The actress on marriage to Damian Lewis and her fierce new TV role
ITV really, really wanted Helen McCrory to star in its big conspiracy thriller, Fearless. When, in February last year, she explained she was otherwise committed, playing the troubled heroine of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre in London, the programme-makers said, fine, they would wait until she was done in the autumn and film then. Shortly before the play opened in June, Fearless’s writer, Patrick Harbinson — who, coincidentally, had worked with her husband, Damian Lewis, on Homeland — came to the theatre during rehearsals and bought her coffee.
“He came to convince me he’d written it for me,” she says. “Just like the actress before.”
Yet even this cynicism (which is meant as modesty) demonstrates why Helen McCrory is, indeed, perfect for the part of Emma Banville, a fearless, streetwise, no-bull lawyer investigating a wrongful conviction and an international government plot. The six-parter is due to be broadcast next month. If you want fierce in your female lead, you want McCrory, the murderous Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders, the child-killing princess of Euripides’s Medea, the Vampire of Venice in Doctor Who, the evil Madame Kali in Penny Dreadful and, perhaps, most chillingly of all, Cherie Blair in Peter Morgan’s The Queen.
So when I go to see her at ITV HQ on the South Bank, I am expecting trouble. Wrongly, it turns out. She is tiny, dressed diaphanously, and could not be more charming, asking me, “before we get down to it”, how my day has been so far. Actually, my morning was spent interviewing the comedian John Bishop, who plays her partner, domestic not legal, in Fearless. I should have believed him when he told me she was not the least bit a prima donna, happily sharing a changing room with everyone else in the small house in which they filmed their scenes. She was, he said, brilliant to be around.
I am glad to say, however, that there is a dash of eccentricity to her that takes her beyond being simply “nice”. She tells me that at her local pub in Tufnell Park, north London, she will happily walk in dressed in a tiara. “Sometimes I look like I’m going to the circus.” Her views are showy too.
Emma, for instance, is an “old-fashioned girl”, the kind who frequents the “Colony Room and the Groucho”, chain-smoking, pint-drinking, not “mint tea and beards”. She is driven by her crusades, going right back, Fearless’s title sequence suggests, to darkest Thatcherism and Greenham Common. And yet, in what we can assume are her late forties — McCrory is 48 — Emma suddenly realises there is more to life: she wants to adopt a child (and God help the child, one feels).
“Patrick didn’t want to write this alpha female who has everything. Every woman knows now that’s a lie. Obviously, you can’t have everything. Every woman is a pioneer because there isn’t a guide to when you have your career and when you have your children or how you balance it out. ‘Should I care or not care what I look like?’ ‘What is a feminist?’ ‘Who is a feminist?’ All these questions! Every single woman is defining it for themselves because there’s just so much twaddle around.”
There was this thing, I say, around Emma Watson, whom she worked with on the Harry Potter films. Could Watson call herself a feminist when she had done a topless photo shoot for Vanity Fair?
“Of course she bloody can!” McCrory explodes. “Why the hell not?”
“So,” she says returning to Fearless, “I like the fact that he’s written this flawed character. You don’t see her as somebody who doesn’t care, who is just out there following her own truth and sacrificing everything. That’s the point. She’s not fearless. She defies her fear because she cares more than she’s frightened, but of course she’s frightened and of course she’s made sacrifices and of course she isn’t perfect and of course she wishes she bloody had children. And adoption, as we know, is a f***ing nightmare in this country. So hard! I’ve got friends who are trying to adopt and two years down the line some bloody thing happens and some kids end up with no one. I mean, it’s heartbreaking.”
Was McCrory, who did not have her first child until she was 37, once an Emma, driven by success, married to her job, unfussed about children? “Oh completely, completely.”
The daughter of a career diplomat from Glasgow, she grew up largely in Africa without the advertisements other little girls saw indicating their fate was marriage and domestic servitude. Her paternal grandfather was a widower and raised her father single-handed; her mother’s mother was a pub cleaner. Her father cooked and cleaned; her mother volunteered in polio camps. “So, I was never brought up with those stereotypes about a woman’s role and a man’s.
“When I came here and wanted to be an actress, that was the only thing I wanted to be. When I was a little girl, I had wanted to win the sprint or be the best at high jump or whatever it was. Now I wanted to be an actress and I was incredibly lucky. I went straight up playing leads at the National and my first television roles were with people like Michael Gambon.” That was in John Osborne’s The Entertainer; now Gambon is starring alongside her in Fearless.
And then, years later, she signed up for a play called Five Gold Rings at the Almeida in London. Her co-star was the red-headed Old Etonian Damian Lewis. The play was a turkey (and a Christmas turkey at that) but the director, Michael Attenborough, later said he could have warmed his hands on the electricity between the two of them.
“And that changed it all. But marriage and motherhood was certainly not an ambition of mine. So, I can completely understand why Emma would be there without children in her forties. You don’t realise how quick life passes you.”
Lewis and McCrory had two children, Manon and Gulliver, within 14 months (“totally planned,” she jokes), and married in the space between their births. To her surprise, she found she loved being a mother.
“I was never brought up with those stereotypes about a woman’s role and a man’s
“I really enjoyed it, really enjoyed it. My parents were very un-neurotic, so I was quite un-neurotic. I think that gives you a bedrock emotionally from which you can take risks, you know, playing Medea or being in The Deep Blue Sea and every night contemplating suicide. You can take yourself to these places safely. Obviously, it’s all still acting, but I wouldn’t want to if there were some deep, nasty cracks down there. Acting is not therapy. There’s nothing worse than an actor using a part as therapy. The audience sniffs it out a mile off and everything feels unsafe.”
When she returned to work after her necessary break — Lewis in recent months has had the children living with him in New York while he films the TV series Billions — her roles seemed to get juicier, or to put it more plainly, sexier: a married woman obsessed with a younger man in Tony Marchant’s Leaving; Barbara Villiers, the king’s favourite mistress, in Joe Wright’s Charles II: The Power and the Passion and, most recently, the sexually obsessed Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea.
“I know what you’re talking about, becoming more relaxed sexually, but I don’t know if it was around having the children. Maybe it was. I’m not a navel-gazer so I never really noticed. I think definitely as you get older you become much more in control.
“I have never had a problem with sexuality on stage. I mean, I ramped it up on many occasions, slithered across many a board in many a skimpy outfit. When I was playing Olivia in Twelfth Night [in 2002] the whole place erupted when I slapped Orsino’s face and then took what I was wearing off in front of Malvolio and was just there with no knickers, no bra and a lace dress. But I was doing that in theatre because there you can control it. It’s you and an audience and you want to make an impact as this woman who is so desperate that she’s practically naked.”
But in a film you can be exploited in the cutting room? “Of course you can. Unless you are sitting beside the cameraman and you have the ear of the director, be very, very careful what position you put yourself in.”
In Charles II she had “about 37” nude scenes, but reached a pact with Wright. She would play them nude, but they would shoot only her non-erogenous zones. “It’s erotic for this person she’s in the scene with, and we understand they are in love, that they have been in bed, that they are free with each other, but the audience don’t need to see it all.”
There was a report that she had revealed in an after-show discussion of The Deep Blue Sea that she had suffered a panic attack one night while delivering the line: “Lust isn’t the whole of life, but Freddie is, you see, for me. The whole of life. And death.”
She denies it. “Unfortunately, I’m not sensitive enough to have had a panic attack. I’ve had deep doubt, deep self-doubt. Does that count?”
Self-doubt, really? “Yes, of course, we all have self-doubt.”
About parts? “About the capability of doing parts.”
With certain thoughts still slithering across my mind, I tell her I am slightly aggrieved that although her figure remains girl-like and her face indestructibly beautiful, she is starting to be cast as older women. Joan Collins is reported to want McCrory as the Dynasty-era version of herself (when she was in her fifties) in a future biopic. There are rumours that she may be cast as middle-years Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s The Crown. The Queen! Worst of all, she recently played the 67-year-old Bill Nighy’s love interest in the inexplicably well-received romantic movie about wartime propaganda films, Their Finest.
“Bill’s lovely.”
But is he still sexy?
(Quickly) “I think that’s the fun thing, though. I like the transformation. I mean, last year I was in a Horrible Histories film called Bill and I was persuading the director, ‘Please can I have a bald cap, and please can I have a pock-marked face? Please can I have blacked teeth?’ He was, like, ‘Really?’ I was, like, ‘Yes, it’s just fun.’ I think that we hold ourselves back too much with vanity. It really gets in the way of having a good laugh or telling a good story.”
She doesn’t mind playing older? “No, you just make yourself look older. You make yourself look younger. It just doesn’t matter. It’s what story you’re telling.”
In real life, she has made one concession to the years. Tired of the serial cheroot-smoking she did as Emma in Fearless, she stopped rolling her own liquorice-paper ciggies the day after they wrapped on December 23 and has not lit up since. “I just decided I didn’t want to be smoking when I got to 50.”
Age cannot wither Helen McCrory nor custom stale her infinite cheekbones. Smoking, I suppose, might have. Whether Fearless bombs or provides her with work for series ahead, she will have ITV and Patrick Harbinson to thank for delivering her from that fearful future.
Fearless begins on ITV in June