by Elizabeth Day | June 12, 2017 | Radio Times
Her latest incarnation is as the lead in ITV’s new political thriller, Fearless, scripted by Homeland writer Patrick Harbinson. McCrory plays Emma Banville, a campaigning lawyer who fights to free a man she believes was wrongfully convicted of killing a schoolgirl.
by Gingersnap4Helen | helen-mccrory.com | June 12, 2017
Helen McCrory chats about her new role as a human rights lawyer in TV thriller series Fearless.
by James Rampton | June 8, 2017 | The Independent
When he was interviewing politicians on BBC2’s Newsnight, it was often said that the presenter Jeremy Paxman lived by the old journalistic motto: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”
That is also the credo adopted by Emma Banville, the central character in Fearless, ITV’s absorbing new six-part legal thriller. Played with characteristic panache and passion by the actress Helen McCrory, Emma is a human rights lawyer whose speciality is defending lost causes. Her whole career has been based on questioning the powers that be and refusing to accept the official line.
According to Patrick Harbinson, the creator of the series, (who also worked with McCrory’s husband Damian Lewis on Homeland), the character is inspired by the work of lawyers like Gareth Peirce and Helena Kennedy.
by Emma Powell | The Evening Standard | June 6, 2017
McCrory said gender is important as men and women have very different experiences of the world
The Peaky Blinders star said she found it “odd” when people called her an actor as opposed to an actress, because men and women have very different experiences of the world.
She told the Standard: “I’m not an actor – I’m an actress. I find it odd when people introduce me as an actor. There are many, many jobs that it doesn’t matter what sex you are — it doesn’t matter what sex your doctor is, or your lawyer – but as an actress your sex really matters because part of your experience of the world is as a woman.”
Continue reading Helen McCrory: Call me an actress not an actor – in my job gender matters
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’