Claire Foy sits in a pub, orders a Guinness and begins talking at a sprinter’s pace. There is a lot to cover. She has been out of the public eye because of the pandemic — but also thanks to burnout. “It can get to a point where your body gives up,” she says, making the phrase less sad than it sounds. Her career was busy in her twenties, hectic in her early thirties, and she is 37 now, with a young daughter. Sometimes you have to step back.
“I couldn’t keep going job after job,” she says. “It was going to get boring.” For whom? “Everybody! At some point somebody will say, ‘We don’t care about you any more.’ And boring for me too — I was quite jaded. I turned down work and it’s not like I had shitloads of money. I was exhausted, at the end of my rope with lots of stuff and just went, ‘Goodbye! I can’t do this any more.’”
Foy is a striking actress, as good at being kinetic as she is at being still. In the pub she is wearing a jumper so big she is as much pullover as person, but she makes people feel as comfortable as she looks. She is irreverent, funny and unflustered, despite her recent and understandable need for a break.
In a rush, from Little Dorrit in 2008, she played queens Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth II, in Wolf Hall and The Crown, before going to Hollywood to play Ryan Gosling’s wife in the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. She was also dealing with the end of her marriage to the actor Stephen Campbell Moore.
Now, after three years off screen, she is back. First in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, in which she is the adored wife of the titular cat cartoonist (Benedict Cumberbatch). Second, in the role of the Duchess of Argyll in the most essential TV of the Christmas period, A Very British Scandal.
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This gripping three-parter, full of sex and sadness, is the second series from the team that brought us Hugh Grant as the closeted MP Jeremy Thorpe. The year was 1963 and the cheating duke (Paul Bettany) wanted to divorce his cheating wife. The case was infamous for a snap of the duchess giving oral sex to a mysterious man, whose head was chopped off at the neck by the camera. Given the era, the duke won while she was torn to shreds. The case has been called the first time a woman was slut-shamed by the mass media — details of her sex life were all over the press, especially that fellatio photo. It was revenge porn before the term existed.
“We’re so good at shame in this country,” Foy says. “That deep-seated and curtain-twitchy gossip. We love the idea of sexual deviance because we’re such a repressed group of people. We think it is titillating but also shameful. We’re just so good at judging people, aren’t we?” Does that mean she is too? “I’d like to think I’ve grown more self-aware.”
The judge in the Argyll case gave a lengthy summation in which he called the duchess “a completely promiscuous woman”, while the duke celebrated. “It was a moral reckoning of women,” Foy says with a gasp. “Sex is the one thing you can get a woman on. It is a quick way to make a woman subhuman, wrong and weird. It happens in every walk of life.”
In the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard in March, Foy had to turn off the radio. It seemed to her that possible solutions, such as what to wear, were being offered to women to make themselves feel safer, while nobody was dealing with how men could be less violent in the first place. One of her friends works for a rape crisis charity and told her about the number of cases thrown out of court when it is implied that a woman was engaging in some form of sexualised behaviour. Foy was disgusted at the idea that women need a hand signal to warn others that they are in danger, or, which was mooted by the police, that a woman under threat could wave down a bus.
“Hundreds of women get attacked every single day,” she says. “It makes me so angry. How you can look into making women safe and think about getting more policemen — who women don’t trust — to look after them? We don’t need looking after. We don’t. We need people to stop killing and raping us. That’s all. It’s simple. And it’s awful to say, but that’s men. It’s time to say, ‘You sort that out. What are you going to do?’ ”
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As she talks she gets more fired up. “It’s like saying,” she continues, “that lots of dogs are killing cats, so let’s lock cats up and let dogs loose. It doesn’t make any sense. Women basically just get lumped with the emotional burden and responsibility of everything.”
There has been a lot of discussion about this during the year; does she hold any hope? “I just hope by the time my daughter’s older . . .” she begins, but she trails off, slightly overwhelmed by it all. Her next film deals with similar themes: Women Talking is the true story of a group of Mennonite women, 95 per cent of who were raped.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is lighter fare, in which Foy plays his beloved wife, Emily Richardson-Wain, who died young of cancer. OK, not much lighter then. She really does pick them. Anyway, the biopic is actually rather gorgeous in the way it deals with love and grief. But it does help if you like cats.
Does she? “I don’t hate them, but I’ve had experiences where I go, ‘I get it, you don’t love me.’ And I need something to love me.” You can tell a lot about a person from what pet they pick, and she is thinking about getting a dog because she says if you can change your baby’s nappy you should be able to deal with dog mess. You don’t get that sort of chat from Angelina Jolie, do you? But then Foy has a welcome habit of blurting out whatever is on her mind.
Feelings just pour out of her. Take what happens when we talk about grief. In the Louis Wain film grief is put forward as crippling and inspiring, and there is a line that shook Foy, in which her character says that the world is full of beauty. “It’s so true,” she says, sounding more hopeless than hopeful. “I just find the whole loving-people thing heartbreaking — I don’t really get what the point in human beings is because it’s just all so painful. It hurts so much. The world hurts. It’s beautiful and awful, and if I watch anything where people love each other, I can’t take it.”
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But that is most things? “I know!” Even A Very British Scandal is about how love can vanish. “Yes, it boils down to a relationship and how much they hurt each other. That feeling of unpicking it, to go back to the beginning. How can it be that these two loved each other? It’s the same when anything ends. They are two completely different people to how they were at the beginning, and that’s the big lie of life — they don’t know who the other person is any more.” Some of this, one has to assume, speaks to what has happened in Foy’s life.
Such empathy is why her turn as the Queen in the first two series of The Crown was so revered. Even when the monarch was saying nothing, Foy’s expression said it all. Friends of Princess Diana are said to be unhappy with how she is portrayed in The Crown. Was Foy’s period easier because the memories were further away? “My God yes. But also if it had not treated people like human beings it could have got a massive kicking.” She still watches the show. “People are right to be sceptical, but drama has a right to exist and it’s not going to be a documentary — and it’s hard to please people if it’s not a documentary.”
We end on fame. Three years ago she told me how “f***ed-up” it was that, at a wedding, someone random took a photograph of her because they felt that she has more worth than she once did. She is no more used to it now and feels mortified when she is approached in a Costcutter. The other day she was in Zara with friends when an assistant spotted her. People are nice, but still.
“It’s not normal,” she says with a sigh. Has she set up Google Alerts for her name? “No, but members of my family have.” Does she look herself up online? “When I’m drunk I look up reviews. But it’s the way of the Devil.”
And is she happy to watch back old performances? “Oh, I have no problem with that.” She pauses. “Apart from now that I’m getting older.” Why is that worse? “Well, you’re watching yourself age on screen. It’s OK looking in a mirror because it’s incremental, but if you haven’t shot anything for years, you go, ‘Woah!’” She laughs. “It’s a shock.”
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One way to avoid that shock is to spend less time away. Shall we call this your comeback? “Please don’t! Here I am everyone!” she says with a laugh. The acting equivalent of the return of Adele? “It’s nothing like Adele!”
A Very British Scandal starts on BBC1 on Boxing Day at 9pm, when it will all be on iPlayer. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is in cinemas on New Year’s Day, with previews on Dec 29
Scandalous dramas
The Trial of Christine Keeler
Sophie Cookson plays Keeler, the woman at the heart of the 1963 Profumo scandal that brought down Harold Macmillan’s government, in a six-part drama that tells the story from her perspective. James Norton plays the osteopath Stephen Ward.
iPlayer
A Very English Scandal
Hugh Grant has fun as the former Liberal Party leader accused of conspiracy to commit murder in a case involving his former lover, Norman Scott. Written by Russell T Davies, it’s a perfect mix of humour and tragedy.
iPlayer
Quiz
The Succession star Matthew Macfadyen stars as the former British Army major Charles Ingram in this three-part series about the cheating scandal that rocked Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Adapted by James Graham from his 2017 stage play, it has Michael Sheen as a convincing Chris Tarrant and lets the audience decide the final answer: did he cheat or not?
Britbox
By Jake Helm
