Author: helenistic

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.”

Continue reading Helen McCrory on the next Woman in Black and life with Damian Lewis