A Busy Actress
I first met Helen McCrory in a modest caravan, next to a haunted house, in the freezing Buckinghamshire countryside during the winter of 2013. The 46-year-old Peaky Blinders star, award-winning stage actress and wife of Damian “Homeland” Lewis OBE, was huddled next to a fan-heater in between set-ups on her new movie, the horror sequel The Woman in Black: Angel of Death. She was wearing a grim, lime green two-piece and a cruelly over-curled “do” (in the movie she plays a priggish 1940s school marm), but was otherwise on giddy, quip-friendly form.
“Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo was the first film I ever saw, and it still influences me today,” she said at one point, deadpan. “And you’ll see it in some of my roles, especially when I indicate before leaving a scene.”
She cheekily dismissed her part in The Woman in Black as that of a “background” player. She claimed that online fans who blog about her “hotness” were merely “a niche market of internet perverts”. But mostly she described, and clarified, her radical new career plan.
“I’ve decided, this year, that I’m simply going to do stuff that I haven’t done before — I’m doing this horror film, then some mad comedy, then Medea at the National Theatre, then a gothic TV series, plus I’ll do a second series of Peaky Blinders. Well, that’s the plan.”
I meet Helen McCrory a year later, almost to the day, in a West London members’ bar. She’s in black leather boots, bright red leopard-print jeans, black shirt and shades (they’re prescription sunglasses, she can’t find her regular specs), and is every bit the indoor rock star. So, I say, how did that career plan work out for you?
This is a leading question. I know the answer. It worked out very well indeed — her Medea was rapturously received (“she ascends to greatness” gushed one of many fawning reviews), as was her gothic TV series Penny Dreadful, while the second series of Peaky Blinders elevated her mob boss character Aunt Polly to near sublime heights (she ends the show bloodstained and swaggering away from a murder, like something from Macbeth).
Add to that the fact that McCrory and Lewis nabbed the No 4 spot in The Times’s 20 Most Powerful Couples in the Arts, and it has all been, admits the actress, “a really good year. Yes. It was fun. I enjoyed breaking out of my niche. Although, at first, I worried that playing Medea every night in a 1,200-seater would kill me. When I told Damian that it might kill me, he really encouraged me to do the job!”
McCrory, typically, is still every bit the joker. And yet the persona that has defined her in this same standout year is, conversely, one of brooding darkness, grit and solemnity. It’s there in the savagery of Medea, who strides off stage at the end of the play with the corpses of her children (she has murdered them) in two sleeping bags slung over her back.
It’s certainly there in Polly from Blinders. And it’s there again in the no-nonsense headmistress from The Woman in Black, who barks at the winsome heroine Eve (Phoebe Fox), just as the spirits are creeping out of the woodwork: “Our own worst enemy is ourselves. Our fears, doubts and despair. That is what will destroy us.”
Does she recognise this grit within herself? Without hesitation she says, “Yes. Yes. I don’t use it very much in life but there’s definitely a line that I know if people cross with me, I can be very, er, well, I understand brutality. I understand what motivates brutality. Not physical brutality. I’ve never hit anybody and I’ve never wanted to. I find it much more satisfying to destroy them psychologically.”
We’ll come back to this but, for now, we keep moving. With McCrory, in conversation, she’s like that. Fast. Multi-directional. She did The Woman in Black, she says, because her Peaky Blinders director, Tom Harper, was behind it.
The film, a sequel to the 2012 Daniel Radcliffe smash (£81 million at the global box office), is a campy fright-fest that pitches McCrory, Fox and a bunch of terrified schoolchildren into a deserted rural mansion during the Second World War, then kicks back with delight as things go bump, slash and scream in the night.
McCrory says she doesn’t watch horror. Ever. Never even finished The Shining. But you can’t be too choosey. Because the movie roles out there for women these days. Well. “I get sent so many scripts where people go, ‘Oh, it’s a wonderful part.’ And I read it, and all my character is saying is, ‘I think he’s having an affair. I’m so worried.’ It’s, like, ‘Oh, for f***’s sake. It’s not a wonderful part, it’s a s*** part.’ It’s just depressing.”
She says that at least in TV the female characters are richer, while in theatre there is obvious economic parity between the men and the women (Medea sold out in two weeks). And the brutality thing? “Oh, I think that the most sensitive people are usually the most vicious, as a defence,” she says. “I’ve always been empathetic to people’s vulnerability because I spent a lot of my childhood feeling vulnerable but not being able to show it because of moving around a lot.”
McCrory’s father was a Glasgow-born diplomat who worked for the foreign office; her mother, Welsh-born, worked for the NHS. McCrory grew up in Tanzania, Paris, Norway and Madagascar, before relocating to the Queenswood School for girls in Hertfordshire. She is proud of her working-class roots (her grandfather was a lorry driver, and a boxer) and is keen to point out that “neither of my parents were posh, but they’re both clever”.
She found acting in school, via an inspirational drama teacher, Thane Bettany (father of the actor Paul Bettany), and regular term-time trips to the West End (seeing Judi Dench in Brecht’s Mother Courage was the eureka moment). She studied at Drama Centre London in King’s Cross, and almost immediately emerged, in 1993, with an Ian Charleson Award nomination for her turn in Trelawny of the Wells at the National Theatre, establishing herself as a new stage actress with genuine clout.
She moved fitfully, in and out of TV and film, supporting Cate Blanchett in Charlotte Gray, then taking the title role in the 2000 mini-series Anna Karenina. She met Lewis in 2003 on stage at the Almeida Theatre, London. She says that, no, she was not instantly aware of her old Etonian husband’s inherent poshness. “He is posh, I know that now. But it was a long time into our relationship before I even knew that he went to Eton. And we didn’t talk about that kind of thing. Although, now, occasionally, he does call me his class warrior. Whenever I start to pile up the soapboxes.”
The couple’s first child, Manon, was born in 2006, and McCrory learnt of her second pregnancy (with son Gulliver) during a studio-sponsored medical check in the summer of 2007, before beginning her role as Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She told the doctor she was tired, he told her she was four months pregnant, which meant bye-bye to Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter stepped in, and McCrory eventually appeared in the series as Lestrange’s sister, Narcissa Malfoy, to great effect, in the three closing instalments).
It has been in recent years, however, that McCrory and Lewis, who live in the trendy north London enclave of Tufnell Park, have inexorably emerged as the power couple du jour (I suggest their Brangelina name should be “Hamian”, but she prefers “Helian”).
She says, reflecting on Lewis’s Homeland triumph and her own increasing prowess, “I think we’ve been lucky in that we’ve started to find success at the same time. When we met we both had our thing going, and that’s continued to grow. Although I hope it wouldn’t be any different if he was going to the Golden Globes and I had been unemployed at home for two years. I really hope so.”
McCrory’s new-found power also means she can take more chances on screen, as seen in the no-blushes-spared sex scenes in Tony Marchant’s mini-series Leaving or the recent erotic drama Flying Blind. She says that, unlike in the early years, she’s not scared of sex scenes any more, because she knows she’s not going to be manipulated by the film-makers.
“The truth is that I’ve got more control now,” she says. “So if I want to do something I can do it, and I can ask for playback, and to see the camera position, and I can decide myself whether it’s furthering the story, or not.”
This leads us on to ageing, and to how she is unafraid to be heading, albeit in four years’ time, towards 50. “At this age you get yourself together, you know what you want, don’t apologise and don’t explain,” she says, before grinning and announcing. “When I turn 50 there’s going to be fireworks in Tufnell Park. I’ll be this beautiful angel, hovering with sophistication and the smell of Chanel No 5, over our house. ‘That’s your mother, darling. She turned 50 this morning!’”
In the meantime, she says, domestically, parenting is balanced between the pair, and a nanny, and a refusal to engage with the screen-obsessed culture of the day. She doesn’t believe in gadgets, she hasn’t brought her phone with her today, and keeps her children away from smartphones and iPads.
And if they complain? “I say, ‘I’m the adult, you’re the child, and that’s that!’” Socially, she still likes to party, she says, and loves to have “the craic”, but these days she is a more conservative hedonist — “The days of drinking lots and not feeling it are long gone. I drink lots more water.”
We close with a look to the future. She’s up next opposite Kate Winslet in the period drama A Little Chaos, and as Queen Elizabeth I in the Shakespearean-era comedy Bill, plus there’s a third season of Peaky Blinders on the way (“Aunt Polly will get even more involved in the man’s world!”), a second series of Penny Dreadful, and a top-secret London stage production.
She stands up to leave. She’s wanted for a BBC radio show. I tell her that I’ll see her in 12 months’ time. Another knockout year awaits. The career plan, clearly, is working like a dream.
The Woman in Black: Angel of Death opens today