British acting legend Lindsay Duncan talks "provocative" new BBC drama role – and why she'd never call herself English

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

In Mint, Charlotte Regan’s leftfield love story set in central Scotland’s criminal underworld, Lindsay Duncan plays Ollie. Mistress of this mobland when her husband was master, we meet the widowed Ollie as she is transitioned/relegated/sidelined into the mother of the king, with the ascension of her son Dylan (Sam Riley) to the position of the Godfather of Grangemouth.

No longer queen bee in this hive of illegal activity, Ollie spends her days assembling and reassembling firearms, doting on her granddaughter Shannon, picking on her daughter-in-law, Cat, and satisfying her not insignificant sexual appetites by bedding Dylan’s henchmen – though beds are apparently optional. In a certain light, I suggest to Duncan when we meet, Ollie looks like a psychotic sexual predator. She wrinkles her nose in disagreement.

“That sort of thinking is no help to me,” she declares, which is perhaps the nicest way in ages I’ve been told I’m talking rubbish. “The sex isn’t just about the sex.” The sex is about power, says Duncan, who originated the role of the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985 at the Royal Shakespeare Company (in a production that would transfer to the Barbican, then the West End and then Broadway).

“You don’t get to be as domineering and as provocative as Ollie is without the grains of that when she was young. She’d have to insinuate herself, get close to power and take it, as women have done for ever, with a whisper in the ear in bed or over drinks, sowing a seed of doubt about someone or whatever. She does have a sexual appetite, but I also think it’s absolutely linked to her stating her claim. She’s saying to people, ‘You better take me seriously because I will use all the power I have at my disposal’ – including her sexual prowess.”

Ollie is also at an age, 75-year-old Duncan points out, at which some people think it’s inappropriate for a woman to have sexual desires. “So, she’s like, ‘Oh you think so? I’ll show you…’ There’s a defiance to her.” Duncan smiles a smiles that says, “Dare to disagree with me.” I don’t.

As a powerful woman, Ollie is entirely in keeping with Duncan’s oeuvre, which includes queens, duchesses, ladies, upper-class doyennes, the home secretary in Black Mirror and Margaret Thatcher in Margaret. Over a 50-year career, Duncan has often attracted adjectives like “glacial”, “icy” and “aloof” but in real life, she couldn’t be warmer. We talk of cake: “I don’t deny myself very much, but I can’t have cakes around the house because who’ll eat them but me and Hilton [McRae, Duncan’s husband and a fellow actor]?” Of how nice the PR is: “Not at all PR-y. I was bracing myself because you come across so many impossible people.” And, randomly, of how once, years ago, she put a vanilla pod in the oven when she was selling a house.

Did it work? I ask.

“Yeah.”

Did it?

“Could’ve been the house.”

There is something gloriously conspiratorial about Duncan and never more so than when we talk of how Ollie is a departure for her. Because Ollie is not posh. Ollie is Scottish, and Duncan does the accent. It’s only the second time in her career that she’s done a Scottish accent on screen. Which is as curious as Duncan being a go-to for icy English Establishment types. Because Duncan is actually, technically, Scottish.

Born in Edinburgh to working-class parents who moved to Leeds then Birmingham when she was a baby, Duncan says she feels Scottish – “and I do more as I get older” – but it is, as they say, complicated. “I would never call myself English – no way! – but when I’m called Scottish, I sometimes feel like it’s a little lie because I wasn’t educated there. But being there, with work previously, I felt the pull of Edinburgh, because my mum was from there. The same with being in Glasgow for Mint. I felt not like an outsider – even though I sound ludicrously like an outsider.”

That the most important voices in her life have been Scottish makes a difference to Duncan. Her husband is from Dundee. “The first time I heard his disembodied voice, we hadn’t been together that long. It was an answering machine, and it was so powerful. When I was with him, I wasn’t aware of it but just hearing it, it was so Scottish. If the first voices in your ear were Scottish, as mine were, it’s fundamental, even if you’re in England.”

All the same, Duncan is aware of what she calls her “vulnerability”. “Here I am playing Scots and I live in England while there are plenty of great actresses in Scotland who could play this part. But what can I do? I’m not going to say, ‘No, I will not do this job because I’d like you to offer it to another actress.’” She cackles. “I don’t think so! I’m not that nice!”

Duncan is perhaps best known for the work she has done with three giants of British drama: Stephen Poliakoff and Alan Bleasdale on TV and Harold Pinter on stage. She calls that work – Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and Close to the Enemy; GBH and The Sinking of the Laconia; Ashes to Ashes and The Homecoming – “the bedrock of everything”.

“It makes me really emotional because they’re people who mean so much to me and I’m so grateful that those writers are or have been in the world – because we need those people. To be asked repeatedly to work with them is a source of real pride because I respect them so deeply and in those three cases, I love them too,” she says.

“I’m incredibly grateful for what they’ve done for me because I’m not someone who can just spin on nothing or stand in front of a camera with absolutely nothing to go on. I rely on the material and I celebrate the material. I love it, and I love writers. I’ve been incredibly lucky to be around at a time when those people were making work.”

It’s talent more than luck that gets Duncan into any room, isn’t it? “I’m not change-the-world talented, but I’m good and care about what I do.” That much is clear from how interesting her career is. What’s also clear is that it’s not ambition that drives Duncan but curiosity.

“Yes!” she exclaims. “Everything has just happened to me and most of it has been really brilliant. It’s made my life so great as an actor and as a human in the world. The people, the situations and the places I’ve been in, this business has enriched it and made it more exciting.

“I look back at the last year and think to myself about what an amazing, unpredictable year it has been. The things that have come I could never have hunted down. It’s curiosity. That’s how it’s been, that’s how it’s gone, and that’s how it’s going – and it’s great!”

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Mint begins at 9pm Monday 20 April on BBC One and iPlayer.

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