GALLERY LINKS:
- Stage: Love, Love, Love by Mike Bartlett
- Events: “Love, Love, Love” Play Press Night After Party

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots: The Hunger (2011)

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Dazed & Confused (2011)

Her luminous good looks made her the star of Little Dorrit and Upstairs Downstairs. As she prepares to light up our TV screens once again, Claire Foy talks to Gerard Gilbert.

Claire Foy is running late for her interview in the first-floor private dining room of a north London pub, finally phoning to say: “I’m downstairs”. “And I’m upstairs,” I reply, which is all very droll because Foy is of course one of the stars of Upstairs Downstairs, BBC1′s reconstituted version of the Seventies ITV classic about toffs and servants. Except that today the toffs are downstairs, or rather the cast of ‘scripted reality’ show Made in Chelsea are shooting an advert for the fashion chain River Island. “How exciting,” says Foy when she puts her head round the door. “It’s Made in Chelsea downstairs… I can’t believe it.”

What chance the cast of Made in Chelsea returning the compliment: “It’s Claire Foy upstairs… we can’t believe it”? Have they even heard of her? The difference is that while the solipsistic Sloanes are chasing fame for its own sake, celebrity is a by-product of Foy’s job. She is, however, the real class act in this building, a fact momentarily disguised by her munching a Danish pastry from a paper bag. “Breakfast,” she says between bites. “I’m lucky I have a fast metabolism… my whole family does… everyone’s got a lot of nervous energy so we burn it off.”

I’ll say. Foy is high-spirited, chatty and, I discover when transcribing my recording of our conversation, tends not to finish one sentence before embarking on a fresh one. She is, you might say, the mistress of the… And this might be more frustrating if the conversational cascade was not rounded off with a pleasantly earthy, self-deprecating laugh. She seems genuinely bemused by the fact that she has won several of the most covetable television parts of recent years, from the title role in BBC1′s Dickens adaptation, Little Dorrit, to playing Erin – the young woman investigating her grandfather’s role during the British mandate in 1940s Palestine – in Peter Kosminsky’s acclaimed Channel 4 drama The Promise. Journalists have even started calling her the “next Keira” and the “next Sienna”.

“I’m not being funny but I’m never going to be Keira Knightley,” she says in a matter-of-fact way that suggests realism rather than false-modesty. “It’s that thing of going (putting on a moronic voice) ‘the next… the next…’. I hate the idea of being touted as something that I have never tried to make myself be. I mean, I might not do anything… I might finish doing Upstairs Downstairs and just drop off the face of the planet.”

Before that unlikely event, and for the next two months, Foy will be prominent on our television screens in contrasting roles – as the fascist supporting Lady Persephone Towyn in Upstairs Downstairs, and then as Charlotte, a middle-class feminist in mid-Sixties London in the Paula Milne’s generational saga White Heat. In the first series of Upstairs Downstairs, which was set in 1936 and had the misfortune of launching in the wake of the Downton Abbey juggernaut, ‘Lady Persie’, the black-shirt, black sheep of the family, had an affair with the Mosleyite family chauffeur (shades here of Downton‘s Lady Sybil, who ran off with the Granthams’ driver). Lady Persie then turned her sights on the German ambassador to London (the real one at the time, but he’s not going to sue), Joachim von Ribbentrop. In other words, she is the Unity Mitford – the Hitler-loving Mitford sister – of the piece, and in the new series living in Nazi Germany.

“It would be interesting to see Lady Persie and Adolf Hitler around a table together,” muses Foy. “Probably she’d call him a stupid name and laugh and he’d probably quite like her.” Never mind Hitler, does Foy like Lady Persie? “You have to like every character that you play because if you don’t understand them then, you know…” she says. “Yes she stands for awful things, but when you read Unity Mitford’s diaries you realise she isn’t really conscious… they come from this privileged background where they were brought up in the country and their mum and dad were completely bonkers and they just say what they think. She doesn’t give a shit about what anybody else thinks.” But wasn’t that just the prerogative of privilege? “I am always so envious of people who do whatever they want. Obviously she’s not a very nice person, but I still think she’s hilarious.”

The snobbish Mitfords would probably categorise Foy as ‘non-U’. Born in 1984 in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in Stepping Hill hospital, scene of the recent spate of suspicious saline-drip deaths, she is the youngest of three siblings and part of a large, extended Irish (on her mother’s side) family. She moved south to Buckinghamshire with her father’s job (he was a salesman for Rank Xerox) and an averagely happy sort of childhood was only slightly discomfited, at the age of eight, by her parents’ divorce.

“As divorces go, on a scale of one to 10? I don’t remember a thing – so, 10, amazing,” she says. “My sister was five years older, so she got a lot of the… and my brother is my brother so he didn’t pay much attention either, bless him. But I didn’t really know what was going on. Or maybe I just chose not to remember, but mum and dad didn’t shout at each other or anything so… And we moved to another house in the same village so we didn’t have to change school or anything”.

Claire was the least academic of the three children, but her mother’s persistence with the schools’ appeal system finally got her into the same grammar school as her older siblings, and she mustered enough A-level grades to secure a place at Liverpool John Moores University to do a joint-honours degree in drama and ‘screen studies’, with a vague idea of becoming a cinematographer – “not realising that you have to have an interest in lighting people,” she laughs. “You should see the video of this children’s TV programme we made at university. It was shockingly lit.”

Foy was the only graduate from her course to actually go on and study acting – a year’s course at the Oxford School of Drama. “I wouldn’t have been able to go to drama school when I was 19,” she says. “I don’t think I was even conscious of life… I was like a zombie. But when I finished uni’ I just realised… just go and do it, stop being a knob.”

What she could not have foreseen was the speed with which she would “go and do it”. An obligatory episode of the BBC1 daytime soap Doctors and the pilot of BBC3′s supernatural drama Being Human under her belt, Foy was plucked, as they say, from obscurity to play the title role in BBC1′s 16-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. “It was a bit of a shock… yeah, it was very weird,” she recalls. “I remember the first audition where I was sat with a load of ginger girls, and everyone was ginger apart from me. Rachel Frett, the casting director, was really plugging for me – I don’t know why. I must have looked right because I was not doing it right. Then the BBC do like launching people, they do like finding people who haven’t done anything before, and Andrew Davies likes doing that because then people think you are that character.”

Actually, Davies has said that he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be “a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze,” and indeed the enduring image of the series was not Andy Serkis’s bravura malevolence as Rigaud, or Tom Courtenay’s shambling brilliance as Mr Dorrit, but Foy’s delicate and very still, pellucid white face and big blue eyes staring out from beneath her bonnet – more Irish moss than English rose, and the very picture of innocence. It gets me to thinking about an often overlooked aspect of an actor’s fortune, one that cannot be taught or learnt, of how the camera responds to their particular assemblage of cheekbones, eye-colour and skin-tone. And when Eva, our photographer, says “I was really excited to shoot you – you’ve got such an amazing face,” Foy seems embarrassed. Is it difficult to accept that a significant part of your fortune is something you have no control over?

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to say when people say stuff like that… it’s just my face, I’m quite lucky to have a face…” In fact, Foy doesn’t mean this facetiously, because at the age of 17 she developed a growth – a benign tumour – in one eye. “I was like a Cyclops and it was all a bit scary,” she says, “and I was on steroids for about a year and a half afterwards that makes you put on a lot of weight and have really bad skin. It’s quite good when you have something like that, because the amount of time you’ve got to look in a mirror when you’re working… the amount of time people talk about your face… It’s quite good to have some sort of perspective, because it’s just a face.”

And of Little Dorrit, and the camera’s absorption in her visage, she says: “It actually set me up quite well because the director, Dearbhla [Walsh], said to me, ‘Your face is powerful enough to communicate stuff, so just trust that you don’t have to…’ you know. And less really is more.”

Less really was more – less screen time, more money – in Foy’s follow-up project, starring opposite Nicolas Cage in the Hollywood fantasy Season of the Witch. “A really bizarre experience,” she says. “Amazing but ludicrous… how much money they spend and the places where we were staying. And there’s so much free time. I had been doing something that had 16 scripts where I was in every other scene; this was one single script that was about 90 pages long and I was in about six scenes.”

Foy liked Cage. “I think he’s a real actor, which I was surprised at… not surprised but shocked. Not shocked but he really acts,” – this last sentence being pure Foy in its skittish circularity. “He’d ask me questions like, ‘What do you do in your life?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, go to the shops…’. People who are in that position don’t really do that sort of thing anymore!”

Does Foy get recognised in shops? “It depends whether I’ve been on the telly the night before. The Promise was the thing that got most people stopping.” Peter Kosminsky’s drama, in which Foy played a stroppy 18-year-old, Erin, experiencing a political and historical consciousness-raising gap-year in Israel, showed that she could do more than look beatific beneath a bonnet. The Night Watch, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Sapphic love story unfolding against the backdrop of the Blitz, saw her playing Anna Maxwell Martin’s girlfriend, while she appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in a low-budget movie, Wreckers (“He’s a complete geek… he’s got more brain power than I will ever have so it just makes it so difficult to have a conversation with him”). And in a complete change of style and pace, she was the tabloid editor whose resemblance to Rebekah Brooks was entirely coincidental, in Channel 4′s spoof of the phone-tapping scandal, Hacks. “I should play someone normal,” she says.

White Heat, Paula Milne’s new saga following a group of student housemates from 1965 London to the present day (it’s already been dubbed Our Friends in the South) sees Foy returning to the more watchful ways of Amy Dorrit. Her Charlotte is a fledgling feminist, putting ‘This Ad Degrades Women’ stickers on London Underground posters, and falling into bed with her radicalised landlord (played by Sam Claflin). “If I never had to do [a sex scene] again that would be the best thing in the world because no one in their right mind would enjoy that,” she says. “You’re worried about what the crew are thinking, whether they’re really uncomfortable, whether you’re uncomfortable. You’re just thinking, God, let this be over.

“The Nightwatch was the first thing I had ever done like that and I remember thinking at the time, ‘When it’s on the telly I’m going to die’ and actually I really didn’t care. Because I’d done the worst bit of it… it’s not like every time you see somebody, people are going to think they’ve seen you naked. You forget it, you just forget it.”

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to her boyfriend, actor Stephen Campbell Moore, who made his name with The History Boys and who met Foy while working together on Season of the Witch. They share a flat in Notting Hill, and Foy is horrified when I jokingly describe them as the latest celebrity couple, British TV’s very own Brangelina. “A celebrity couple, Jesus Christ. I saw someone recently who I went to school with who was saying something like that and I nearly punched her.

“We did a job together – a pilot for a medical drama called Pulse that was on BBC4. It was quite funny because everyone knew we were together and [were] like, ‘You’re actually going out, aren’t you?’.”

“I don’t think I could ever do a play with him, however, because it’s too much. You’re in a room and you’re constantly being taken apart, and told to do this again and again. You don’t really want the person you’re with see you being told ‘You’re shit’ all day and every day. Anyway, he’s a brilliant actor, so I’d be lucky to be in anything that he’s in, to be honest.”

She may be being honest, but that last statement is baloney. Foy has already proved that she can carry a variety of ambitious projects, and being the sort of person that she is – cheerful and grounded – she must be very easy to work with. This month she’s taking her mother on holiday to New York, and is then doing the rounds with her newly acquired American agent.

Martin Scorsese and Mark Rylance are mentioned as directors she’d like to act for. “I’d like to work with directors who really make you work hard,”she says. “I’d like to be given a responsibility and have to live up to it. I don’t want to do anything easy because I’ve got the rest of my life to do that. Before I have kids and stuff I might as well get all the horrible, you know, self-involved stuff out of the way.” An actor with a horror of self-involvement? Now there’s a thing.

‘Upstairs Downstairs‘ returns to BBC1 tomorrow; ‘White Heat‘ begins on BBC2 in early March

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She lit up the screen as Little Dorrit – now Foy is taking on the role of a tabloid editor.

by Alice Jones

For a British actress, tying the ribbons on a period drama bonnet for the first time is an important rite of passage. For Claire Foy, though, the occasion was particularly memorable. In 2008, aged just 24, she landed the lead role in Andrew Davies’ 14-part adaptation of Little Dorrit, having previously appeared only in the pilot of Being Human and in a single episode of Doctors. All of a sudden, she was being directed by her teen idol. “I’ve seen Pride and Prejudice about 4,000 times. I’m not joking: I know every single line. I used to go round to my Aunty Cath’s house and we’d all sit under the duvet and spend all day watching the whole thing. I was obsessed,” she says. “So when I first saw my bonnet, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Today, Foy still can’t quite believe her luck. She is endearingly wide-eyed about her chosen profession, even though, at 27, she has a CV to rival actors twice her age. Before she has even sat down, she’s gossiping about the time she auditioned for Ben Stiller. “I went in and thought, ‘Oh my god you’re Ben Stiller!’ It was just the worst audition ever. Needless to say I didn’t get it.”

She flops down on the sofa and unwinds her long woolly scarf. “But it was so nice to meet him.” She is starry-eyed about Hollywood in general, though she already has one blockbuster – Season of the Witch – under her belt. “They closed a ski lodge for us all to stay in on the shoot! Only because we were with Nicolas Cage – they wouldn’t have closed a ski lodge for me. I haven’t been to one since.” She’s now planning to go to LA next year, in pursuit of more film roles. “It’s so warm! And it smells amazing! It smells of oranges and sunshine and attractive people!”

You can see Hollywood falling for this British ingenue in a big way. She has the kind of delicate English rose features and gigantic blue eyes that make directors swoon. (Davies said that he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be “a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze…”). Yet when she opens her mouth, she’s surprisingly loud, an unstoppable chatterbox, all estuary over-emphasis and ohmigods.

It’s a combination that has made her hard to typecast so far. She followed up her angelic Amy Dorrit with roles in two further classy television adaptations – of Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal – and the lead in Peter Kosminsky’s Israeli independence drama, The Promise. Lately, she’s taken a turn for the villainous, playing a plague-spreading sorceress in Season of the Witch and the brattish, fascist-supporting Lady Persie in Upstairs Downstairs. This weekend, as if to confirm her passage to the dark side, she plays the editor of a tabloid newspaper in Hacks, a one-off phone-hacking comedy on Channel 4. “I’ve played quite a lot of horrible people recently,” she says. “I probably need to stop that.”

Written by Guy Jenkin (Outnumbered, Drop the Dead Donkey), Hacks stars Foy as Kate Loy, “a ferociously ambitious newswoman who believes that you should do anything to get a story”. Loy is appointed to the top job by the newspaper’s Australian owner (over the head of his impotent, bespectacled son), celebrates by spending the night with a well-known soap star and when, on her first day at the helm, she’s presented with a pile of files by a journalist, demands, “Why won’t you just hack phones like everyone else?” She’s also, according to Foy, “completely fictional” and wears her dark brown hair in a severe bob rather than, say, wild, red curls. Still, Foy must have looked to recent events for a little inspiration? “No, I deliberately didn’t. It’s not based on fact, it’s a comedy drama. It’s close to the bone but that’s what comedy is.”

Has she experienced any press intrusion? “Not really. I’d be really shocked if that happened.” In fact, fame is a strange source of fascination for her. “It must be weird if you’re a proper star and you just go from amazing place to amazing place, never going anywhere horrible, never having anything slightly cruddy, never having unwashed clothes,” she says, eyes like saucers. “But that’s life. You need stuff like that.”

She went to the Baftas last year but left straight after dinner. “I was eating guinea fowl at midnight thinking, ‘This is really weird. I’m not hungry anymore. I’m really tired. Shall we just go home?’ I watch the Baftas every year and I love it. It’s so glamorous and exciting, then when you actually go… I’d rather watch it at home, if you know what I mean.” Home is Notting Hill – “Swit swoo! I’m very lucky” – where she lives with her partner. She has previously kept his identity a secret but tells me that it’s the actor Stephen Campbell Moore. They met on the set of Season of the Witch.

Foy has just starred in the British indie movie Wreckers, playing Benedict Cumberbatch’s wife. “Filmed on a budget of 2.5p,” she says, cheerfully. “Benedict has a huge female following. They’ll probably come after me now. Start going through my bins…”

Foy never planned to be in front of the camera. Born in Cheshire, she moved to Buckinghamshire when she was six, after her parents divorced. The youngest – and loudest – of three children, her performing career got off to a stuttering start when she fell off the stage while playing Titania in a purple tutu at primary school, and she later had to give up ballet thanks to juvenile arthritis.

She did drama and screen studies at Liverpool John Moores University and toyed with becoming a cinematographer – “until I realised that I didn’t understand what the lights did”. It was only a chance remark from one of her lecturers, about acting, that set her on a different path.

“I was a bit confused. I loved film so much but it didn’t occur to me to be an actress or go to drama school.” She applied to Lamda but didn’t get in and instead enrolled on a one-year course at the Oxford School of Drama. A year later, she was tying her bonnet on the set of Little Dorrit.

She’s now filming another period drama – the second series of Upstairs Downstairs. Foy plays Lady Persie, the petulant sister of the lady of the house (played by Keeley Hawes; the two look spookily similar), who becomes embroiled first with the family chauffeur, and then with fascism. “I get to play a complete loony,” says Foy, with relish. “People hate her but I think she’s amazing. I love her. I’d quite like to be her friend – discounting the fascist bit, obviously. There’s no excusing being a fascist, but if I’ve got to play her, I can’t say ‘I’m not going to do that because people won’t like her.’”

‘Hacks‘ is on on 1 January at 10pm on Channel 4 ; ‘Upstairs Downstairs‘ returns to the BBC early next year

Actually not all that much, so why not insert a nice topical joke about that fancy dress swastika scandal… from seven years ago.

Channel 4 have released a clip from their new phone hacking satire show Hacks, based on the recent controversy surrounding the News of the World phone hacking scandal. The show is set in the offices of tabloid magazine The Sunday Comet and features a cast including Claire Foy, Nigel Planer, Phil Davis, Alexander Armstrong, Gordon Kennedy, Russ Abbott and Celia Imrie.

Hacks airs on New Years Day at 10pm on Channel 4.

Watch it HERE.

GALLERY LINK:
- Hacks (TV, 2012): Trailer

Claire Foy and Stephen Campbell Moore attended The Moet British Independent Film Awards 2011 yesterday. I’ll be adding more photos as soon as possible.

GALLERY LINK:
- Events: The Moet British Independent Film Awards 2011

In an explosive finale to Dazed & Confused’s 20th Anniversary season, magazine co-founder Rankin has photographed a series of 20 covers for the December issue, featuring new portraits of 20 iconic cover stars from Dazed’s past including Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton, Alicia Keys and Jarvis Cocker. Each unique cover has a gatefold pull out, which features 20 rising stars chosen by each celebrity, resulting in a groundbreaking portrait of pop culture heroes of the future. Claire Foy was PJ Harvey’s choice.

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans: Dazed & Confused (UK) – December 2011, thanks to Lorna

GALLERY LINK:
- Events: UK Premiere of “Wreckers”

Thanks to my friend Mata.

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots: The Observer (2011)

The veteran actress conceived the idea for the original show – which ran from 1971-1975 – along with its star Jean Marsh, but did not appear until the series’ 2010 revival in which she played Lady Holland.

However according to the BBC News website Dame Eileen has opted out of the next series amid reports she is “unhappy” with the direction the scripts are taking.

“It’s with much sadness that we say goodbye to her wonderful character, the straight speaking mother-in-law Lady Holland,” a BBC statement said.

“However we respect her decision and will be announcing new star casting soon.”

The next six episodes of the show – which follows life above and below stairs in the home of a wealthy diplomat’s family – are due to begin filming in October, and will be broadcast in 2012, following the show’s successful revival last Christmas.

Co-creator Jean Marsh is the only cast member to have appeared in both the original and the 2010 version, which also featured Ed Stoppard, Claire Foy and Keeley Hawes.

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Claire Foy and Stephen Campbell Moore attended the UK premiere of ‘The Devil’s Double‘ at Vue West End on August 1, 2011 in London, England.

GALLERY LINK:
- Events: “The Devil’s Double” UK Premiere

Sarah Waters’ highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no less than Dickens is. With The Night Watch, adapted last night, her subject was still the love that dare not speak its name. But two things were different. This time Waters’s narrative was compressed into a single film. And it was set in the Blitz, when a modern lady’s drawers could be removed in a flash.

As usual with popular quality fiction, those with a strong loyalty to the original will be posting their objections in the comments box. But clearly this was an efficient filleting by Paula Milne. All the important marks were hit: the terror of discovery for young gay men and women, somewhat alleviated by wartime when everyone was too busy licking Hitler to keep an eye on the same-sex fumblings among pert young flatsharers. In 90 minutes the more sinuous and serpentine coils of Waters’ plotting were sacrificed in the interests of clarity. But something of the structural ambition was preserved as, like Harold Pinter’s portrayal of a love triangle in Betrayal, the story came by its relevations by travelling backwards in time, in this case from 1947 via 1944 and thence to 1941.

Thus in the first section we witnessed the relationship of pretty, shy Helen (Claire Foy) and her more vampish lover Julia (Anna Wilson-Jones) run aground on Helen’s jealousy. Three years earlier, now in the midst of the ferocious bombing campaign, we watched Helen fall for Julia, who happened to be the ex of her current lover Kay (Anna Maxwell Martin), an ambulance worker whom we duly saw rescuing Helen from the rubble in the Blitz in 1941. Meanwhile, two parallel stories told troubled siblings. Viv (Jodie Whittaker) was seduced into an affair with a married soldier which led to abortion and disillusionment, while her brother Duncan (Luke Treadaway), a homosexual banged up in the Scrubs after his lover committed suicide, grappled with the shame of his homosexuality in a prison heaving with poufs and conchies.

“Hitler would have you lot strung up by your tits,” one ambulance worker told Kay, perhaps because she’d thumped him three years earlier. So long as his bombs rain down on London Waters’s ladies were fetchingly free to play the field. Kay’s optimism that the peace would bring equal rights for women was of course not borne out. In the script’s hasty final return to 1947 to tie up a bow or two, it was two heterosexual characters who found each other and the promise of happiness, while the gay men and women were consigned by the forces of history, and the resumption of the natural order, to roam once more in the shadows, awaiting their turn. As Duncan was eyed up on a train while Kay unpacked boxes alone, Waters’ climactic argument was that it would be easier for the boys than the girls.

You missed the crashing chords of Rachmaninov, put to service in a better-known wartime tale of forbidden love in buttoned-down Britain. What we saw of London was suitably clad in gloomy greys and browns but for the pair of racy red pyjamas gifted by Kay to Helen. As ever with a drama which tried to fill a large canvas, the television budget did its asphyxiating work. Bombarded London burned and smoked modestly. Kay looked for the body of Helen, presumed buried at the bottom of a heap of miraculously undamaged chairs. Much of the artistry was in the acting – Maxwell Martin, yes, cheekily got up to look like Sarah Waters, but also Whittaker and Foy as women looking for love in the wrong places. In the film’s most novelistic still, Treadaway lay in his prison bunk as an arm dropped down limply from the bunk above, an ambiguous, unreadable invitation to play.

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