Anna Friel on men, Marcella and the pressures she faced as a young actress

Added to this is a plot that involves grooming and paedophilia. We see cars crawling along kerbs beside little feet pattering home from a playdate; a mother clueless downstairs while her son is in his dark bedroom, his chubby face lit by the blue glare of his computer screen, in the process of being drawn into the clutches of the man who will pick him up in his car and drive him to his death. We see a convicted sex offender masturbating in a basement, hiring and firing a rent boy dressed in a fake school uniform because he doesn’t look childlike enough. And the whole thing kicks off with the discovery of the skeleton of a little boy buried between two walls. It’s grim, really grim, and the temptation is to turn off the TV, make a cup of tea and go to bed with a PG Wodehouse.

But if all this is harrowing to watch, imagine what it must have been like for Friel, a mother of a 12-year-old herself. There have been weeks and weeks of 15-hour days filming this material, she says. It’s why she is now ill.

In the new series of crime drama Marcella

Her performance is fantastic, with every anguished close-up showing the pain and suffering. “The camera sees what you feel,” she says, “and, of course, you have to feel it. It can make an actor sound so precious talking about this, because it is a job and a job I adore, but it did make me ill – very ill at the end. I said to my brother, who is a doctor, ‘Why is it having such a physical effect on me?’ And he said, ‘Because the body is releasing cortisol. Your body doesn’t understand that your brain is tricking it [to feel that way].’ ”

For every distressing scene, she faced her own demons. “It’s everything – fear of losing parents, your own mortality. You being the best mother you can be. Are you making the right choices? Will you have love that will be eternal when that’s the most important thing to you on the planet? Will you be the best person you can be? Will you be able to pay your bills? Erm, it’s everything.”

Anna Friel is not new to this kind of material. In fact, in Britain she has become known for difficult, gruelling parts. There was Beth Jordache in Brookside, the role that made her when she was just 16, in which she buried her father under the patio and had that still-talked-about lesbian screen kiss. And more recently there have been Jimmy McGovern’s Broken, Pushing Daisies in the US, which took her to a new level of fame, The Girlfriend Experience, and now two seasons of Marcella.

The only way she got through Marcella, she says, was to sleep most weekends at her home in Windsor, or at least to stay in PJs with her daughter, go for long walks, watch cookery shows and cook.

“For 15 hours a day I never smiled, because Marcella never smiled. I felt a great obligation to the crew just to carry on rather than cry in a corner for ten minutes.”

Friel is now 41, although it is hard to think of her as being in her forties. Ill or not, she still possesses that same gamine beauty that the tabloids and lads’ mags loved so much when she was in her celebrity fodder/Brookside heyday, when from one day to the next there would be tabloid headlines about her and her various high-profile boyfriends, from Robbie Williams to Darren Day. Because she was so young, literally growing up in the public eye, the noise around her then was much more about her love life than her acting. It was only when she moved to New York, at 18, that she lost the Brookside tag. “I think there was no judgment, no bias, no discrimination. It was much more about [my acting], a case of, ‘Let’s see what this girl can do.’ ”

Still, in direct contrast to her appearance there is an aura of toughness about Friel, partly a product of her upbringing and partly to do with the trajectory of her life. On a personal level, she says, she is motivated by kindness, consideration and empathy, but her choices and the situations she has found herself in over the past 25 years in the film and TV industry have forced her to be tough.

With Nicola Stephenson in Brookside in 1994

The most profound period of unhappiness, she says, was between the ages of 18 and 23, after she left Brookside in far from satisfactory-sounding circumstances. It’s not something she likes talking about, but she has admitted that after becoming ill even back then through overwork and hitting her head during filming, she announced she was leaving the show only to be told by its executives she’d never work again. She was kicked off set mid-scene.

As she recalls it, the period that followed, with agents sending her to New York and Los Angeles with very little protection, has all the hallmarks of a young and vulnerable actress being put in a position to be taken advantage of by powerful movie men such as Harvey Weinstein. (When Jack Nicholson, old enough to be her grandad, saw her for the first time on stage in New York, he reportedly said, “I won’t rest until I sleep with that girl,” a comment that now leaves an unsavoury taste in the mouth.)

There were some shining lights in this dark period. Her career took off on Broadway and then in movies, and there were wonderful older actresses such as Brenda Fricker, her career mentor, and Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith looking out for her. “I remember Judi always coming to find me in the dressing room and saving me a place at the table at Joe Allen,” she says. Still, when she thinks of that time, it casts a shadow.

With Kate Moss in New York, 1999

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“I have to be delicate and tentative about how I approach this, because I never want to sound like a victim,” she says, “because I’m far from that. I’m a very lucky girl, but would I have my daughter put in the same situation? No, I wouldn’t. Not being protected and not feeling safe, I think the only positive you can find from those feelings is knowing that you have to protect yourself and find your own safety. But how does that then dictate decisions you make?

“Now I’m playing mothers, the way I’ve learnt from what happened to me is that I say to any younger actor, ‘You watch out for that. No matter what they say, they have their own interests at heart. They won’t have yours at heart, so you make sure that you do.’

“But if you are a strong woman, you are called a bitch. You are called difficult. If a man acts in the same way, it’s not the same. That’s what everybody is fighting against.”

So what did happen to her? She doesn’t want to go into detail.

“We’ve all got our stories,” she says. “It’s just my prerogative that I choose [not to speak out]. It’s not that I block them out; it’s because I dealt with them and I want them to stay something of the past. I’ve got things that I’m very angry about, but there is no point because it’s not going to help anything.”

Was it Harvey Weinstein, I ask her.

“Erm …” There is a long and painful silence.

Finally, her PR jumps in and says, “That’s not a topic of discussion for today.”

Friel, echoing the tenor of the recent Time magazine devoted to #MeToo women all over the US, says, “I think those things happen in every industry, not just ours. I’ve been lucky enough not to have it affect me too deeply.”

I suspect that actually there is a bit of papering over the pain going on here. Recently her name was linked to the resignation of Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, after he behaved inappropriately towards her at an awards ceremony. Friel “fled” the scene (tabloidese), industry sources reported.

Friel neither made a comment nor offered a rebuttal, which fits with her line today. Again, her PR interjects when I ask her about it: “Anna didn’t comment on that story.”

It’s hard as a woman not to feel slightly irritated by this verbal blocking, when all over the world there are women making what Time called “small individual acts of courage” to try to make things a better place for future generations.

I think Friel intuits this, too. It’s clearly difficult for her. What she does say fluently is, “I completely feel for anyone. I am heartbroken every day when I read those stories of what has happened, because I think, ‘Oh my God, I so understand.’

“To this day, I still have not got a comment on [Price]. And I also have that right. But I understand and respect everybody who wants to talk. There are other things in my life that have been far more upsetting than that occasion.”

So Roy Price with his “inappropriate behaviour” at the dinner table is nothing compared with other incidents, Friel seems to imply.

These past episodes of which she will not talk seem to be much more disturbing, no doubt rooted in an abuse of power. Friel stresses it’s not just actresses. “I have always had lots of male friends [with stories] and some of them say, ‘What do you think about this? Would you do that? Would you treat a woman like that?’ And I say, ‘Absolutely not.’

With David Thewlis in 2002

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“We all know what the issues are. We have to concentrate now on finding a solution.” Friel’s point is that it’s important that women feel in control of how their own story plays out, publicly or not – that they have a right to handle it in whatever way they want, for whatever reason.

“I had my eyes wide open at a very young age. It toughened me up. I could have said, ‘Have you any idea what I’ve gone through?’ but I didn’t want it to be about that. I wanted it to be about my work. That was my focus. All the time.”

For her own part, Friel was brought up to be self-reliant and steely in the face of life’s difficult blows. She grew up with her brother (the doctor) in Rochdale, the children of two teachers. Her parents still live there. From a very young age, she says, they encouraged in her if not a toughness then certainly an emotional resilience, which I imagine plays some part in her wanting to move on rather than revisit past pain, even if revisiting it becomes an act of power.

“There was always stoicism,” she says. “A feeling of, ‘Don’t let it beat you.’ My grandfather fought in the war and my grandmother had been on her own for 25 years. She’d worked in the mills and gone deaf in one ear as a result. Mum and Dad had always struggled on really low wages.

“My dad would never allow self-pity. It was not that he didn’t understand things like me being bullied, which I was a bit at school, but he would say, ‘You’re stronger than that,’ and, ‘You are a Friel.’ I have amazing parents, and I think that is what has always kept me OK.”

They supported her as her acting graduated from local theatre group to television roles, reading those early scripts for inappropriate material.

“If anything ever goes wrong, the first thing they say is, ‘What did you do? How could you be responsible?’ I’ve been taught to look at myself first and then, if I can have a clear conscience and say, ‘No, I did nothing,’ I can look outside the box and go, ‘What’s wrong?’ Because I know it’s not me. It’s not finding someone to blame, but it’s trying to have a full, rounded understanding of the situation you are in.”

After Brookside, she recalls, she was verbally abused in the street, with people calling her “lesbian” and “dyke”. Tabloids followed her, taking her picture, and she agreed to appear in lads’ mags, too, which seems incongruous given what a serious actress she is today. But, as she says, it was a learning curve right from the start and it coincided with her growing up. For a long time she thought that acting might just be a hobby, that she might return to university. But she realised that performing was what she wanted.

Brookside might have appealed to the red-tops but, Friel says, “It made me and I’m 100 per cent proud of it.” Jimmy McGovern wrote the scripts and the cast was stellar, too. It set her on a path, away from the north and her beloved parents, first to London and then to New York and Los Angeles, where she has forged for herself a lauded film career, exactly as she planned from the start. She still has a house under the Hollywood sign and she says that she has moved back to the UK only because it is the best decision for her daughter. “I have to put her first. It’s less important now to be in LA, because all the filming happens in other countries. But it’s probably significant that I haven’t sold my house there.”

Amazon Studios’ Roy Price (left) with Harvey Weinstein

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From the beginning, she admits, “I had a long-term game. My objective was always longevity, not fame, not money. I thought, ‘If this is my job, I’d better keep it going for as long as I can, because it’s going to pay my bills and be my livelihood. I wanted to keep getting better and better. Sometimes I’d take small jobs so I could learn from the other actors.”

It is revealing that at the age of 23 she began a relationship with the actor David Thewlis, 13 years her senior and wise to the mucky business of showbusiness, with whom she stayed for a decade. At the age of 28, Friel had her daughter. She was back on set in America, breastfeeding, eight weeks later.

Friel and Thewlis split up seven years ago but remain good friends, juggling their international schedules so that their daughter feels the impact of their separation as little as possible. While Thewlis now lives in Paris and Friel has properties in Spain and LA, their respective houses in Windsor are opposite one another. “My regret is that we didn’t have another child together, because we seem to make good ones,” she says.

She hasn’t ruled out freezing her eggs to enable her to have another child should she find the right partner.

That Thewlis entered her life when she was 23, the end of her “difficult” period, is significant. “Having him protect me was absolutely crucial,” she says.

When they broke up, a combination of growing apart and distance, it felt like jumping off a cliff. “I’d be a liar if I said [it wasn’t]. But we’d become best friends and you have to stay with someone for the right reasons.”

There have been a string of reported romances in the past seven years – “I have had boyfriends and a private life,” she says. “I haven’t sat lonely on my own.” The longest one lasted four years with the actor Rhys Ifans and was “really serious”, she says. They had a “three-week rule” about being apart in order to protect their relationship from the corrosive effects of distance. “I love him dearly and I will for the rest of my life.”

So why did it end? “That is private. That is very private.”

I suspect she is in a new relationship – she becomes a bit coy-looking – but one of the hard lessons she says she’s learnt over the past 25 years is to dismiss a sense of obligation to be open about her life.

“I thought I had to answer every single question honestly. I thought that was my duty. Now, I draw a line at relationships and say, ‘I am not going to talk about that,’ because I feel that it sets it up for failure. And it’s [then] that everyone can say, ‘Ooh, that didn’t work.’ If people don’t know, they can’t cast aspersions or make judgments.

“As a 41-year-old woman, I have given myself independence and choice. I love to love. It’s the most important thing to me and I won’t settle properly and commit until my heart absolutely knows it’s right.”

With Rhys Ifans in Chichester, 2012

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Friel is now on a break for two or three weeks before filming begins again on a new drama in which she plays the mother of a boy, Max, who wants to change gender and become Maxine. It’s another emotionally demanding role that required research.

“Going to meet all those parents with a continual battle, with tragic stories. It’s so hard for them.

“These are the things that make me always have perspective. They make me remember that I can say, ‘Cut,’ and I can go for a lovely walk. Usually, I have my health. I have my amazing, beautiful child and I have wonderful parents and I have brilliant friends. When you look back, eventually my life will tell its own story without it having to be spelt out.”

The second series of Marcella starts next month on ITV

Shoot credits
Styling Prue White Hair Luke Benson using Tigi Professional and GHD Make-up Lauren Griffin using Chantecaille and MAC Cosmetics