How would you describe the second season of Baptiste? I saw it as a study of someone pursuing something, but as each episode got written, I could not believe the level of grief, the weight. Emma becomes like Atlas, holding up a ceiling of grief. I’ve played [Greek tragic heroines] Electra and Medea, so I knew stories can get bad, and this one really did. What interested you about your character, Emma? I loved that she was very ordinary; she’s not a very interesting person, not very witty, not a very good mother. She’s quite an ordinary half-failed high achiever in the diplomatic world, but not a high-flyer. She’s a bureaucrat. You play a portion of Baptiste in a wheelchair. How did that affect your performance when you have limited mobility? I auditioned a few wheelchairs. I had a selection of wheelchairs delivered to my door, which was amazing. That doesn’t happen every day of the week. And I tried them out, and of course, my respect for wheelchairs has risen as I got to understand them. But the new wheelchairs are built largely for Paralympics. The Paralympics has brought great attention to the need for light, easy-to-manage, sporting wheelchairs that give you great height. So I tried these various wheelchairs, and my wheelchair was wonderful. They’re narrow, so that they don’t overwhelm the person sitting in them. But you don’t feel you’re sitting in them; they do become legs. So I actually got used to it. But what was very hard was absolutely making my legs go to sleep every day. You really can’t be twitching them; you’ve just got to let them be. How do you shake off the heaviness of the role in Baptiste at the end of the day? Mentally you can, but physically I was often very tired in the mornings from spending 12 hours arguing with my son. You’re exhausted and you also have to try and be as true to the complexity of the moment as you can. It can’t be dramatic fireworks; you’ve got to absolutely both hold it and yet release it. I found the whole thing very taxing but rewarding in that I tried to sculpt it. It’s a bit like painting; I tried to keep carving the truth of it out from the side as well as in the middle. Do you think if you weren’t an actress that you would have made a good ambassador, like your Baptiste character? Because I’m Irish, I’m often invited to the Irish Embassy here in London and I’ve been to the Irish Embassy in Paris. I always love their life. I think, God, what a gorgeous life. But I don’t suppose their daily life of trying to help somebody who has lost their passport, I’m not sure that is quite the job for me. But I do admire what ambassadors are because they’re not political in the sense of proffering something. They are there literally to soften the deliverance of one country to another. And I think that’s a really good job because it almost always does something good. There might be even more wars if we didn’t have ambassadors. They are there to soothe and to ameliorate issues. I visited some ambassadors to play this part—the British ambassador to Hungary, who is a very nice guy, and his wife. And, also, I met the Danish ambassador to Hungary, who’s a woman. I also have known various ambassadors, including the Irish ambassador to America. So I’ve met quite a few ambassadors and I’ve always liked them. Production was shut down because of COVID. The borders to Hungary were closing and you had to come home, so was there an effect of the pandemic on the series? Astonishingly, you can pick something up six months later. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. We didn’t go back to it till September, and we got the last plane out of Hungary in March. We kept filming. The BBC being the BBC, we didn’t stop when everybody else stopped. All the Americans had gone home, and we kept going like obedient schoolchildren. And then finally we were shut down and we all packed in two hours and got the last plane out. I was rather relieved. I was relieved to be calm. I might have got ill, I think, if I’d kept going at the pace I was going because they’re very long days in the darkness of Hungary in the mornings and the cold. So in September we did go back to it, and some of it we filmed outside London. It’s amazing that sometimes you will be in a forest and it’s in Hungary, and in the next minute you’re in the same forest, same scene, and you’re just outside of London. But they bleach this countryside to look identical; it’s fascinating. Actually, the first walk up the mountain with the family was done outside London. And there was a wonderful hotel in Hungary that we were shooting in, and somehow, they managed to get a drone backdrop of that, and they dropped it into this hillside. It’s fascinating. The early part of your career was spent in theater, but recently you have done a lot of great TV. What was that transition like for you? Most of my career until very recently was in the theater. I spent 30 years in the theater, and I was getting a bit tired at about the age of 50 because I was in so many things that went abroad. I did Testament of Mary on Broadway, and the responsibility and the eight shows a week, it is very tiring. And rehearsing and mending and fixing. Oddly, I was asked to direct an opera, and I did direct an opera for the English National Opera. In fact, I directed five of six subsequently, and it gave me room for pause. I sort of went theater, opera directing, and then that made me inevitably more available for television, which I’d never been really. I was very delighted. I suddenly started in television, things like Mrs. Wilson. And then [producer-writer] PhoebeWaller-Bridge asked me to do this strange part in Killing Eve, and it was just very successful. So, from being really almost on a parallel path, I’ve completely leapt into television. I’ve embraced it with arms, and legs, and heart because I’ve hit a very good moment. There are many more parts for women and women who are not just playing the wife of the vicar or something. It’s a really interesting time. Were you surprised at how big of a hit Killing Eve became? I was and I wasn’t. Initially, we just thought it was a strange, quirky show. But I must say that Phoebe Waller-Bridge really has got a phenomenal gift for inverting things in a stellar way; she is quite a brilliant wordsmith. And not just that, she has a great sense of irony and contradiction, and I think actors love playing contradiction. I love to play somebody so unlike myself because I often play very loud, shouty parts, and so it feels very calm and very slow. But I was surprised at the recognition it got. Of course, as the seasons went on it won all those Emmys, et cetera, but earlier than that I noticed people were stopping me on the street with their bicycles and talking to me. Whereas people often know me from various things, and they wave or say hello, people were stopping their bicycles. I thought, I’d never had bicycle stoppers before. Phoebe also wrote the role of a therapist in Fleabag especially for you. Was that before or after Killing Eve? How did that happen? Oh, after. In fact, I was doing another opera and I wasn’t sure I could do the part in Fleabag. And then suddenly they delayed, and they were able to have me, so I just nipped in and did it. But she really knows how to write for me, I think. I hope she does more of it. Can you tease the final season of Killing Eve on BBC America in 2022? The intrigue that you’ve enjoyed in previous seasons has definitely deepened. [In the new season] the characters are dealing much more with the past. You played Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films. Do you love having been part of that franchise? I do. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley and the boys [DanielRadcliffe, RupertGrint, TomFelton] would do a special week at the beginning of every film. The longevity of the commitment was very pleasing because we watched the boys grow up. No thoughts of retiring? Oh, my God, no, I think not. I don’t feel any desire to. The glorious moment, as I say, that television is at the moment, means there’s plenty to play. There’s an audience of both sexes that want to watch women, particularly older women maybe, in things. And I feel, if anything, more enthused than I’ve felt for a long, long time. I feel very excited. In a way it’s taken over. I was very much part of theater as an investigation into the form of theater. And now I think we’re part of television as an investigation into the form of television. It’s bending itself. These marvelous series that you produce in America, but also that we have here with I May Destroy You, et cetera. They’re using the form to celebrate, investigate, champion. There’s a sort of largess about television that has stopped being just a realistic little map of domestic life. Around the time you were 28, you did come to Hollywood, and pretty much they weren’t interested. Do you actually think that’s been a good thing for your career? Because look at what you’re doing now. They were interested. I’d done a film called Mountains of the Moon with [director] BobRafelson and also My Left Foot, and it was a big hit. But they did say, “You’re very old, you’re 28.” I go, “What!?” They were very nice, but I didn’t stay. I went back because I was playing TheTaming of the Shrew at Stratford-upon-Avon at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was playing Portia [in The Merchant of Venice] and Beatrice [in Much Ado About Nothing], and my ambition at the time had really been to play those roles. Maybe I would reassess. I might have stayed now. You’re absolutely right. I’m glad I came home [to England] because I did things like Three Men and a Little Lady. I did lots. I made forays to Hollywood and enjoyed every single one including the marvelous True Blood that I did about 10 years ago. I think you’re right, in that I think I was spared burning myself out at 28, 29 or 30. And instead, I’ve come in much practiced at a later time without any of that pressure to be less than 28. Now, you’re going to be part of another big franchise with Andor for Disney+. Are you a Star Wars fan? I’ve become one, obviously. I’m not sure I’m the target audience for that, but I was so impressed with the writing of it and the making of it. We made it through this very dark winter that we had here, and I very much enjoyed being in Pinewood and being in outer space. It was very, very interesting being in the future. I’m very close to the leading man in the film, very nice. The pandemic was such a big part of our lives in the last two years. Did it teach you something about yourself that maybe you didn’t know before? Yes, it’s taught me many things, but one of the things it’s taught me is how contented I am to be at home. I’m more contented now that we’ve got used to it. I think the first six months were very hard because it wasn’t pleasant being at home knowing that we were being invaded. The city in my case, I live in London, and every 30 seconds there was the sound of ambulances. And that was a grief that really one felt helpless, hopeless, even as one was enjoying the relaxation of not being at work, but actually it wasn’t for free. I’m hoping this changed all of us, that we all suddenly, our values have shifted. I’ve been reminded that the meeting of people and the love of my friends is what matters, and my family of course. Next, Find Out Why Americans Love British Programming, Like Masterpiece, So Much
