Juliet Stevenson: ‘Do I have a nemesis? Where do we start? Putin, Musk, Trump, Erdoğan, Modi, Netanyahu’
What was the most Australian thing that you experienced while you were in the country filming Dustfall? Working with a python? We don’t tend to
What was the most Australian thing that you experienced while you were in the country filming Dustfall? Working with a python? We don’t tend to work with snakes in the UK. I’m absolutely snake phobic but the python was very professional. Behaved better than I did. Also, the phenomenal openness which I associate with Australian people – the lack of class pretension, the glass half-full approach. That seems to me a very Australian quality. It’s like the landscape: big, open and generous. In Dustfall you play the mother of Anna Torv’s character. I understand you seek roles specifically that pull you out of your comfort zone – was Olivia one of them? I do, because it’s very boring playing characters who are close to myself. I didn’t become an actor because I wanted to play me! On the contrary – as a kid I was always dreaming of being a very different person. Unfortunately our industry is pushing back on that. You’re supposed to be playing nearer and nearer your own lived experience and you’re not allowed to play other people’s lived experience. Well – what’s the word “act” mean, then? As you get older, if you’re not careful, you get worse as an actor. Because you get too comfortable, too safe. You know how to do things, you’ve got a lot of technique. So you need to be pushed out of your comfort zone. I’m certainly not like Olivia. There are overlaps. She’s a feminist and she’s my age, so we were brought up in the same culture in terms of attitudes to sexuality. But I’m a very hands-on mum, and Olivia handed over a lot of parenting to her own mother. She comes breezing back in, flirts a lot, gets drunk and stoned. She’s pretty insensitive. But it’s fun to play all that. I hope my kids would say that wasn’t like me. Drunk and stoned acting is quite hard to do convincingly, isn’t it? Yes. I think I’ve only ever been stoned once in my life. It just didn’t appeal to me. That was probably 40 years ago. How often do millennial women want to talk to you about Bend It Like Beckham? A lot, and it thrills me! I was filming a big film in Australia when that script arrived, and I thought, “Oh my god, I have not got time to read this, and what a rubbish title!” Then I opened it late one night and by page three I was roaring with laughter.
It was brilliant not just because it’s very funny but because it was touching on two really important things: women’s football, obviously, but also what it means to be a British Asian girl. There’s one reality inside your family home, shaped by your mum and dad’s values and codes of conduct and so on. And then they step out the front door and they’re in the street or they’re at school and they have to cope with a completely different set of values and a completely different culture. These young kids are negotiating all that and I hadn’t ever given that enough thought. It was a really beautiful film. Lots of young Asian girls still come up to me to talk about it. Which is great, because most of our work dies away. Which role has been most personally fulfilling for you and why? I’ve never felt so free as I do on stage. Nobody can stop you. Nobody can edit you. There’s a freedom in that which, on a good night, is incomparable. It’s intoxicating. There’s also nights when you’re out there and you think, “Shit, I’m so bad.” But when it’s good, it’s so intoxicating. You have this power over 1,000 people and you’re just holding them. It is hard to pin just one down, but perhaps The Doctor, the Robert Icke play we brought to the Adelaide festival in 2020, just before Covid lockdowns. Film-wise, I would say Truly Madly Deeply. That’s had such a legacy. As I said, most of the work we do is ephemeral and that’s OK. But Truly Madly Deeply goes on having a life and I’m so thrilled by that. I think it speaks to people’s need for their grief to be recognised. Grief is so often glamorised in film but there’s nothing glamorous when you’re in grief. You feel like shit, you feel ugly and angry, you hate the rest of the world, you hate happy people. The elegant single tear rolling down the perfect cheek, which is so often what you see in cinema – we had all the snot! I think people were grateful for that. That was a blissful collaboration – [director] Anthony Minghella wrote that part for me and we knew each other very well by that time, so it felt very liberating on set in a way you don’t often feel. View image in fullscreen Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman in the 1990 film Truly Madly Deeply. Photograph: Bbc/Allstar What are you secretly really good at?
I’m a good driver! What else … I’m a rubbish cook. I love to draw and paint – I’m not really good at it, but I really love it. I think I’m quite a good parent. I hope that’s not too secret! And I’m a really good cleaner. If you want a cleaner, call me! I have that skill if the career goes wrong. Is there a role that you really wanted that you didn’t end up getting? When Merchant Ivory made Howards End, I desperately wanted to play Emma Thompson’s role [Margaret] because I just felt I was her. I loved that book so, so much. When I heard they were making a film of it, I thought, I can’t bear this. I did go up for it but it was just after my dad died and I was sort of in pieces. He died quite suddenly and I’d been nursing him, so that was my first job interview in that sort of state of skinlessness. I had an interview with James Ivory in London and I messed up so badly. I think I’ve never got a job that I desperately wanted from an audition. Because you go into the room slightly desperate, which in my case probably looks a bit mad. Luckily most things get sent to me now. I didn’t watch the film, not out of pique I don’t think. I hope not. I know Emma and she’s wonderful. Do you have a nemesis? So many. Most of the men running most of the world. Where do we start? Putin, Musk, Trump, Erdoğan, Modi, Netanyahu … I’m quite politically active and I’m very preoccupied at the moment with the fact that most of the world is run by authoritarian men who are terrifyingly rolling back women’s rights, human rights, progress, civil rights, generating racism and homophobia. It’s just terrifying. I’ve been politically engaged since I was about 16. I’m in my late 60s now, and to see everything that we have marched for and fought for being rolled back by these horrendous men is inconceivable. That we have someone like Trump in a position of power like that – a man so uneducated, so corrupt, so evidently, blatantly stupid … yes, I have plenty of those kinds of nemeses. What has been your most memorable interaction with a fan? Until I made Truly Madly Deeply, I hadn’t got that sort of recognition. Suddenly I had people coming up to me on the street. I was in a flower shop in London and I was in a hurry buying some flowers for a friend when this woman came in.
I became aware that she was staring at me. I never imagined that she was staring at me because I was an actor; I was even getting a little angry about it, thinking, what the hell? Then she came up and said, “Please, can I talk to you?” Her daughter had died, in her late teens, maybe her early adulthood. I think it hadn’t been very long ago. She’d seen Truly Madly Deeply and she just desperately wanted to talk about her loss. For her, the film had been an incredible catharsis. I think it was the first time she felt anybody understood what she was going through. I really had to get somewhere, I had an appointment or an interview or something. But I could not leave her. I think our conversation went for about 45 minutes. We ended up on the pavement outside and I found it impossible to pull away. I didn’t really want to. It was memorable because I’d been doing a lot of theatre until then and you don’t really get to talk to the audience after. The impact of Truly Madly Deeply had been so huge for her and she was trusting me with so much. It was the most extraordinarily huge conversation between two complete strangers on a street in London. I still think about her. What is the strangest thing you have done for love? I’m married to an anthropologist – the love of my life is Hugh Brody, who has worked largely in the field with the Inuit and First Nations people in the high Arctic. We once found ourselves staying in a chief’s ranch in a remote part of Canada. I was incredibly excited about it – I mean how glamorous, how did my life bring me to this thrilling point? The chief and his wife were very keen on horse riding. I’ve always been terrified of riding, I had a bad experience when I was a kid. But there was this big expedition planned to go bareback riding and I couldn’t really say no. So there we were, galloping bareback across the Canadian landscape! I was completely terrified. Hugh’s work is so interesting and it has taken me to thrilling places. But there have been occasions where I thought, “I like to be out of my comfort zone, but this is a little too far out!”
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