When I was 18 I wrote an angsty fan letter to Radiohead. They replied, advising me to “cheer up”, a comment I have always proudly believed to be the paradigm of arty pots calling kettles black. But since meeting the British actress Lucy Punch, who acts in Woody Allen’s new film, and discovering that the director told her she was neurotic, I think the crown may just have been stolen.
“Woody kept saying to me: ‘You’re quite good,’” says Punch, sitting in a hotel in her adopted hometown of LA, all big smiles and blonde hair and infectious comedy whispers. She had been out of work for a year before she landed the part in his new film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and was seriously broke, on the verge of giving up her silly Hollywood dreams and hitching home to Fulham. Until she got the call from Woody, who had just lost the actress who was going to play Anthony Hopkins’s midlife crisis wife (just some unknown wannabe called Nicole Kidman). “So I was going to replace her in this all-star cast, and of course I was desperate to please him, but I didn’t realise that in American English ‘quite’ means ‘rather’ and ‘quite good’ means ‘rather good’. Every time he said I was quite good, I kept saying: ‘I can do it differently! I can change!’ The more he said it, the more other ideas I offered him, until finally he said to me: ‘My God, you’re neurotic.’ He actually called me that. I realised too late that I’d misunderstood.”
Fortunately, her performance on screen isn’t just quite good, or rather good, but actually excellent, stealing the scene from more experienced actors like Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin. (The film also stars Javier Bardem, Pauline Collins and Freida Pinto.) Punch plays Charmaine, a glammed-up escort who starts sleeping with Anthony Hopkins’ character for money, but soon marries him, leading him to bankruptcy. Her character is hysterically funny (with a bra padded with chicken fillets) and the odd one out in an ensemble of actors who are not only more famous than her, but all playing characters more educated than Charmaine. (It’s like watching Chantelle win Celebrity Big Brother, despite her being the only housemate who was faking it.) Yet Punch’s comic instincts had to be toned down for her director, rather than amped up. “There’s a bit where I’m lounging in fur on the floor,” she says, giggling again at the memory, “and when we were doing camera practice I did a sort of sexy move on to the rug, and the crew all laughed. I thought, ‘It’s my first day, made them laugh, not doing badly!’ Until I look up and Woody goes,” she adopts a deadly serious voice, “ ‘Stop being funny’. My character didn’t actually need it.” Then there’s the scene where she takes her new husband clubbing but he’s old and boring so she dances with someone else. “I told Woody that I’d found the perfect song to move to. He said OK, so I bring in Put That Pussy on Me by Spank Rock. The colourful lyrics come in and Woody and Anthony’s faces just fall. So we didn’t use that one.”
As if things couldn’t get any worse, there was the time they shot the final, crucial scene between her and Hopkins, where she must deliver some big news that could either render him furious or ecstatic. “That was a really hard scene as well ’cos I’d gone up to Woody and said, ‘Oh I don’t know why I’m saying this’. I mean, how precocious and presumptuous, telling Woody Allen you’re not sure about his script. He told me to improvise whatever lines I wanted instead. So we started shooting and he suddenly went, ‘Stop, stop! What are you doing? These actors are drowning. You’re not saying anything better than I’ve written. I have to fill this long tracking shot so you’ve got to think of something else.’ I was thinking, ‘This is the worst moment. I want to kill myself’.” Except — flustered, groping to find the right words — she of course delivered the perfect performance.
“And I did think afterwards, ‘I wonder if he did that on purpose’ — left me scrambling for the words, which is of course how somebody bullshitting like her should be.”
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You get the sense that if you went down the pub with her she wouldn’t even need to drink: she could just whoop you under the table with her general jolly brilliance. (It was impossible to mind when she turned up late for the interview, having gone to entirely the wrong hotel.) Indeed, she is starting to get recognised, having shot four films and one TV show in the year after Woody spotted her. Variety magazine named her in their Top Ten actors to watch in 2010.
See her in Dinner for Schmucks, as the ex-girlfriend who takes to stalking Mr Corporate Nice Guy, Paul Rudd: she is comically terrifying. “There was a lot of licking in that part.” Or imagine being a fly on the wall at the auditions for Bad Teacher, a forthcoming film in which Cameron Diaz plays the naughty character and Punch, for once, gets to be the strait-laced one who behaves herself: “So I don’t wear sexy clothes, which meant I could eat normally, thank God. But actually I had eaten something just before the audition and I was in there with Cameron, who is the sweetest person in the world. She was trying so hard to gesture to me that a bit of my lunch was still stuck to my teeth.”
It’s all quite a step up from her youth in southwest London, where she wanted to be in the school plays, “but they tended to be musicals and my singing voice is abysmal. In fact, I grew up torturing my younger brother in the back of long car journeys. I’d be belting out the tunes and he’d be weeping, going, ‘Make her stop, make her stop’. I mean, to me, I sound fabulous, but when I joined the National Youth Theatre we had to sing there, too, and this one guy told me, ‘Luce, don’t make a noise, just mouth it’.”
So she didn’t go to drama school, but to University College London to study French and History of Art. But she had only stayed in London so that she could go to auditions and be in the thick of it. “Actually, I am sad not to be able to say I got a degree, but I grew up watching French and Saunders and for me that was the ultimate thing to do. So when I got a call to say I’d been cast in a show of theirs and could drop out of university, I just remember standing in the street in Farringdon, screaming.
“I worship them. I had all their videos as a child, all their sketches. In fact I was so intimidated by working with them that I didn’t speak for the whole time and they probably wouldn’t remember me now.”
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Hollywood fame hasn’t changed Punch too much. She still lives in the same little one-bedroom flat in West Hollywood that she got when she arrived: it’s next to a noisy high school but she can’t be bothered to move. There is glamour, though: she went to Elton John’s Oscars party and threw herself at Ben Kingsley, whose compliments then rendered her mute.
But LA is the place for her now. They love her rather plummy British accent, which back home led to her being stuck auditioning to play “rich bitches or dizzy Sloanes. Of which I am neither, I hope you can tell,” she adds, before making a quick gag about her Barbour jacket and green wellies. “I like playing character parts and doing accents, and out here nobody cares how you actually talk. LA was a weird city to be in when I wasn’t working, though. There’s something about feeling low when it’s sunny. It’s actually more depressing. It’s like being in a romantic restaurant on your own.”
Americans obviously find her hugely entertaining. “I don’t know. I think they find me funny when I’m not trying to be, which is alarming. But then here they all think I’m so intelligent. I don’t correct them, obviously. Shrug it off while nodding furiously. And they call me adorable. I’m in Starbucks trying to pay for my coffee and they’re just going, ‘You’re adorable!’ And then I’m back in London in Starbucks and they’re like, ‘That’ll be two pounds fifty’. It always upsets me. I want to shout, ‘I’m adorable in the Starbucks in LA! Adorable!’.”
Soon, it seems likely that people on both sides of the Atlantic will know.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is in cinemas nationwide from Friday