 1996. Emily Mortimer has now been living in Brooklyn for long enough for it to feel like home. She met and fell in love with her husband, the American actor Alessandro Nivola, when they were filming Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1999, and married in 2003. Their two children – Sam, 17, and May Rose, 11 – both appear in The Pursuit of Love. We’re talking on Zoom, at 7.30am US time. The actors’ sprawling house is full of fascinating objects and a certain air of appealing chaos: “It’s a terrible mess right now,” Mortimer says. May pushes in to introduce me to their new puppy, a King Charles called Etta. In the background, when he’s not standing on a table to change light bulbs, Nivola is chivvying the children, with occasional loud bellows of “Come ON! You’re taking TOO LONG!” Emily is drinking a green smoothie and apologises for her appearance (naturally, she still looks beautiful despite unbrushed hair and no make-up). She’s wearing a Chicago logo T-shirt, with a huge hole in the sleeve, shoved on from the bottom of a pile of clothes: “I didn’t realise I was doing this,” she says. “I would have put some eyeliner on. I’m so sorry. I’m a wreck!” When she laughs and smiles – which is often – there is something lovely about the way her entire face creases and her eyes slant upwards with mirth. Despite the tendency to retreat reflexively into self-deprecation (“I hope that doesn’t sound too pretentious” is a refrain), she’s not afraid to stick to her guns, as you might expect from her background and education: the high-achieving St Paul’s school for girls, then reading Russian at Oxford. Mortimer has often spoken about her shyness as a child. Her mother, Penelope Gollop – dubbed Penny Two by John on account of his ex-wife being Penny One, the writer Penelope Mortimer – was a model in her early 20s when she got together with John, then in his mid-40s. (In early photos, she looks the spitting image of Emily.) If the Mitfords had messy lives, so did the Mortimers. Penny One published a blistering novel about a philandering husband, The Pumpkin Eater, in 1962; two years later Harold Pinter adapted it into a film starring Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch and James Mason. In 2004 it emerged that John Mortimer had had a brief affair with actor Wendy Craig that in 1961, unknown to him, resulted in a son, Ross, whom Craig and her husband Jack Bentley brought up as their own. Decades later Mortimer was delighted to welcome Ross into the family – attributing the affair, when asked by reporters, to the excitable 60s. John and Penny One divorced in 1971, the same year that Emily was born. Her parents married the following year. Thirteen years later, her sister Rosie was born. It’s well known that the offspring of colourful parents can react by craving something more orderly for themselves, the Bolter’s daughter Fanny in The Pursuit of Love being a case in point. Whatever the reason, Emily’s shyness extended to her never wanting to have other children at her home or to go to their homes: “I would dread friends coming to my house in case they thought it was weird, or I was weird, or my parents were weird,” she says. That shyness remains, she says: “I know you wouldn’t notice it because I’m very good at managing it. I mean I’m fine now, but I think you’re either born that way or not.” Just as John’s father was sharply present in his thoughts and writing (the inspiration for Rumpole of the Bailey as well as his memoir A Voyage Round My Father), Emily feels the same way about her own father, who died, aged 85, in 2009: “I feel very sad that he’s not here any more,” she says. His spirit imbues her version of Mitford’s novel: “Every single part of this has been influenced by my dad and the way he saw life. That kind of resolute and determined lack of earnestness that Nancy had, my dad had. You know, that you can be anything as long as you’re not boring. “If you’re a good writer, that can end up being incredibly moving because you’re tripping along the surface of things and then suddenly you get a sucker punch and it fells you.” But there was also kindness. Mortimer once said, heartwarmingly, that her father looked at the world “with forgiving eyes”. “Yes, and when you read The Pursuit of Love you also feel forgiven, and that Nancy gets it that a life well lived is a life full of mistakes, which was something that I was brought up to understand, too. Both as a criminal defence lawyer and a writer, my dad really understood that people are flawed and the flaws are to be celebrated. Often, of course, they can cause pain and distress, but that’s part of life and that feeling of understanding about the messiness of life and forgiving it and celebrating it – well, that’s something Nancy and my dad also had in common.” https://www.instagram.com/p/COcmgmoo8rW/ Her father was a famously keen diner. Was there a particularly memorable meal with him? “Oh my God, there were so many over the years! I still find the most comforting place to be is a nice restaurant and I’m sure it’s because of my dad. He liked big, bustling places where you could see what you were eating – like operating theatres – and you always had to decide what you were going to eat in the car on the way there. He loved going, but didn’t want to sit there for hours. You weren’t really allowed pudding. “And he would always say, ‘This is the absolute best meal of my life’ and ‘I’ve never been happier than I am at this moment’ and ‘You’ve never looked more beautiful.’ And it didn’t matter that he’d say it every single time. By the time he was in his last years he was completely blind anyway so there was no way he could tell if you were beautiful or not. It was a joke, really. “He was the best company ever and I would go to meet him thinking, ‘I want to talk to Dad about…’ I don’t know, a boyfriend being mean to me, or a job I didn’t get – and then forget to ask him about any of those things because I was just having too good a time. “His only real advice to me was ‘Make sure you always line yourself up with the next one before you get rid of the one before’, and I say that in The Pursuit of Love.” Another line she has knitted into the script is the one when she, as the Bolter, says to her daughter Fanny (played by Emily Beecham) that it is a mistake to have a girlfriend more beautiful than oneself. The girl in question is Fanny’s cousin, Linda Radlett (played by Lily James), who is indeed a shimmering beauty. There is also a risqué line in this episode, Mortimer tells me, that was actually written by Nancy Mitford in a letter to fellow novelist Evelyn Waugh, in which Nancy describes how a small painting of Lady Jane Grey prompted her to masturbate. From this alone, it’s clear Mortimer didn’t intend to make a dusty period drama. She has stayed true to the spirit of the novel while injecting it with an exciting, contemporary edge and a glam rock, punk and new wave soundtrack. It is sexy, funny, stylish, racy and beautiful. As for The Pursuit of Love's cast, the project came to Mortimer with Lily James already signed up, but it was her idea to cast Dominic West as the barking (in both senses) Uncle Matthew. West is a comic revelation – guffawingly funny, brandishing his bullwhip at dawn on the rolling green lawn and singing opera, reaching appallingly badly for the highest notes. Matthew is, of course, also a ghastly racist who loathes all foreigners and a violent misogynist whose children can’t wait to escape. When Mortimer first started thinking about her adaptation, she saw it as a Brexit story with mad Uncle Matthew as “this xenophobic nationalist who has gone bonkers from the First World War and has PTSD and hates all Germans, as well as the French, and insists that on no account must any of his children be let out of his sight, let alone meet anyone that doesn’t think or talk or look like them.” His first shock is when his family falls collectively for their neighbour Lord Merlin, who appears at a fusty ball, taking over the floor as a stunning hybrid of David Bowie, Michael Clark and Marc Bolan – who soundtracks the scene – complete with a gender-fluid entourage of dancers and many provocative moves. Mortimer’s dream was for Fleabag’s Andrew Scott to play Lord Merlin and it came true. Does she have a crush on him? “Doesn’t everybody?” she says. Forget “hot” priest, it’s hot Merlin from now on. “Oh my God,” Mortimer breathes. “Totally! And if you were to meet him, you’d fall much more in love with him.” She has come a long way since demonstrating her acting skills to her parents as a little girl by pretending to be Delia Smith pouring sugar into bowls. She and her sister Rosie have been working on an even more emotional adaptation than the Mitford story: a new version of Rumpole, in which their father’s crumpled, claret-drinking QC is a woman. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. Her ideas for The Pursuit of Love certainly changed, as filming set in Bath and Bristol was only six weeks away when COVID hit and it morphed into something else. “It’s a time in people’s lives when life is fragile and there’s no knowing whether somebody you love is going to live or die the next day, and how does that affect the way you think about the world. “We get into the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War, and the question is – both then and now – how you deal with that. And the answer is you have to live as if there’s no tomorrow, because there might not be.” The Pursuit of Love starts tonight on BBC One at 9pm. If you want a spoiler-free insight into the series, you should read our The Pursuit of Love review. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our handy TV Guide. This edition of The Big RT Interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
Years and Years creator Russell T Davies: caring for my husband is the greatest work I'll ever do
Andrew Smith and Russell T Davies were together for 20 years before Andrew died of a brain tumour in 2018
Russell T Davies arrives slightly breathless and immediately friendly. He is tall (6ft 6in), dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans and hiking boots with a rucksack slung over one shoulder. In a single bound, he enfolds me in the warmest of hugs and pours himself a cup of tea. We’re in the boardroom of the company that’s publicising his new BBC1 drama, Years and Years, which starts next week – his last was A Very English Scandal, with Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe. It’s intended to be set in a dystopian future but feels anxiously all too recognisably like today. Did he feel that he could write quickly enough about the future to be ahead of the material he was creating? When is Years and Years on TV? First look at Emma Thompson in Russell T Davies drama Years and Years Russell T Davies drama The Boys about the 1980s AIDS crisis to air on Channel 4 “The world is now so mad that it’s faster than my imagination,” he says. “I mean, at no point could I have imagined Donald Trump standing in a gold room full of hamburgers. It’s impossible to predict.” The six-part series, which spans 15 years from 2019, has a terrific roll call of British actors, including Anne Reid, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes, Rory Kinnear and, in a splendidly splenetic role, Emma Thompson. With the exception of Thompson, who plays populist celebrity-turned-politician Vivienne Rook – think Katie Hopkins meets Nigel Farage – the others are members of the Lyons family who live in Manchester. It’s an epic drama, with a shocking finale in the first episode, but at its centre lie the ties and tensions of family life. View oEmbed on the source website As Davies says, it’s quite tricky to describe, “which is almost a worry when you’re pitching and selling to people because I like a one-line pitch”. I say it’s Peter Watkins’s 1965 The War Game meets Davies’s own Queer as Folk meets Doctor Who… “meets Cold Feet,” he adds. “The nice Manchester happy people. I love Cold Feet. Please bring back Cold Feet. PLEASE! This year was SO brilliant. Do I write a letter? Do I join that bandwagon?” The futuristic elements in episode one of Years and Years are tweaks of what exists now. Mobile phones are not triangular or circular or crazily different, but you can just tap one to another and contacts are miraculously transferred. The family talks regularly to one another in a big simultaneous conversation, walking around the house – not trapped by a screen on their mobile phone – “It’s a conference call, in a sense, but an updated one.” Meet the cast of Years and Years Vivienne Rook’s political rise comes on the back of her deliberate provocation on the panel of Question Time, where she uses a four-letter expletive to express her lack of concern about Israel and Palestine. “She’s very aware of what she’s doing. It’s that modern trickster who knows how to play the media machine – it’s Trump, it’s Johnson, it’s Farage. “In fact, by the time this interview sees print, Boris Johnson might be Prime Minister. It’s absolutely possible. Why? Because he’s so entertaining, because he’s so funny. This is what Trump is. The whole world has been Apprentice-d. “Anne Reid does a speech where she says, ‘Beware the tricksters. The clowns. They will laugh us into hell.’ ” Davies wants to stress the warmth and strength of the family in his drama because “don’t we all turn on the news now and say, ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ and turn it off? I can’t bear hearing all those people – on all sides. And as for ‘You pass my deal and I will resign…’ The lack of sense in that makes my head boil. “So, I don’t want to present this as a drama that will make your head boil. It’s about people dealing with those issues, but it’s not about the issues themselves. It’s about how to survive.” Is it the Philip Larkin line about all that survives of us is love? “Oh yes, yes, yes! Wait till you see the ending. Yes!” Although Davies is at his saddest when we meet – the week marking six months since his husband and partner of 20 years, Andrew Smith, died – he is like a geyser erupting with many wild bursts of laughter and hilarity. Just turned 56, he and his two sisters were born and brought up in Swansea by Vivian and Barbara, who were both classics teachers. He is curious and generous – with his time, with himself. His voice is extremely musical, tilting up and down like the hills and valleys of Wales, and he can talk at a gallop. In the late 90s, after years of being frugal and saving (£20,000 by 1995: “because people said, ‘As a writer you’re going to be poor, you’re going to live in an attic and you’ll need money to fall back on’”), Davies – then in his mid-30s – had a party animal phase, which came to an abrupt end when he suffered an accidental overdose. Were you actually close to death? “I think it was pretty bad. Yes.” Were you taken to hospital? “No, so it wasn’t that bad, obviously. But if I’d gone a bit further… Anyway, it was an exaggerated version of the moment everybody realises, ‘Time to stop going out now and settle down.’ ” Davies then set out to find The Boyfriend: “I thought, ‘I’m going to go out and if I sleep with a hundred men, one of them will do.’ I went out ferociously – five nights a week, looking for the one. And it worked. Andrew was number 35. I’m going to write a self-help book about this one day.” Listen to the RadioTimes.com Podcast now: subscribe on iTunes /subscribe on Google Podcasts Andrew and Russell met in a club “at ten to two in the morning”, Davies recalls to the minute. What initially attracted you to him? “Handsome. He was so handsome. Across the club I could not believe that there was this handsome man and he was looking at me. I literally did this [swivels around assuming it must be someone behind him]. All the time I was going out with him, I thought, ‘How did I get such a handsome man?’ ” In his communicative way, Davies searches for a photograph of his late husband on his phone and presents an old picture of a dreamy-eyed Adonis in a black leather jacket. But, as he says, for the long term it’s got to be about more than the good looks, so what qualities was he looking for in The Boyfriend? “Well, you don’t know till you find him. Someone to have a laugh with, someone to be relaxed with – that’s all. “Because my job is high-pressured. It’s tough. I have to have opinions and express what I want and be prepared to fight for that all day long. We both loved television and watched it all the time and we properly laughed. We used to laugh night and day.” It helped that Andrew worked in a completely different world as a customs officer: “He had no idea that people wrote things. He said, ‘What do you mean, you write?’ ” When the men met, Davies was already successful, working on Queer as Folk, which was to be his ground-breaking series for Channel 4. This preceded his even bigger hit, the revival of Doctor Who (a passion since childhood) into the must-watch Saturday-evening family show. View oEmbed on the source website Back in 2011, the couple were living in Los Angeles, where Davies was in discussions about a television version of Star Wars, when Andrew was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given only a three per cent chance of recovery. They returned to Manchester and Davies took two and a half years off work to care for his partner. “I was surprised by the number of people who were surprised that I did that, yes,” he says. That was his rainy day. All his years of putting aside his earnings went on caring for Andrew. “I had the money saved up so nothing was a worry. We had seven years of that illness together, and it’s lovely to come and talk about my shows, but that’s the greatest work I’ll ever do on this Earth.” I remind Davies that he once said, early on, that if Andrew had a heart attack, he would probably walk over his body to write his script. “All nonsense. I surprised myself because I thought my work was more important to me. I thought I’d have got a nurse in – I would never, ever have done that. He was a bit disabled but quite able-bodied so I didn’t have to do the dirty end of caring, but nonetheless I was there. He wasn’t steady on the stairs, so I was with him night and day to help him and get every meal ready. “I was surprised by my patience and I’m surprised by how much I miss it. I knew I would miss him. I knew I would miss the love. But, actually, I loved caring for someone. There’s not enough written about carers. I never resented it but you would think, ‘Well, if this is over one day, I’ll be free.’ I imagined there would be a great freedom. I imagined I would run off to New York, but I’m here because I only want to go to New York with him, really. All that freedom that I imagined would exist means nothing. “It’s six months this week. All the widows warned me that six months was hard, and it is hard. I expected to miss him but we knew he would die one day. We had 13 years before he was ill but it’s hard to remember that at the moment. I’m stuck in the last four weeks of him dying. “Little by little, I know it will pass. I knew I would miss loving him, but what I didn’t know I would miss is being loved. That’s quite hard. That’s hideous, actually. No one warns you about that. I didn’t expect that to vanish but it’s just gone.” Apart from his home in Manchester, the city he’s lived in since he was 24, Davies still has a house in Mumbles, Swansea, and he gets out his phone again to show the view across the whole bay, the curve of sand and sea, from his kitchen window. His sisters, both teachers like their parents, live there and he considers it to be his home also. When he was growing up, the television was always on. “My parents were war children so it was almost like an extension of the radio that you kept on during the war.” In the 70s living room, all brown furnishings and art works made of string, the family would watch shows like I Claudius. “I was about 12 and it was full of orgies and stuff. The first men I saw kissing were on I Claudius. “My mother was always in the kitchen and she was a phenomenal cook: she would do osso bucco and make real rum babas. They travelled a lot. On the day she died, the oven broke.” From the age of 11, he knew how he felt about boys. You weren’t the only gay in the village, so to speak? “You were at that age, yes,” he says, “in the 60s.” John Inman and Frankie Howerd were on the telly… “You didn’t discuss them being gay – they were just ‘elaborate’.” His father was a keen rugby player who came close to being capped for Wales and was chairman of Swansea Rugby Club for many years. Kingsley Amis, who wrote Lucky Jim when he was a junior lecturer at Swansea University and later The Old Devils, could have been writing about Davies’s parents since they were in the same set of friends. “When it was on television, people were phoning me up and saying: ‘That’s your mum and dad on television!’ All those drunk people having gin and tonics, pissing in the garden and the women clinging to each other with laughter.” Davies didn’t share his father’s enthusiasm for rugby and when a PE teacher at his vast school (with some 2,000 pupils, from which he got a place at Oxford) insisted that he play because he was “Viv’s son”, his father intervened. He picked his 11-year-old son up from school and they went for a walk. “He gave me the most fantastic little speech saying, ‘I do not expect you to love rugby. I see fathers bringing up their sons, making them play rugby and I think it’s wrong – you do whatever you want to do.’ “Little did he know! I took that to heart! HA-HA-HA-HAH. But what a wise thing for him to say. He was a good person and brought me up properly.” View oEmbed on the source website He came out as gay to his parents when he was a punk in his teens. “You rehearse it but it doesn’t come out exactly as you imagine it,” he says. “I did my mum first and my dad second. My dad’s was like a rollercoaster of a sentence. I started over there [pointing to the right] – talking about France, and this sentence literally went up and down, over the hills and over the dales, and came back round through the corkscrew to say, ‘…and by the way, I’m gay.’ “Dad was very relaxed and said, ‘I thought so.’ Same with my mother. Because they watch you night and day. And you never stop coming out, do you? I come out every day.” Davies didn’t talk about his job with Andrew, but his husband always watched his programmes on transmission. “That’s why I’m quite sad about this one. As he was dying, he said: ‘I’ll never get to see Years and Years now.’ And I said: ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s rubbish.’ I thought it might make him feel a bit better. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Bless him.” There is no comfort for him in the hope of rejoining him in the afterlife: “I don’t believe in it for a second, I’m afraid. My sister was with me as Andrew died and she said, ‘He’s here now. He’s looking down at us,’ and I said, ‘Stop. Stop now. Don’t do that.’ It was really nice of her, but it’s just not true. She said it for the loveliest reasons.” Davies, like the writers he admires, is able to create worlds for everyone from children to knowing adults; fantasy to gritty reality and sometimes where they overlap. He holds no truck with the idea that you can conjure a way of being only if you have been that way yourself. He quotes the example of Ricky Gervais’s Netflix series After Life, in which he plays a man dealing – badly – with life after the death of his wife. “It’s a fantastic piece of work and, as far as I know, Ricky Gervais has not experienced that sort of grief, and I have. I watch it thinking, ‘You have imagined this perfectly.’ His insight into your life alone once your partner is gone is horrifying and I think he has imagined it. Well done.” Davies says that something may have been experienced but that doesn’t mean that it has merit if the person expressing it can’t write. “A sentence that has sustained me through all my writing is: ‘A moment’s imagination is worth a lifetime’s experience.’” Years and Years begins on BBC1 on Tuesday 14 May Russell T Davies portrait exclusively photographed for Radio Times by Ray Burmiston
Line of Duty's Adrian Dunbar: "I’d love to do a sitcom with Anna Maxwell Martin"
The Line of Duty star reveals what writer Jed Mercurio has in store for Superintendent Ted Hastings
Within ten minutes of talking to Adrian Dunbar, I find myself channelling Superintendent Ted Hastings, the chief of police anti-corruption unit AC-12 and most popular character in the BBC’s wildly successful TV drama Line of Duty, which is heading for its feature-length series finale this week. The actor, a Catholic brought up in Northern Ireland – like Hastings – is talking about whether his character will find love again. Our man is still in love with his wife Roisin but she has found someone else and wants a divorce. “That’s probably something that people might be interested in. There’s a site, I think… What do they call them – Silver Singles?” Meet the cast of Line of Duty series five Stephen Graham’s character is the "most dangerous" Line of Duty villain yet The best TV shows airing in 2019 Noooooh, please, for the love of God, don’t have upright, uptight, old-fashioned Hastings going on a dating app! “You never know,” the actor says, in his wry, understated way, “Jed [Mercurio, series creator] might decide to have a bit of fun with him.” View oEmbed on the source website This is the first time in my life that such an antique, deity-summoning phrase has come out of my mouth, but then the LoD effect is sweeping the nation. We are all talking in acronyms now – blithely referring to AC-12, the OCG (organised crime group) and SCG (serious crime group); DNA, DIs and DS-es tripping off our tongues with ease. And, above all, H. Please Jesus, Mary and Joseph do not say our guy, our beloved Hastings, is the most bent of bent coppers. Who is 'H' in Line of Duty? Meet the suspects Dunbar is, of course, not saying a word. He and fellow regulars Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming) and Martin Compston (DS Steve Arnott) are well-practised – five seasons in – at the Seamus Heaney line, “Whatever you say, say nothing.” But they also like to tease… We’re discussing a long scene that features in the finale, with Hastings (last seen banged up in a prison cell, shouting “I am not bent!”) the subject of a lengthy interrogation, when Dunbar adds: “I don’t know how you’re going to put that in your article?” I’ll just say that there’s going to be a long scene of interrogation. “There could be…” Ha, here we go. “You always have to do that with Line of Duty. ‘There’s a possibility of...’” I wonder whether he is as discreet in his private life? “Yeah, I can keep my counsel. Absolutely. A friend needs to be able to confide in you and to be confident they can do that. Those things are important; they’re the bedrock of most friendships.” Mercurio originally intended Hastings to be a shambolic genius, in the Columbo mould, whom everyone underestimates, but in the audition process, this changed. “That’s a very attractive type of character, absolutely, but we all came to the decision that it would be useful if the character was from outside the police system, making him a Catholic in the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] – so he was an outsider within an organisation.” This also meant Dunbar could keep his own accent. “I come from that generation where we really love the likes of Bill Paterson and Pete Postlethwaite and Alun Armstrong – all working-class guys who kept their accent. So I think where you can keep your accent you should, for greater authenticity,” he says. “But I did The Hollow Crown [as Plantagenet], for instance, and that was definitely not my own accent!” Martin Compston, by contrast, speaks pure Estuary for the duration of Line of Duty filming, including when he’s not on set, when in real life he actually has a broad Greenock accent. “Yeah, he keeps his accent going and then now and again we might have a party and at about one o’clock in the morning, he just goes into Scots.” That must be a bit weird. “It is weird because we can’t understand a word he’s saying by then!” We all have our favourite Hastings-isms. Mine is, “I am calm! I am bloody calm!” Although it’s a close-run thing with “Now we’re sucking diesel”, with “I didn’t float up the Lagan on a bubble” close behind. He was fortunate, he says, that Mercurio was receptive to his suggestions as to how Hastings could be. “People start to get involved with the character,” he explains, “and you start adding little bits of characterisation, with both myself and Jed putting in these little Northern Irish-isms and people get interested in that." What do all the police acronyms mean in Line of Duty? But do you actually use those expressions yourself? “Not necessarily, no,” he says. “Those were phrases, I have to say, that my father used.” Dunbar decided that Hastings would be a good man manager – “not necessarily a good woman manager [cue “She’s a great wee girl doing a bang-up job”]. When everyone is in uniform, he treats them all the same – as though they are all men.” He gives a big laugh. “He is a bit old school. I think people understand that about him. He’s a bit Bill Shankly and Alex Ferguson.” Is he surprised that Hastings has become a heartthrob figure? “Yeah, well, that’s a subject of some amusement, obviously,” he says, as dry as can be. That wasn’t intended in the script? “No, we didn’t expect for any of that to happen.” You must have a laugh about it? “We do, we do – I mean obviously there’s the Gill Biggeloe thing and all that to-do,” he says, referring to AC-12’s legal counsel, played by Polly Walker, who managed to get Ted into bed. He was even asked onto Woman’s Hour to explain Hastings’s homme fatal appeal. “They were asking me why I thought women responded so much to Ted and I think it’s because they all realise they could have him round their fingers within 20 minutes. Women like that. ‘Oh, Ted, he’s so easily led.’ In personal relationships I think that ’s where he’s at.” Hang on, Ted did resist Gill’s charms for a time. “He did, yes – he was trying to hang on to his marriage for as long as he could." Dunbar is the eldest of seven children – he has two brothers and four sisters, none of whom has followed him into the arts – and was born in a working-class area of Enniskillen in 1958. His father was a joiner and the actor has spoken about his regret that they were never able to talk in a meaningful way. The family moved to Portadown, which he has described as “the most marginalised of all the Nationalist communities in the North… if you were Catholic, you literally couldn’t walk up the street without getting into some kind of conflict… Everyone on our estate was living in fear.” He himself was dragged out of a shop because of his school uniform and beaten “while the RUC strolled by”. Elsewhere, Dunbar has talked about seeing the RUC as a “sectarian” and “oppressive force” when he was growing up. The family moved back to Enniskillen when the Troubles became too intense. As children, he and his siblings watched the Ealing comedies on television and there was a piano in the house and always music. “My mother was a wonderful singer and we listened to lots of tenors , Mario Lanza and Josef Locke [Dunbar co-wrote and starred in the 1991 film Hear My Song about the great Irish tenor] but also Kathleen Ferrier and D’Oyly Carte and Gilbert and Sullivan. All of it was accessible and fun.” How to watch Line of Duty online Stream on BBC iPlayer Stream on Netflix Buy on Amazon Buy on iTunes Buy on Sky Store While working in an abattoir in his teens, he played bass guitar and sang back-up vocals with an Elvis impersonator. “It was a very good job at the time, I really enjoyed it.” He later became lead singer in his own band – Adie Dunbar and the Jonahs, playing a style of music he describes as “folk jazz”. They released an album called Two Brothers with some songs written by him, including Turn Me Around, about a forlorn, boozy tumbleweed of a man. He has a beautiful voice. The night of our interview, he is performing jazz standards in a Pizza Express in central London. He started acting and was encouraged to apply to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He was awarded a place, graduating in 1983, and fell in love with the city where he still lives with his Sydney-born wife, Anna Nygh (they have been married for 33 years), describing his Crouch End neighbourhood in north London as a “fantastic part of the world”. Their daughter, Madeleine, 32, works in New York and in the UK, writing rap songs with kids who are struggling and getting them back into school. His stepson, Teddy, from Nygh’s first marriage, runs his own film company, Fully Focused, working around issues such as knife crime and homelessness among the young. He has appeared in terrific films like My Left Foot and The Crying Game, and in the television series Inspector Morse and Cracker. He has played Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan on stage, often performing at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Lyric in Belfast. He writes, directs, acts, sings – what more could a creative man want? Well, he wouldn’t say no to a London play. “I end up working in Ireland the whole time,” he says, “which I love and I can go home and see everybody, but it would be nice to be like other people who live in London and just head down town every day and feel like a proper actor working in the West End.” When I ask him who he would like to work with now, he checks that the Line of Duty audience will have been introduced to the new star character – his chief interrogator, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, who has made it her mission to bring Ted down: “She’s very funny and I’d love to do a sitcom with her.” He reveres Jimmy McGovern and Paul Greengrass as writers and also Lisa McGee, the writer and creator of Derry Girls. “What’s interesting about her writing is that she manages to shed light on a period that was very, very difficult without explicitly referring to it.” Dunbar goes on to talk about the two education systems in Northern Ireland: one is state-run and largely Protestant; the other is run by the Catholic Church (he was educated by the Christian Brothers). “I don’t think the people in the rest of the UK really understand this. You might be in a kindergarten with your best friend who lives next door, then at the age of five you’re made aware that that person is different, and they head off in one direction and you head off in another. And that is basically where the dysfunction within Northern Ireland starts. In the 1960s in America, they had bussing – and in Northern Ireland, they still have bussing. They are bussing children from one side of the city to the other.” He is passionate about introducing integrated education, and has said: “You can’t make someone fear another person if they shared a desk for seven years.” As for the recent tragic murder of journalist Lyra McKee amid rioting and fires, he is not at all surprised. “This is the result of Brexit. Brexit has destabilised Northern Ireland terribly. And we can’t go back to a hard border. If we did I’m afraid there will be civil disobedience, which could lead anywhere, really. It doesn’t bear thinking about. It certainly didn’t bear thinking about when everybody was campaigning to leave the EU. No one gave a thought to Northern Ireland and what might happen.” With our time coming to an end, we discuss Mercurio’s ruthless dispatching of even the biggest stars on his shows, making him the serial killer of screenwriting – the latest victim being Stephen Graham’s undercover officer John Corbett. We know there will be a sixth series. The big question is, will Hastings be in it? “If you think about it, Jed has put the sword through so many brilliant actors. You just think, ‘None of us are safe. It could happen at any time.'” I accuse him of being disingenuous when he affects vagueness about the ending of this season. Come on, Adrian, of course you know what’s going to happen! “Well, yes, I do know what happens in the last episode. I don’t know, however, what the edit of it is like, and the edits do throw up different things. Bits you thought were going to be in sometimes aren’t.” In this context, I bring up The Big Chill – it turns out Dunbar was unaware that Kevin Costner was supposed to be in the 1983 film in flashback but ended up just being a corpse in a coffin. That was certainly an edit that Costner wasn’t expecting! “They probably made a wise decision there,” he says cheekily He is really grateful for this plum of a role. “Obviously, it’s brilliant for an actor at my stage in my career to get a part like this. I’ve been banging away at the coalface, if you like, for many years now, and I’ve done some really wonderfully interesting work, I’ve been very lucky. But I’ve never had a character that I could really throw my stuff at.” I persist and put it another way. Is there an element of the LoD actors putting their careers on hold waiting for Mercurio to reel them back in for the next season? Isn’t it conceivable Dunbar might get a more attractive offer – let’s say, that longed-for role on a West End stage? “Oh, I see,” he says. “Well, I’m sure Jed would find a way to say, ‘Poor old Hastings, that was terrible that car crash, wasn’t it?’ But I’m not going to get anything better than Ted. That’s not going to happen, so don’t worr y. And I’d miss everybody too much.” Line of Duty airs on Sundays at 9pm on BBC1
Poldark’s Jack Farthing on playing George Warleggan, stripping off on camera and his crush on Timothée Chalamet
The star discusses why he wouldn't mind ditching clothes for a role, his Poldark crisis of confidence – and how he accidentally broke his cat's leg
There’s a funny thing that Jack Farthing does. Unaccustomed to giving interviews, the 33-year-old actor – who plays George Warleggan and is as far a cry from Poldark’s bully banker as it is possible to be – does not have an arsenal of polished anecdotes. There is something charmingly unfinished and raw about him. But there are a few actorly giveaways, and one is his unconscious habit of slipping into the lingo or accent of the characters he is discussing. Talking about the Essex rent boy he played in Carmen Disruption – Simon Stephens’s 2015 reimagining of the opera as a modern piece, with the central character a male prostitute – he starts slurring the odd phrase: “sort of” becomes an estuaryish “sorrov”, quite unlike his usual, clipped diction. Later, talking about aristocratic nincompoop the Hon Freddie Threepwood in the BBC adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s Blandings, he says the whole experience was “just bananas!”, a Boris-ism that could have come straight out of the mouth of the hapless second son of Lord Emsworth. Meet the cast of Poldark series 4 Where is Poldark filmed? RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Farthing is incredibly slim and slight, with a modest and understated manner. When the camera is on him, his eyes are rather sleepy and dreamy; off it, they become sharp and focused. He is the very opposite of a diva. When his car fails to turn up at the end of our interview, he shrugs his shoulders and walks to the Tube – anonymous and unassuming in his baseball cap, denim jacket and trainers. He was born in north London and has stayed there all his life: “Can’t get enough of it.” His brother, Tom, three years older, is an artist, as is his uncle, Stephen Farthing, a Royal Academician. His mother is a radiologist, his father a gastroenterologist. His childhood was “lovely”, marred only by the traumatic event of jumping on one of the family’s two cats (sisters who never graduated from being called Puss and Puss) and breaking one feline leg. “I was very small but big enough to hurt it. It was awful. I can still hear the sound it made. The poor thing had to wear a cast.” He was in plays and musicals at Westminster school (Sondheim’s Into the Woods and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene) and also at Oxford, where he read history of art (he played Prospero in The Tempest, among “other abominations”). Thence to Lamda (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts), which he found confronting. “Being at drama school is a very exposing, taking-off-your-skin, have-a-look-at-me kind of process and you do silly, emotional, ridiculous things in front of each other all day, every day,” he says. “It’s not so much embarrassing as cutting through your armour – which is good, I guess, because it’s what you want to do as an actor.” After leaving drama school, he had a few small parts in big plays and then got even smaller parts on television, with his first significant break being Freddie in Blandings. The same company made Poldark and when he went for the part of George – they had approached him for it – he had a brief crisis of confidence. “I thought, ‘This is crazy, I’m not right for this,’” he says, “I think because of the way he is described in the books as very tall, big and broad-shouldered. But I went in a few times and it worked.” As an actor, he says, you are always bringing a part of yourself to your role. Playing George Warleggan for six months of every year for the past four years has become second nature. In what ways is George hard to shake off? “Well, I don’t condemn people to death in my spare time, but you definitely take stuff with you. There’s an energy you feel in your muscles – a way that George stands and moves, which is not like the way I do, for instance.” Do you think that, like George, you are possibly a bit of a repressed Englishman? “I’ve definitely got it in me,” he says. “I think there aren’t many of us who are as honest as we could or should be. Certainly, in my mind from the start was the idea that George has got to be fuelled by insecurities and a sense of inadequacy and that his true feelings are somewhere hidden beneath. So that we believe in him as a person and don’t just think of him as a force for bad, because he’s not that.” View oEmbed on the source website He clearly feels some affection for the man he plays – however badly George behaves. “He does some hateful things, but there is a love-to-hate aspect about him – there’s a lot to him, which makes him interesting to play.” It is George’s love for his wife Elizabeth (Heida Reed) that offers him the potential for redemption, and the marriage, against the odds, appears to be working. “He is full of love for her. They have a successful partnership, even if it’s not a deeply love-filled, passionate marriage. “This series, we felt it when we were shooting and found we were doing scenes – more than ever before – where we were happy together, where there was such a lot of consternation and anguish last year. It was really nice – odd and refreshing.” With Poldark taking such a political turn this year, I wonder about Farthing’s politics. “I definitely have views,” he says. The last march he went on was the big women’s march in 2017. Which brings us to Ross’s Sexy Scything Moment – possibly superseded by the Emerging From The Waves Sensation at the start of the latest series. Did he feel sorry for Aidan Turner, or did he have a tiny George-like sliver of envy? This elicits a roar of laughter. “I can give you the answer that most actors would give – I would take my clothes off if it felt like it belonged in the script. Why should it be any different for men than women? My focus is certainly on acting rather than taking my clothes off but if they come together,” another laugh, “then that’s fine.” How does he feel about the prevalence of British actors with public-school backgrounds? Is it fair enough that it keeps being pointed out? “It’s totally fair enough,” he says firmly. “The balance is totally off. It’s too one-dimensional. The whole point about this profession is that it’s supposed to mirror the world, but if it’s only mirroring five per cent of the world it’s not doing its job. It’s hard to come up with a solution, but it must start at the beginning with people being given the opportunity to train without having to pay a fortune.” He is excited about an upcoming film he’s in, where he plays a very different role. With an amazing roll call of talent, including Ralph Fiennes, Matthew Goode, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans and Tamsin Greig, Official Secrets is about Katharine Gun, the British Intelligence whistleblower who, in the immediate lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, leaked a top-secret memo exposing a joint US-UK illegal spying operation against members of the UN Security Council. “It was a huge story in The Observer. She was trying to stop them getting approval for a UN resolution for war, which was unfortunately rendered irrelevant because we went to war anyway.” Gun is played by Keira Knightley and Farthing plays her friend and desk-neighbour at GCHQ, the focus of the first half of the film. It’s not his first foray into whistleblowing. Two years ago, in Mike Bartlett’s play Wild, he was the lead in a fictionalised version of the Edward Snowden story, set post-leak in a Moscow hotel room. Who is his favourite celebrity crush? He has moved on from Marion Cotillard to Timothée Chalamet. “He’s a dream as a gender-free subject of adoration by me and the rest of the world because of the film Call Me By Your Name. It’s the most natural and engaging performance.” Does he have any surprising talents? “I can make bird noises,” he says, demonstrating something so sweetly authentic it sounds like a nightingale warbling in your garden at dusk. The killer question for an Englishman – does he dance? “Yes, but the circumstances have to be right, and the levels of ‘merriment’, too. I like dancing but I don’t think I’m good at it. Mind you, you can learn. “There was this moment in Carmen Disruption and I had to do this... very sexy little number. We had this unbelievable choreographer who made me do things that I didn’t know I could do!” Why not repeat the moves at your next party? “I could, but I’d risk being thrown out!” And finally, can he cook? “Yes, but again, it’s another thing I’m enthusiastic about but don’t have much expertise in. I need time to plan my menu. So when are you free?” View oEmbed on the source website This article was originally published in the 21-27 July 2018 issue of Radio Times magazine Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
King Lear's Anthony Hopkins on Shakespeare, family break-ups, life... and death
Westworld and Silence of the Lambs star Anthony Hopkins stars in BBC2's adaptation of King Lear
At 80, Sir Anthony Hopkin s believes he has reached the perfect age to inhabit the ancient despot who loses everything – King Lear. He’s certainly convincing as a very “foolish fond old man” who fears that he’s not in his right mind. So much so that during filming of the BBC production, dressed in a shabby khaki overcoat, pushing a trolley full of plastic bags through a shopping precinct, a kindly passerby – not recognising one of our greatest living actors – pointed him in the direction of a homeless shelter just down the street. The binding threads of Shakespeare’s masterpiece – ageing, betrayal, the abuse of power (swiftly revealed to be unabsolute), the nature of love, the fear of and descent into madness, redemption, what it means to be a parent as well as a child and, finally, death – are what makes King Lear both universal and timeless. This adaptation is set in modern-day England: the hundred knights are rowdy, boozy soldiers; Lear is a self-made dictator with a military past; the poor, naked beggars sheltering in hovels on the heath have become refugees in a camp. When is BBC2's King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins on TV? BBC and Amazon reveal new images of Anthony Hopkins as King Lear RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website I wonder which themes of the actor’s favourite Shakespeare play speak most eloquently to Hopkins. “It’s hard to define, really,” he says, sounding incredibly Welsh and sing-song, even after all his years living in California. “I did Lear about 30 years ago with David Hare, at the National Theatre. It was a wonderful production but I think I was too young. I didn’t get it right. “For the last few years, I had contemplated doing it again because at 80 I can understand the mechanisms within an older man – mechanisms of fear and despond – and so I thought I was right to play it.” The idea crystallised when Hopkins was in The Dresser with Ian McKellen, directed by Richard Eyre a couple of years ago; the film is set in the dressing room behind a production of King Lear. Eyre had directed an acclaimed Lear at the National in 1997, with Ian Holm. Hopkins agreed to play the old king again, as long as Eyre directed the film – and off they went. The result is a triumph, and has a phenomenal ensemble, with even the smallest roles filled by big names, such as Christopher Eccleston as the courtier Oswald, in the household of Lear’s eldest daughter Goneril, played by Emma Thompson. Jim Broadbent, Jim Carter, Emily Watson… the list goes on. Eyre says: “Well, if you get Tony [as Hopkins likes everyone to call him] then the actors come in his wake, and everybody we asked said ‘Yes’.” Hopkins and Eyre swapped emails across continents, and the actor told the director how he saw Lear. “I wanted to do him as a fast, furious old man who is incapable of love,” Hopkins explains. “He has never felt love. I feel that in his early life, he was deeply hurt and savaged by some awful emotional calamity and he turned his ire on the human race and his three daughters. “He was a very over-stern father who made his daughters into the creatures they were. Even with Cordelia – he only felt comfortable if she was a tomboy. A masculine girl. He treated her like a boy. That was my subtext, if you want. The other two daughters… he didn’t even like them. And that happens with families. You don’t have to like your family. Children don’t like their fathers, you don’t have to love each other…” His daughter, Abigail Rhiannedd Hopkins, is now close to 50. She was the child from his first marriage to actress Petronella Barker, which ended in 1972. Hopkins’s second wife was Jennifer Lynton, who is often credited as the person who helped him give up drinking. Since 2003 he has been happily married, he says, to his third wife, Stella Arroyave, who is from Colombia and is a Malibu antiques dealer turned actor/director. Abigail describes herself as a singer/songwriter, actor and theatre director. Father and daughter were estranged for many years but there appears to have been a rapprochement in the early 90s, since she was cast in two of his most famous films from that time – Shadowlands and The Remains of the Day. Now the curtain has come down again. Since no parent of a certain age can watch King Lear without a little shiver of apprehension about getting the right balance between divesting your worldly goods to your children and maintaining your independence, I wonder whether he is still in touch with Abigail. Is he a grandfather by now? “I don’t have any idea,” he says. “People break up. Families split and, you know, ‘Get on with your life’. People make choices. I don’t care one way or the other.” That sounds a bit cold… "Well, it is cold,” he responds with equanimity. “Because life is cold. It’s like John Osborne’s response when someone said to him, ‘Mr Osborne, your play is so offensive,’ and he said, ‘Life is offensive.’” We have a big chuckle at that, which diffuses any awkwardness around what must be a sensitive subject; the anecdotal aperçu is the actor’s shield of choice against personal intrusion. His father, Richard, was a baker, as was his father before him. The family lived in Margam, a suburb of Port Talbot, south Wales, close to the childhood home of Richard Burton. Hopkins remembers asking the actor for an autograph at 15, and “he was very gracious, very nice”. The two actors met again, many years later, in New York in 1975, as Burton prepared to take over Hopkins’s role as the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. “He was a phenomenal actor,” Hopkins says. “So was [Peter] O’Toole – they were wonderful, larger-than-life characters.” Hopkins drew on his father, and his childhood, for Lear. “My father was a tough old man. He wasn’t a tyrant, but he was a hard man. As was my grandfather, his father – and all those ingredients that were in my father are in me. I’ve survived over the years and become more mellow, but I know how to reach into it, you know. The violence and the anger – I know all about that stuff. Instinctively, deep down inside my nature." But alongside the toughness was a sensitivity: “My father didn’t have much confidence in himself. He could get angry about things. He was a good father but he was limited by having had no education. All he knew was hard work and hardship and I inherited that from him – that ethic for work. My philosophy is: ‘Stop whingeing – get a life’. And that was my father’s philosophy: ‘Grow up and get on with it’. “I have gratitude for it in a way. It’s a great gift to be all of the things that you are – you can either die of them or make light of them. Any discomfort from the past, any pain… use it!” Stay up to date with the RadioTimes.com newsletter Has he, like Lear, ever feared losing his mind? (There are legions of stories from his drinking youth of unstable behaviour and dissolute ways – many told by himself.) There was a recent video of him dancing that went viral. “Oh that!” he says, “It was just a bit of fun. Happened a few weeks ago. Stella had a meal with her friends at home, so I sent her a quick video and her niece put it on. Apparently it had a lot of viewings and everyone thought I’d gone mad. “I don’t think I will go mad now,” he adds. “The best I can say of myself is that I’ve tunnelled through the mountain of my life and come out the other side. I think once you get past the mid- 70s and you’re in your 80s, then you feel OK because you know your time is limited and you’d better get on with it and enjoy it. “In my 50s and 60s, I was discombobulated. I was not sure which way to go in life – although I was a very successful actor. Like when I was doing King Lear with David Hare, for some reason I was angry and very confused. Well, life is strange and it is baffling. And you come to a point when you think, ‘Oh shut up! Get over the past. Get on with your life. WAKE UP!’ “It’s like Tony Bennett said, of Amy Winehouse, I think, ‘Life teaches you how to live it… if you live long enough’.” Is he frightened by the prospect of death? “Not at all. I’ve got no choice,” he says in an amused voice. “What’s the point of being frightened? We’re all going to die.” He is intolerant of what he calls “gloopy American sentimentalism”, with a particular loathing of death euphemisms. “It’s the inability to use words properly. ‘He passed on.’ What do you mean? He died.’ “Lear understands there’s nothing nice about death. There’s no respectable way of looking at it. When you’re dead you’re a lump of meat and you decay very rapidly. Cordelia’s dead. Face it. Dead! "I say this to the young kids, Don’t take yourself so seriously! We’re all going to be dead one day’. I tell myself every morning: ‘You’re not so hot. You’re not that important.’ We spend so much time worrying about what people are thinking of us, and they’re not thinking of us. They’ve got better things to do. They’re thinking about themselves. It’s like Humphrey Bogart said, life is for the living – ‘We’re all just three drinks behind.’ I like that philosophy.” In his life he must have had his share of courtiers who fawn and flatter. But does he also have his own version of the Fool and true, straight-talking Kent – who dare to say the unsayable to him and protect him from his own ego and vanity? “I am very guarded about that,” he says. “I have an assistant and my wife. You talk about power. Look at Hollywood! How insidious it is. Look how people feel entitled to this, that and the other, and they can only be surrounded by ‘Yes’ people. It’s a poisonous, toxic atmosphere and I don’t want to be surrounded by people like that. The ‘lovey’ and the kissing cheeks – I can’t stand it. There’s so much hypocrisy… and they know nothing.” Hopkins has reached the age when he realises how little we all know: “Uncertainty is the greatest value – that is the road to wisdom. If you’ve got certainty, you’ll end up being like Hitler.” See the new teaser trailer for King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins View oEmbed on the source website Living in America, there’s an obvious person in power who has a lot of opinions but rather less knowledge… “I don’t discuss politics,” he cuts me short. Do you take an interest in current affairs and politics generally? “No.” Decades ago, the actor would take off in his car to explore the States on his own, stopping for the night at motels off the highway – Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, driving from Charleston, South Carolina – 600-plus miles – to Pittsburgh in one day. He doesn’t go on odysseys any more, but he still loves to drive and he and his wife cruise up to Big Sur and walk the trails. I picture him, I say, in his Malibu house, on his balcony overlooking the ocean… “Oh, I don’t have a balcony. Just a little house on a cliff. It’s an ordinary ‘Cape Cod’ house, 50 or 60 years old. A bit ramshackle, but we love it.” Do you like luxury at all? “Not particularly,” he says. “I like to have a good meal, but I don’t go to openings of new restaurants or that sort of stuff. I like to work hard and I exercise and keep fit. I’m not really about being opulent.” He enjoys working with people but he doesn’t have friendships with actors. Or many friends at all. “I like people but I’m very much on my own. I paint, I write music and I play the piano [in 2013, Dutch violinist and conductor André Rieu led his orchestra in playing Hopkins’s early piece The Waltz Goes On, and he has released an album of his compositions, Anthony Hopkins: Composer]. And that’s as good as it gets for me. I have no ambitions. I have no desire to prove anything. “I’m happily married but my wife worries because I work too hard. I will go on working because what else would I do? I’ll retire when my teeth and my hair fall out. What’s the point in sitting and staring at the TV?” He chuckles. “I mean, I can’t play golf, and I don’t wish to.” We speak on his day off from filming a Netflix movie, in Rome, about the relationship between Popes Benedict (Hopkins) and Francis (Jonathan Pryce). Could he ever be lured back to the stage? “Maybe one week doing Lear.” Towards the end of our interview, we have a friendly mutual beef about the culture of our times, when everyone seems so hypersensitive, and discuss my fears that this will stultify creativity. He is sure it will pass and compares it, rather dramatically, to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. Not long after we say our goodbyes, Hopkins calls to say that he wants to pull back a bit on his comments. “My attitude is that if people want to be like that, fine. I’ve no judgment because people do what they have to do. I don’t want to be involved in that argument; it’s all so touchy. I’ve lived long enough to figure out that most of my opinions aren’t worth anything, anyway.” All the fire and fury of his youth and the scrappy belligerence have evaporated. He is Lear’s calm after the storm, sanguine and philosophical. I ask him whether he thinks he has accrued wisdom with age and he responds with that familiar slightly shy, tickled laugh: “I hope so! I’m certainly enjoying my life now and I may as well get on with it because I’m going to be asleep for a long, long time.” King Lear is on BBC2 at 9.30pm on Bank Holiday Monday 28th May 2018
"I'll never see a better Lear than Anthony Hopkins," says King Lear director Richard Eyre
Legendary director Richard Eyre discusses his new BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear
Richard Eyre’s last Lear was in 1997, the year he received his knighthood, in the National’s most intimate theatre, the Dorfman (then called the Cottesloe). Ian Holm was a brilliant, twitching, neurotically strutting, pomp-stripped king, and caused a sensation as the first Lear to rip off his clothes to become the “thing itself ”, like poor naked Tom, during the storm. The director recalls his late sister, Georgina, asking at the time: “‘Why did you put Dad on the stage?’ I told her that I had never imagined that for a moment and she said, ‘Well, you got him to behave exactly like our father’. I could only infer from that that all fathers are like King Lear at some stage.” View oEmbed on the source website When is BBC2's King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins on TV? BBC and Amazon reveal new images of Anthony Hopkins as King Lear RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox When we first spoke, in 2001, the director eloquently expressed the ways in which Holm played Lear like their father: “…the irascibility, the extremes, the sense in which he would test the love of his children, that refusal to concede. One of the reasons I was fascinated by the play is that it takes the family as a microcosm of the state, and of course all parents have the potential for tyranny.” Looking back, Eyre says that while “Ian, and Paul Scofield [who starred in a 1962 RSC production], are great, great Lears, I don’t think I’ll ever see a better Lear than Tony’s [Anthony Hopkins]. He, like Hopkins, sees the play as being all about family. When I ask him if he has ever been tempted to abuse his power (another underlying narrative of King Lear), say when he ran the National Theatre or in his role as a director, he brings it back to his family. “I don’t think I’ve ever abused power in an institutional fashion. However, it’s very easy to abuse power in a family situation, and I can think of occasions when Lucy, my daughter, was growing up when I might have shouted at her in a way that you think is legitimate because you are a parent, but you would never shout that way at anybody else. That is the agony of being a parent, and being a child, which we all face.” See the new teaser trailer for King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins View oEmbed on the source website I ask him whether, like Lear, he has ever feared madness himself – particularly in the context of his mother Minna’s descent into dementia. He says not. In the past five years, Eyre has directed two films, two operas and several plays. We speak the day after his Long Day’s Journey into Night opens in New York; he is also promoting King Lear, rehearsing his new play – an adaptation of the novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, which opens in June – and anticipating the summer release of a film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act, starring Emma Thompson, which he directed. Does he ever take a break? “I do fear not working. You ask, ‘Do I fear madness?’ – what I fear is the void.” King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins is at 9.30pm on BBC2 on Bank Holiday Monday 28th May
Sofia Helin explains why it will be a "relief" to say goodbye to Saga Noren and The Bridge
The Swedish actress prepares for what's set to be the final series of Scandi drama The Bridge – and reveals her ambitions for what to do next
The Swedes say S-ahh-ga; the Danes say S-eyyy-ga. But please don’t call the whole thing off. Alas, this is being trumpeted as the final season of The Bridge. Sofia Helin, its star, however, has talked about being brought back in her 50s so, you know, is it just wishful thinking to say: “Sag aldrig aldrig”? (Never say never, in Swedish.) Sofia Helin is perfectly groomed, with lustrous locks and bright eyes which immediately meet your gaze. In fact, it’s hard to see any trace of Saga in this charming woman, with her friendly manner and ready smile. Only when she’s in front of a camera, looking far off in the distance, does she assume that remote, slightly puzzled frown, with the raised eyebrows, and I feel a familiar rush of affection. Sofia Helin on her favourite things to do in her hometown - Stockholm Hans Rosenfeldt on why he needs to reduce the body count in The Bridge RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Saga inspires legions of fans, some bordering on obsessive. Helin tells me of one woman who turned up to an event, dressed in exactly the same clothes as the detective’s unchanging uniform – leather trousers, military boots, greatcoat – all in shades of drab khaki and dung. “She had even bought the same car,” Helin adds, still slightly astonished, referring to Saga’s 1970s olive Porsche 911, which has its own cult following. We repair to a small room, where Helin balances a canteen-style lunch of chicken and chips on her lap, opening onto it a bag of edamame beans, bought the previous day as emergency healthy food rations, which keep pinging haphazardly off the plate. She loves it, she tells me, when people tell her Saga is their feminist icon: “Oh, it makes me so happy. That’s the most beautiful compliment I can get.” Last year, Harvey Weinstein revelations led to the global #MeToo movement, with its various national iterations. Sweden’s version is called tystnadtagning, translating as “Silence, action”, which is what the director shouts out before the cameras start filming. Helin was one of more than a hundred actresses, holding hands and wearing black T-shirts with the tystnadtagning slogan, at the Swedish Oscars held in Stockholm in January. This action followed a collective letter, full of stories by actresses of their own sexual abuse in the industry – the difference to their American colleagues being that the Swedish sisterhood decided to keep the whole enterprise anonymous, both for the victims and the perpetrators. But the whole reason this movement has taken off, I suggest, is precisely because of the toppling of the massive behemoth of Weinstein. Without him being personally pursued, would Silence, Action, and its like, even exist? And are you not naming and shaming because you don’t want to burn bridges? “No, no! Not at all! It’s to not make a war. To make it peaceful. I really admire and I thank all the women in the world who have named people – when they do it right – but I don’t think that’s the way of progressing. I think the way to progress is by going together to expose the structure,” she says, in her gentle voice – most unlike Saga’s monosyllabic bark. The result of her union’s investigation into sexual harassment in the theatre, film and television industry revealed that 65 per cent of women reported having been sexually harassed. “The numbers are crazy. So we have to look at the structure. It’s not just one man or two – and it’s not just them, it’s also us. We have all agreed, in a way. We have been blind and now we can see.” Are you saying that women have been complicit? “No, not quite,” she says, aware of having to tread lightly here or risk blaming the victim. “But when it happened to me or to someone I know, we have been joking about it – even though it hurts. Instead of standing up and saying, ‘Hey! No! What are you doing?’” It’s important, though, to point out that the most common reaction to sexual harassment is to freeze – “and you can never discern that in advance. However powerful, great and tough you are, you never know how you would be. So you should never judge someone from their reaction.” She and her husband, Daniel Gotschenhjelm, an actor turned priest with the Church of Sweden, have two children – Ossian, 14, and Nike (pronounced Nik-eh), 9, named after the Greek goddess of victory, rather than her sports shoe namesake. When I ask Helin how she would feel about her children following her into acting, she breaks into a panic-stricken little hum: “Hmm, mmm, ahhh… Yeah, if they love it.” She clears her throat: “If 65 per cent of Swedish actresses are being harassed, until now…” So you would worry more about your daughter than your son? “Unfortunately, yes.” Her advice to a young woman entering her profession would be to hook up with an older woman for support, “and we should also look out more for the younger ones. I say to my colleagues who are my age and older: ‘Find yourself someone to take care of – don’t see someone younger as a threat.’ Because I think the young women shouldn’t go to a job and feel: ‘Oh, how am I going to protect myself?’ I just want them to go to work and DO IT!” she almost bellows. View oEmbed on the source website Feminism is not a dirty word in progressive Sweden and Helin is proud to say she wears “feministic spectacles that I cannot take off, even if I wanted to. I had them before but now it’s like I sharpened them even more.” A by-product of the #MeToo movement is that it has given women across the world confidence in other areas and has acted as a catalyst for wider shifts. Sweden’s Silence, Action group – numbering 70,000 supporters and rising – was contacted, in solidarity, by the women soldiers of the Kurdish Peshmerga, fighting Isis. Helin has called it a revolution and she is palpably excited by its possibilities: “This new movement makes it feel possible to do anything. I guess that’s what guys used to feel previously.” As an actress, for example, she now feels emboldened to share her views on how her character can develop and because of that other women tell her that her example has made them more confident, “which makes me have courage to raise my voice even more openly”. On The Bridge, she gives even quite strange suggestions – as she puts it – and the team take what they need for the story. “It can be just out of the blue and I don’t need to feel ashamed – people are not raising their eyebrows. On other sets, what I’ve heard is: ‘You’re an actor. Don’t think. Just say your lines.’ ” She mentions the company that makes “’Omeland ” – Helin speaks good, Swedishinflected English, with the odd mis-word – and how they’re looking for actors to contribute to their projects: “They call it ‘intelligent actors’,” she says with a wry smile. “They want them to be having their own sayings about the script, and I figure that I’ve learnt something and so many ideas pop up inside of me, so why not bring them out?” Another way forward is to be actively in charge of the scripts and casting – and she’s developing a number of projects with other women. One is called Honour, a thriller inspired by an actual law firm of women who are trying to change the law regarding consent and rape. The story is about four female lawyers who studied together but have a lifelong secret. They start a law firm – which is when the Scandi noir becomes very noir indeed. Helin is not acting in it but is one of the producers, all women. She also has what she describes as “an English project” in her computer and is looking for an English writer – step forward Sally Wainwright and Abi Morgan! What she loves is working with other women. “Because we are always just ONE woman. And I think the new and wonderful thing about this #MeToo movement is that women are coming together and that is so beautiful. In Sweden, we have a new connection between colleagues that wasn’t there before.” Does Helin have concerns about roles drying up as she gets older – she is 46. “I hope to have food on the table but I think I will manage somehow,” she says. “And I think the audience will not accept this concept of the older man with a younger woman for too much longer.” Another project in development is a comedy dealing with senior sexuality. So… Saga. Helin says that she can reveal some things about the opening of the new season, without spoiling it – those who are behind on catch-up please look away now! We left Saga and her Danish counterpart Henrik – both out of the police force for different reasons – committed to finding Henrik’s two daughters, who disappeared eight years previously. “It has been more than a year since the last sequence and Saga is now in prison for killing her mother. She is so depressed and she’s in a very bad place from the start. She is not a police officer any more, and she starts wondering, ‘What am I? Who am I? Am I anything without my identity as a police officer?’” How will it be for her to say goodbye to Saga? “It will be a relief,” she says. “It’s not an easy way to live, playing her. Eight months of filming and in the darkest months. And in dark places, which is depressing. But I love working with the people, so that’s what makes me sad. But leaving the character and that world – that’s a relief. I’m also content with the ending.” Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter What is fascinating is that Helin believes that playing Saga has in some way rewired her brain. The first season, for her, was as hard as learning to play the piano. But as it became more natural for her to think and move like the character, she felt herself change: “I am so interested in psychology and I learnt that if you behave in a certain way, often enough, it becomes a pattern and changes your brain. “I’m grateful for that because it has added something to my personality that I can use. The interesting thing about that, when you really think about it, is then you really choose who you are. And that’s a bit scary!” There is a sensitivity about Helin that is immediately apparent; a desire to be open and balanced with a strong self-protective streak. She looks delicate in her pale blue blouse with pussy bow and gold spangled ballet pumps, but she knows her own mind. When I ask her about her husband – it is unusual to turn from acting to the priesthood – she says that everyone is intrigued but he has been “quite strict with me, saying, ‘I don’t want you to talk about ME in your interviews.’ And I must respect that.” He does watch The Bridge – “and he thinks that I am doing a good job”. When she was ten days old, her six-year-old brother was killed in an accident while riding his bicycle. Her parents divorced when Sofia was four and what she remembers of her earliest years is sadness. The scar on her lip is the consequence also of a bicycle accident – she came to in an ambulance and had lost a number of teeth. She still cycles but with a helmet and doesn’t allow her youngest child to cycle in the city. “I wouldn’t recommend any children to cycle in the city before the age of 12, because your brain isn’t developed enough to be aware of how long the distance is. Therefore it’s better not." I wonder, finally, how ambitious she is? Is she keener on her career or more interested in a better work-life balance? She’s not sure that America appeals – “no matter how much money or how famous it would make me, if the project wasn’t right, I wouldn’t go. “The success of The Bridge has been so overwhelming, so huge, and I am so grateful. But what I always sense is that with your creativity, you have to be very gentle. It’s like with your sex life, I think.” A little laugh. “You have to treat it well, plant it and give it good earth and good nourishment.” The next big thing for Helin after Scandi noir? It looks like it’s going to be Scandi joie. The Bridge is on Fridays at 9pm on BBC2