You have to get on side with your character, but doing so with this play has been my greatest challenge. My character, Betty, claims that she never gets to have her say. And when she does, it’s not always good to hear. So in the rehearsal process it does feel like she hasn’t been heard — that I haven’t been heard.
And her story is not my story. I’m incredibly lucky: I have a career in which I can do the school run and no one pays attention to me, then I can get on the red carpet and “jooj” myself up. And I have some principles that are very different to hers: she has to be sexually attractive, has to make people’s heads turn. I haven’t had that, but then I always valued things other than that. So I have found myself saying to her: “You have an excellent brain, stop making such a fuss.” But then that’s the job; I’ve been digging around looking for a different perspective.
It’s not easy to keep track of what’s true and what’s false in what Betty says. We started in rehearsals with a board demarcating truth and lies and had to give up on it. My mother is a defence barrister who has worked with a lot of fraudsters, and it’s the same there: they lose track of what is true and what is false. Lying becomes a habit, ingrained.
Neither my role nor Matthew Fox’s is for an actor who wants to be loved, and there’s a freedom to that. It’s a chance for me to rummage around and get something new out of the dressing-up box. There have been times when I’ve been stuck in a corset, or played the understanding wife. There’s not so much of that here; it’s all me, me, me.