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Vogue Interview with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis

On January 20, 2015April 29, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

No Place Like Homeland

by Staff | Vogue | January 20, 2015

“Do you know, I think you might wear a suit better than any man I’ve ever met.” In the intimate and strangely forbidden confines of a lift at the National Theatre, Helen McCrory’s heavily made-up hazel eyes are drinking in her husband’s tall, tailored frame.

“Thank you,” he replies, faintly awkwardly, looking down at the same Tom Ford tuxedo he wore to accept the best actor Emmy award only last month. “Does this mean you want me to do all the washing-up for a week?”

A gypsy laugh bubbles up from deep inside McCrory’s tiny dancer’s body.

“No, my darling, of course not! Just the bedtime stories…”

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Interviews Print Media The Woman in Black, Angel of Death

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

On January 1, 2015April 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

A Busy Actress

by Kevin Maher | January 1, 2015, The Times

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.”

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Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly

On November 17, 2014May 29, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly shows it isn’t just the men who are deadly in Peaky Blinders

By Matt Bungard | November 17, 2014 | The Age

Did you have to do much research into the actual Peaky Blinders gang before you took on the role?

There’s not that much written about the Peaky Blinders – there’s about two or three books that touch on them, and that touch on the violence in Birmingham and the gangs that were going around in the north of England at the time. But what I did do is I spoke a lot to (program creator) Steven Knight, and he was inspired by stories that his father told him. [His father] had been sent to deliver a message to his uncle, and he was terrified; he had to go to a part of town that he’d never been to. He went down Garrison Lane and knocked on the door and went into a smoke-filled room, and saw it was an illegal betting shop. And in the room, behind the glass there were these three men drinking homemade gin out of jam jars and were wearing the most beautiful three-piece suits and peaked caps, surrounded by piles of money. And his father became obsessed with this world – he didn’t ever join it, but he found out all these stories and passed them on to Steve. And so really, Steve is the person that all the actors go to to talk about these stories and he knows all these characters; they all existed. So it was through him, really. Like a lot of this history, it’s passed on orally but isn’t written down.

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Damian Lewis Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media

Helen McCrory’s Travelling Life

On October 20, 2014May 10, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory: “What I love about travel is the freedom. Anything that gets in the way of that is missing the point”

How often do you travel?

As an actress, it is feast or famine when it comes to holidays. I have two children and try to get three holidays a year with them. Last year, we did a weekend in Rome, where it snowed for the first time in 30 years. Then my husband, Damian [Lewis, the actor], worked in Mantua for a week, so we went to Venice for the weekend and visited the Italian countryside for a week. It was bliss.

We also visited Mauritius during the hurricane season, which was actually OK. When it rained, we’d stay inside and watch the geckoes and then walk out afterwards to see bright flowers and rainbows. I was brought up in very exotic places, as my father was a diplomat. By the time I was nine I had lived all over the world, from Oslo to Nigeria and Zanzibar. As a child, I used to think the most exotic place was Cardiff, where my grandparents lived, and where I first saw snow.

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Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory: “How dare you sit on your arse and not support other women?!”

On October 15, 2014April 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Peaky Blinders’ Helen McCrory on playing Aunt Polly, working-class Britain – and the lack of feminism in today’s society

How much have you enjoyed creating season two?

Polly’s story this year is much, much more interesting. I don’t know if Steven [Knight, writer] made a conscious effort or it’s just what he found the most interesting from the last series, but the women’s parts on the whole [are more interesting]. I think you have to establish that the world of the Shelbys is a man’s world, but once you’ve got that up and running, then you can start to look at the women’s world, which were much more delineated than they are now, so they are completely different characters and completely different sets and settings. I’ve had a fantastic time this year, he’s written me one of my best parts I’ve ever played.

It even passes the Bechdel test. Does it offer a more interesting perspective of women in period dramas?

If you actually look at the working class, the working class women ran the homes, those women worked hard, they were the heartbeat of the society, knowing where the kids are, running it all, making sure that the drunk man in the pub was picked up by somebody else’s husband and brought home, and knowing what’s happening on the streets, because you have to, because no one else is helping you. So yes, just by setting it in working-class Britain, which was 95% of the rest of the country, yeah it does.

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