Helen McCrory: ‘Marry someone you love and someone who you like. I am incredibly lucky.’

She’s the feisty star of Peaky Blinders with forthright views on nudity, politics and why actors aren’t role models. He’s the Homeland heart-throb with an OBE. So who’s boss in the McCrory-Lewis house? The actress reveals all to Event…

In the flesh Helen McCrory’s a fierce, sexy woman with refreshing views on nudity, the NHS and the gender pay gap in Hollywood

Helen McCrory is rather pleased her husband, Homeland and Wolf Hall star Damian Lewis OBE, has been objectified as a pin-up, with topless shots from US TV series Billions plastered over the papers and glossy magazines alongside other British hunks Tom Hiddleston and Aidan Turner.

‘It’s lovely. Every wife wants to be with someone everyone finds attractive. Just like every husband wants to feel their wife is attractive,’ she says, perched at the bar of a London members’ club in high black boots and a black high-necked fitted dress with a sexy split in the skirt.

I’d heard McCrory was tiny. But she never looks tiny on screen, especially as Polly Gray the mobster matriarch in award-winning Peaky Blinders, which returns to BBC2 next month.

There you don’t think about her size, just her mesmerising force, equally apparent in her rapturously praised lead in Medea at the National Theatre.

It’s given her an impressively varied career. She’s appeared in two Harry Potter films, starred opposite 007 as MP Clair Dowar in Skyfall, played Cherie Blair in two films, and she’ll take to the stage of the National again next month in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea.

The actress never looks tiny on screen, especially as Polly Gray (fourth from right) the mobster matriarch in award-winning Peaky Blinders, which returns to BBC2 next month

So does she think of herself as part of a power couple? ‘Sure, every morning on the way to school in my pyjamas with the children in all the wrong outfits: power couple is written all over us,’ she exclaims with a laugh.

In the flesh she’s a fierce, sexy woman with refreshing views on nudity (‘I walk around at home in knickers’), the NHS (‘drunks who pitch up to A&E should foot the bill’) and the gender pay gap in Hollywood (‘if you’re doing the same job, you should get the same money’). She also makes a surprising bid for a key role in the next Bond films.

Her relationship with Lewis sounds close and lively. Michael Caine’s advice for keeping a relationship alive is to have separate bathrooms. What’s hers?

‘Marry someone you love and someone who you like. I am incredibly lucky. We are constantly apart and in stimulating situations; it’s feast or famine.’

Does she have anything like the three-week rule, where no matter where she and Lewis are in the world they have to see each other? ‘No, but we try to see each other as much as possible… it’s not a rule, I just miss him when he is not there babbling to me for hours. We talk a lot. We both don’t shut up. It’s constant until your ears bleed.’

At 47, two years older than Lewis, she revels in her role as the tough-as-old-boots matriarch Aunt Polly, who keeps up with the boys both in the bar and on the mean streets of Birmingham, while taking care of business when the men were in the trenches during WWI.

But McCrory also believes she can play much younger women: ‘Instead of that dysmorphia where women look in the mirror, and the size 14 woman sees herself as size 22 because she has no self-esteem, I’m the other way around. I go, “That 17-year-old, tall woman staring back is lovely. Sometimes I look at the screen and go, “Terrible lighting, I almost look middle-aged.” And I am so alarmed if I see a photo of myself. I say, what a strange camera angle, you’ve made me look terribly short.’

While she jokes about her own appearance, she is perplexed by accusations of a lack of political correctness in the film and TV business.

So while this year’s Academy Awards, dubbed ‘The White Oscars’, highlighted race concerns in Hollywood, McCrory suggests that race isn’t the only issue that could have been picked up on. ‘Where were all the old ladies and the big fat guys?’

But she adds: ‘I find it strange when people say actors are role models. Why would you have such low self-regard that you want an actor as a role model? It’s not about being socially conscious, it’s the entertainment business.’

However, she is vexed by sexism in interviews. She would like someone to ask Lewis about his beauty regime and how he juggles children and a job, and is he thinking about getting some work done.

She may have a valid point but given all the recent lascivious media comments about her husband’s naked scenes in his shows I cheekily ask her if she’s changed her mind about stripping off as she used to turn down nudity?

‘You mean, will I drop my knickers at the drop of a hat? Not quite. But when I started I was very aware that I was in a vulnerable position and you can’t call the shots. You can’t decide where the camera is going to be and you are not in control. When you are older you get to be more in control and it’s easier to be vulnerable because you’re in a safe place. And I don’t see that nudity is necessarily sexual. I’d be happy to just open the fridge in a pair of knickers at night talking to my husband.’

So that’s what she does? No top on? ‘In the summer at home I walk around in knickers.’

Where does McCrory stand on the Hollywood pay gap? ‘If you’re doing the same job, indisputably you should have the same money’

Lewis has always said that’s it’s his wife who is the boss at home. ‘I don’t think he sees me as boss lady at home, but when he’s away in America he knows that I am looking after the children and he knows that I can take care of them [her children Manon and Gulliver are nine and eight]. He has recently been doing Billions in New York. When he comes back home he is very aware that I have been there, manning the fort.’

Will they ever work together? ‘I don’t know. I think we’d like to but the problem is we get sent scripts that either have a great bloke part and an only OK girl’s part, or vice-versa. In some of them there are husbands and wives and I think that’s a bit distracting for an audience. It feels a bit Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

Jennifer Lawrence spoke out recently about the pay gap in Hollywood, the difference between men and women. But Kate Winslet said it was vulgar to talk about money. Where does McCrory stand?

‘If you’re doing the same job, indisputably you should have the same money. I don’t sit around with my friends and ask how much do you earn, but mainly because I don’t know what I earn until the tax man at the end of the year says what I have earned. I absolutely assure you that we both need to work. Phone up the National Theatre and ask how much we make a week.’ (Equity minimum wage for an actor is £380 a week, but big names in big theatres can expect up to £1,000.)

Emma Rice, the new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London, said recently that there is no reason why women should not be cast in the classical male roles and vice versa, and she has committed to delivering a 50/50 gender split in her productions.

McCrory has had an impressively varied career, appearing in two Harry Potter films (as Narcissa Malfoy, above), starring opposite 007 in Skyfall and playing Cherie Blair twice

The actresses Fiona Shaw, Cate Blanchett and Maxine Peake have already taken on iconic male Shakespearean roles (Richard II and Hamlet), so is there a classical male lead McCrory would like to play?

‘I was offered Hamlet about four years ago in New York, which I was quite excited about until I discovered that I was to be the only person with reverse gender. If you decide Hamlet is a woman, I want all the cast to be reverse gender. That said, I would really like to play Macbeth. I want to be able to say “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”.’

How does she feel about playing Bond – James Bond or Bond girl?

‘I have been in Bond. I may not have been emerging from the Atlantic in a bikini but I had a very fetching twin set from Jaeger that did the job. I would love to be a Bond girl in the way that M [Judi Dench] was. Would I like to play Bond? No. But if Barbara Broccoli is reading this, can I please play M?’

For her, sexiness and confidence comes from within. She once said that women doing ‘the walk of shame’ [coming home at dawn in the same clothes you went out in the night before] is hot.

So when was the last time she did the walk of shame? ‘I’ve walked into hotel lobbies at 5am with messy mascara and mushed hair, and that’s more to my taste than when I leave looking pristine. That’s what I was talking about. When I come back with Damian from dancing in the boom-boom rooms of New York or whatever, you have that feeling that you are freer, more relaxed and sexier.’

Does she often go dancing with Lewis? ‘Not so much, but yes, we like to go out. He is here now making shelves, actually. This year in September, after I finish the play at the National, he will be filming in New York so I will go over with the kids. Damian filming and me playing my greatest role to date: mother and wife.’

She laughs with a mischievous cackle, but I suspect that part of this is true. Do her children like to hang around on set watching their parents?

‘No. We live in Tufnell Park [in north London] and all our friends are in the area, none of them are in the business and I like it that way. I don’t want my children to be in the glare or rarefied or spoiled. The way we live is kind of low key. We tell them that we are storytellers. They came on set when I was doing Horrible Histories, which is a big kids’ programme. I came down in a bald cap with black teeth and my hair withered – “Look at Mummy’s funny costume” – and they walked right past me. They weren’t interested at all.

In her performances, it is not McCrory’s tiny size that is apparent, but her mesmerising force, such as in her rapturously praised lead in Medea at the National Theatre (above)

‘And you can easily avoid the limelight. I have no time for “Why were the paparazzi there when I was staggering out of The Ivy at midnight?” There is a perfectly good Italian near us on the Holloway Road that the paps [paparazzi] won’t be outside, so if you choose to go there you can keep the paps away.’

She doesn’t suffer fools easily. The McCrory-Lewis household is one of shared tasks. ‘If I have been at home all day and have cooked the kids lunch, Damian will cook in the evening or vice versa. Whoever has the energy left to do it. Damian is better at cooking quick things and I am better at cooking slow things. I’ll make fish pies and apple crumble. He makes tuna Niçoise.

‘That’s all you need in an evening. There’s a depressing new generation of women who say they don’t like the word feminism. Housework is not an optional extra for men, it’s something that’s necessary to do. Not the boring job that the other person does.’

She is clearly not starry either. ‘We avoid all that. It doesn’t interest either of us. The kids are, like most kids with their parents’ jobs, only mildly interested.’

Nevertheless, both have leads in school plays. Do they have strict home rules? Do they have iPads? ‘Absolutely not. I know kids watch television but we are with them. I don’t want them typing “pussy” into YouTube, though the other day Manon wanted to look up a baby monkey and the image that came was a monkey with its skull pulled back and electrodes on its brain. I hope that image will fade and soon they will be old enough to have the conversation of what you’ve got to be careful about because you have to protect your mind. They are lovely children. They will say things like, “I came second, not meaning to boast Mummy, because boasting is not good.” They are both really kind and I am most proud of that.’

McCrory’s childhood was spent in various far-flung locations because of her father’s diplomatic career. ‘We were in Scandinavia, West Africa and Tanzania. Then I went to a Welsh school for a term, then a school in Bletchley. It made me fit in but never want to belong. I used to lie appallingly. I never saw that as a problem.

‘I remember being horrified at 15 or 16 when a girlfriend was really upset because I had said something that was total fantasy. Of course it never happened but it was a terribly good story. And it really confused me why people were so interested in truth. Truth of feeling is very important. Being honest about your feelings. But being honest about what really happened? Unless it hurts somebody it’s just semantics. So living in the great twilight between my reality and reality as an actress was born.’

When she gets on a roll McCrory is almost unstoppable. She is particularly keen on reforming the NHS. She once said people should be fined if they miss appointments.

‘I would also like people to be told how much their prescription is costing. If you pitch up, hammered out of your mind, to have your stomach pumped, which is what most A&Es are full of on Friday and Saturday nights, you should foot the bill. If you can’t take your drink, don’t drink.

‘I would like to take the NHS out of the political arena. Let’s put it back in the hands of the doctors and start really valuing it. And the other thing that depresses me is machines at Tube stations. There used to be six ticket officers who would tell you if the trains were down today and where you would change platforms. And now it’s just machines. What if the Tube crashes and there’s not one person to help 750 people get off the train?’