Helen McCrory Spills the Beans About Her New TV Character
Helen McCrory plays Kathryn in MotherFatherSon.
Tell us about Kathryn
Kathryn Villiers is a wealthy, educated English woman. Heir to a newspaper which her family has owned for generations – a broadsheet, which prides itself in the quality of its journalism. Her parents are distant and cold, perhaps because that is the way they were brought up; perhaps for another darker reason which she discovers in our story. She is expected to marry well, look after her inheritance and her husband, and continue on in her mother’s footsteps, but she’s rebelled. She becomes a journalist herself and on an assignment falls in love with an American steel magnet, who she can’t help noticing has more than a passing resemblance to Richard Gere!
Wild, happy and in love, Kathryn defies her family and marries him. She gives him a son. She gives him her empire. She introduces him to the powerful world of British politics and those who report on it, and he takes it all. Max leaves Kathryn with nothing. In a brutal divorce, he even denies her the one thing she needs more than anything – to see her only child, her son, and to be a mother. Fifteen years later, we find them again…
In MotherFatherSon we see Kathryn at both points of her life. We have flashbacks to a younger, more chaotic Kathryn, and then today’s Kathryn who is a quiet, isolated woman living on the outskirts of her own life. She no longer really knows what she wants. The trauma of not raising her own child still haunts her, and while she can’t fulfil her need to be a mother her life has stultified. The fact that Kathryn’s unable to be part of the family she was born into – or the one she started herself – gives her an adrift quality, a detachment. She is the outsider.
Where do we meet Kathryn in episode one?
At first you’re not really sure who she is. You see a woman in a homeless shelter helping as a volunteer, then going back to her own world, not really talking to anyone, just reading books and living alone. She’s mysterious. She doesn’t really belong anywhere, and doesn’t really know what the purpose is of anything. She tries to be kind because she’s known cruelty, but simply she’s just lost.
Kathryn is very distant from Max and Caden, and you have a feeling that she probably hasn’t seen her ex-husband in at least 10 years. She still tries to be with her son, but although he meets her he’s wary of her. He’s been brought up by his father, in his father’s mould – one that doesn’t have space for her. He seems lost to her. And it’s heartbreaking.
How did you get involved with the show?
My agent Nick Forgacs called me up to say there was a fantastic project floating about, but the only names that were reading it were big film stars. He couldn’t tell me anything about it, nor were they sending it to me, but Nick’s excitement was palpable: “If I can get you into the room I think you’ve got a chance… but I’ve got to get you into the room first.”
So we gate-crashed the auditions basically. I was being offered various things during this process – I even declined a lead role in another series purely on the chance of getting this, because Tom Rob Smith’s writing is brilliant and it is one of the most original scripts I’ve ever read. And you always want to part of the good stuff.
What is it about Tom Rob Smith’s writing that you like so much?
He has a very big canvas. He’s ambitious. He writes in a way that a lot of Americans write because their budgets are more for one episode than we sometimes get for an entire series! “Max wakes up, he’s in Mexico. Kathryn wakes up, she’s in London. Caden wakes up, he’s in a brothel…” And I could imagine the BBC going, “Christ, there’s our budget gone in page one!” But with the ingenuity of the great production team, art department, gaffer, director, Directors of Photography and no sleep for five months, we shoot it all and it looks fantastic. It’s cinematic and it means you see a really broad spectrum of life.
Tom spins many different threads into one extraordinary story. MotherFatherSon is about family, about belonging and not belonging, about power and what kind of people are attracted to power. Father/Max is the conventional Armani-wearing, Rolex-carrying, Audi-driving man from the city. We look at those men in society and say “wow” – they’re the epitome of success, they are the men of the Christmas perfume adverts.
But to actually be those people – to be that successful, to stay on top – requires a certain sociopathic quality that we now know about. And we are now beginning to understand what kind of personalities rise to the top of unregulated capitalism. And as we look at this system, we also look at what this man is like within a family. If people really want this – if young people now really want this when they look at those glittering stories – the Instagram perfection that is being peddled to another generation of consumers – we ask, what are those people really like? What does it cost to be that perfect, to be that controlled, and do we really want those people in charge? Do we really want to be them? Does power have to look like this?
Tom then examines what the consequences are. And we question that power with journalism, for example. The power of the pen is mightier. You feel when you watch it that he questions it all, and tries to examine the whole system afresh. And he’s an optimist, he believes we can choose to change or choose to carry on as we are, but that it is our choice. It is not inevitable.
We are all damaged, and even the most damaged of us can transform. Kathryn may have been damaged but she is loving, loyal, quietly intelligent, with an old-school sense of wrong and right. And if she could only fulfil her role as a mother, would that complete her and make her powerful, or does it not work that way?
Tom gives you archetypes, then smashes them. He uses cliche to twist them and surprise the viewer. MotherFatherSon has a thriller quality. It’s unpredictable. Our first scene is reminiscent of a thousand dramas you’ve seen before, but then Tom flips it. It’s his anarchy l love.
And the family are central to this, aren’t they?
What Tom does is make all these questions personal. So actually when you’re watching it, what you’re watching is a family and you’re watching how people interact. It’s just with a backdrop of power behind it.
Why should everyone watch it ?
Because it’s sexy, disturbing, uplifting, unflinching, and you’ve already paid your licence fee, so what’s not to love?
Unless of course you’re not a mother or a father. Or a child of one…