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.
Continue reading Star of Fearless Helen McCrory: ‘Of course you can’t have everything’
