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

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

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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Sarah Waters is the historical novelist that television loves to adapt. The author of Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity has already seen her first three novels reach the small screen; The Night Watch is the fourth. This time round, though, the drama is not set amid the seedy Dickensian alleys of the Victorian era, but the bomb-damaged streets of wartime London. “It was a disruptive time, a really porous time,” Waters says. “People were living with a few layers’ less skin than usual. The landscape had been blown up, exposed, and people were sharing space with strangers, but all sorts of people benefited from it too, found new ways of living.”

Opening in 1947, with tantalising vignettes of its four main characters – three gay, one straight – the drama spools backwards in time, through 1944, and then 1941 to unravel the clues that connect them to one another. The backward narration was inspired by Pinter’s Betrayal. Like an emotional detective story, it uncovers the hidden histories of Kay (Anna Maxwell Martin), Viv (Jodie Whittaker), Helen (Claire Foy) and ex-con Duncan (Harry Treadaway). “People’s pasts are more interesting than their futures,” Waters says. “Making a friend or a lover is precisely getting to know their past.”

It’s a darker, more melancholy tale than her debut, Tipping the Velvet, the irrepressible story of Nan Astley, the Whitstable oyster seller turned London music hall performer and Victorian rent boy, memorably adapted for TV by Andrew Davies in 2002. That was Waters’s first experience of seeing her imagined world, with its sometimes risqué elements, on screen. “My parents were pretty well prepared. I think there was a scene where a dildo comes around the door, and my mum was slightly alarmed, but then she was gaily talking about it.”

The Night Watch has been adapted by Paula Milne, whose credits include Small Island, The Virgin Queen and The Politican’s Wife. Waters, who says she never re-reads her novels, claims she has no difficulties “letting go”.

“By the time I’ve let someone adapt it, I’ll have assured myself that their vision is similar to mine. We talk it through and then I let them get on with it.

“In The Night Watch, they made a few changes,which I totally understand, because you have to make changes for TV. But inevitably once that’s happened, it feels even less like your own thing.

“The funny thing is that sometimes I don’t have a very clear idea of the physical reality of my characters, and sometimes I do. But I find with adaptations often they get it just right. Anna Chancellor, who played Diana in Tipping the Velvet, is a rather aristocratic figure – she was exactly as I imagined.

“In The Night Watch, I always imagined someone like Tilda Swinton playing Kay [who works in the ambulance corps during the Blitz], but Anna [Maxwell Martin] is great. She does some fantastic striding around. She is and she isn’t my Kay. I love her. She’s got a quiet magnetism, which is perfect. Kay is quite silent and gallant and enigmatic, and Anna brings all that to the screen.”

The Night Watch is tender and sombre, the lush sensuality of Waters’s Victorian novels replaced by a spare, lean style that perfectly reflects the newly austere Britain. “The books are getting bleaker,” says Waters. “I struggle to give my characters happy endings these days. I don’t know why, I’m actually a very happy person. The Night Watch is quite melancholy, I hadn’t anticipated how it would cast a cloud over me.”

Born in 1966, Waters grew up in Pembrokeshire, and says she was a bit of a tomboy, who loved Hammer House of Horror, science fiction and Doctor Who books (“Good for cliff-hangers and plots”). She also says she had boyfriends as a teenager: “I was very happy with them, though I have to say looking back that they were always pretty camp.”

After she went away to college, though, she fell in love with a girl. “The relationship lasted six years, I was 19. It was a long time then.”

After turning her PhD research into Tipping the Velvet, Waters inadvertently became the poster girl for “queer fiction”. “I don’t mind it,” she says, “I’d be wary of minding it, because then it would seem to me that I was slightly bothered by the lesbian label, and I’m not and I never have been. There’s often this very strong lesbian element in my novels, and I never want to play that down, but I also strongly believe that just because a story has lesbian elements there’s no reason it can’t appeal to all sorts of people.

“I’m a pretty old-fashioned writer in lots of ways, strong plot and strong characters, which works well for TV or film, I guess.” Although she appeared fleetingly in the screen versions of her first three books, there’s no Hitchcockian cameo for her in The Night Watch. “I love doing them, but it just didn’t work out with this one.”

Perhaps they will resume with her fifth novel, The Little Stranger (the film rights have also been sold). Meanwhile, Waters is now hard at work on the research for her next novel, set between the wars.

The Night Watch is on Tuesday 12 July at 9.00pm on BBC Two

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You’ve had roles in things from Little Dorrit to Upstairs Downstairs and now The Night Watch – so do you like period dramas?
Claire Foy: I like any drama that pays me to be in it! Period or otherwise! Why are people so obsessed with this I find it very funny? But yes I have done quite a few period pieces. Really I like anything that’s got a good character and a story. They do so many adaptations and remakes and are always finding literature and turning it into dramas so as long as they’re doing that hopefully I’ll do lots and lots and lots, but mix it up with some modern things as well.

Do you get offered as much modern stuff or is it just that a lot of drama is period?
Claire: Well, yes a lot of it is period and people forget that – even if it’s five years ago it’s period because it’s not now. I think because so much television is kind of period of some sort – apart from EastEnders and those things which are set now – it’s probably be a large proportion. I never get offered anything but the scripts that I read are probably more period but I can’t say for sure. It’s hard for me to say because I just like the story, so everything’s just a story to me.

Can you tell us a bit about Helen, the character you play in The Night Watch?
Claire: Helen is a very sweet and lovely person, but she’s very vulnerable and confused and a bit lost and doesn’t really know her place in the world. She makes lots of bad decisions without knowing it. She wants to do the right thing all the time, but is very concerned with what people think, with what society thinks and what’s the right thing to do – even if she doesn’t know what it is. She’s quite needy. She’s the person in a relationship that just gives and gives and gives. She wants love but doesn’t really know what to do when she gets it. It’s why her and Kay’s relationship goes so wrong. She’s a bit tragic really.

Did that make her a difficult to play?
Claire: Yes. It’s quite difficult to play someone who’s so emotionally erratic. She’ll say the first thing that comes into her head. You know when you’re in a relationship and you’re feeling a bit jealous, the adult part of your brain tells you not to ask where the other person was. Well, Helen just goes: “Where were you, what have you being doing? Please tell me, please? And tell me you love me, tell me you love me.”

And it was painful to read and especially when you read the book and you hear her in a monologue and she doesn’t want to do it but she can’t help herself. It’s because she’s so insecure. She has no confidence whereas Kay and Julia are such strong people and Helen holds onto them in order to live her life. It was difficult to play but I did like playing this character who was so desperate as it was quite easy to be the person who said everything first. I loved playing her in fact.

It’s quite rare to get a drama like this where there are so many strong female roles and an opportunity for you to work with lots of your peers – how was that?
Claire: It was amazing and there aren’t any really and if there are there’s always other people involved. It was quite nice that in this they were all female and that they were all relationships with women. It’s a strong female-led cast and the parts have got so much behind them and that is rare. I’ve never really worked with so many women before as actresses. It was a real, real pleasure and an amazing story. It was special really, really special.

Did you feel any special responsibility playing a gay character in a novel that is so sacred to a lot of gay women?
Claire: There’s always a sense of responsibility when you’re doing any adaptation from a book. Some people are of the view that you shouldn’t read the book that you’ve got to work on the script as otherwise you get too confused and you end up acting the book. And the book is not the script, as the script is a drama in its own right. So sometimes when that’s the case you wonder if you should read the book or will that just muddy the waters? But I read the book and I do love doing stuff that has a book behind it as it makes my job a lot easier and I feel a lot more assured about my performance knowing I know what the character’s thinking. So you have that responsibility anyway.

I felt more responsibility as my character is different in the book – she’s quite a lot younger as she’s written in the script to be 26 at the end whereas in the book she’s 26 at the start, so I hope people are not pissed off about that. My main thought when I approached it was I want it to be believable I didn’t want people to think: “There is someone playing a lesbian.” But I don’t think any one could ever think that and the reason it works is because it’s about relationships and all you do is act with the people who are opposite you whatever their sex. Helen’s a funny one as she doesn’t see herself as a lesbian, whereas Kay and Julia do and talk about it openly. Helen would never refer to herself as gay as she doesn’t know what it is. And that’s what I loved about her character as she didn’t need to put a name to herself. She’s in love with the person not the sex that they are. Hopefully, people will be open-minded that it’s heterosexual women playing these parts and that they’ll be ok with that and not judge anyone. But people are nice.

You do have some intimate scenes with Anna and she’s said it was much easier doing them with a woman than a man – how was it for you?
Claire: Ah it was brilliant. And it really, really, really was so much easier. If you’re doing a sex scene with a man – not that I’ve really had any – or even a kissing scene it’s so much nicer. It was just so lovely and not awkward and they’re so pretty and smell nice! We’d just have chats, and we’d have to snog each other, then we’d have another chat. It did get to the point where you could say don’t do that or do this – so you could be really honest with each other. I’ve been very lucky with the men I’ve had to kiss on screen and I’ve got on really well with them but there’s always part of you’d that would rather not do it and finds it awkward. It’s so much easier for your partner too if they’re watching it. With a woman it does make you less self-conscious. Me and Anna Wilson Jones had a whole scene in a bath and we stayed in the bath the whole time between takes. It was so cold out of the bath that it was better to stay in it but if I’d been in the bath with a man I’d have been getting out all the time between takes.

Were you surprised at landing Little Dorrit almost straight out of drama school and do you ever have to pinch yourself at how much you’ve done?
Claire: Yes, but it’s funny because like everything you do become so complacent. When I first did Little Dorritt I do think I went into shock because it was such a big part and such a lot of episodes – it was really scary. I did go into shock for about three months but since then I thought you can’t think ahead you’ve got to take every day at a time. And with the job that I do you’ve got to be confident. As soon as you worry about lots of people watching then it all falls apart.

The Night Watch is on BBC2 on Tuesday, 12 July at 9pm

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“It’s all about how the war frees you, but binds you at the same time”

Helen is far less at ease with her sexuality than Kay, and struggles to come to terms with her affections — leaving her wracked with insecurity.

“Helen makes a lot of bad decisions,” Claire tells Inside Soap. “She wants to do the right thing all the time. She’s concerned about what people think and what the right thing to do is — but she doesn’t know what that is. She wants love, but doesn’t know what to do when she gets it — that’s why her relationship with Kay goes so wrong.” (Source)

The Night Watch will air tomorrow, July 12, on BBC2, at 9pm.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Inside Soap (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: Sunday Telegraph Seven (UK) – July 10, 2011 –> Sarah Waters on being adapted and letting go
- Scans: The Observer – The New Review (UK) – July 10, 2011
- Scans: Clippings from 2011

Big thanks to Lorna.

The Upstairs, Downstairs star worked with Cage on the film Season Of The Witch, and while filming on location in Bath, where she knew he had a home, decided to try and track him down.

Claire said: “I did walk around the crescent where he lives going, ‘Nic, Niiiiiic!’ in the hope he would open his door.”

She added: “He’s a lovely man. When I first met, him he strode across the car park and went, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this movie’. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are you mad?’ It was such a bizarre experience. I couldn’t think of what to say, because Nicolas Cage saying he’s glad that I’m doing the film that he’s doing was just a bit odd.”

In the TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel The Night Watch, the 27-year-old actress plays Helen, who is caught in a love triangle with two women played by Anna Maxwell Martin and Anna Wilson-Jones.

Claire confessed she found it easier filming love scenes with women than she does with men.

She said:”Anna [Wilson-Jones] and I had a scene in the bath, and the studio was so cold we actually stayed in the bath because it was too cold to come out!

“If I’d have been in a bath with a man I would have been out of it at every take but we were just sat there laughing, saying, ‘All right love?’ and having cups of tea.”

:: The Night Watch is on BBC Two on Tuesday, July 12

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Spend a little time in Claire Foy’s company and you get the sense that, while she might be a bit stunned at how rapidly her acting career has progressed, she’s certainly going to seize her moment. Irrepressibly cheerful, fast-talking and candid, the 27-year-old has barely rested in the four years since she left the Oxford School of Drama. It was only a matter of months before she starred in the pilot episode of Being Human (she always knew it could be huge, she says); she went on to take the leading roles in the BBC’s 14-part adaptation of Little Dorrit and in Peter Kosminsky’s acclaimed Israel-Palestine drama The Promise, which she describes as “a real love project for everyone who did it”. Oh, and she’s also squeezed in Upstairs Downstairs and a Hollywood fantasy thriller, Season of the Witch, with Nicolas Cage.

Now we’re about to see her playing the romantically tortured Helen in Paula Milne’s adaptation of the Sarah Waters novel The Night Watch. She says that when she first read the script she thought “Oh God… On the outside you see her as what she is, which is doing lots of things wrong, like when you look into someone’s relationship and think, ‘Don’t do that, Don’t do that, Don’t do that’ – and then they keep doing it. It’s painful to watch, in a way.”

Set in the 1940s, The Night Watch goes back in time to trace the effects of the war on a group of characters including the heroic Kay, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, who rescues Helen from a bombed-out building and becomes her lover, only to find Helen becoming drawn to the far more worldly and capricious Julia (Anna Wilson-Jones). Immensely complex and beautifully realised, the 90-minute film was shot in just a month – “we did the read-through and we were shooting next day” – to a tight budget and in the freezing cold.

Foy’s next major undertaking is another Paula Milne project, a six-part drama called White Heat which follows a group of Tufnell Park flatmates from 1965 to the present day. “I have to get aged up, which is quite a scary thing,” laughs Foy, but she’s delighted with the deep, red hair the part has brought her (she also confesses she’d love gold nails, a la Katy Perry).That aside, she’s keen to do some theatre, and “something with singing and dancing in it. I don’t think anyone else would want me to, but I would.” And, finally, what does she do when she’s not working?

“Not a lot!” she giggles. “If I was working nine to five, acting would be my hobby… I always feel like maybe I should do an Open University degree. But I’m never going to.”

Alex Clark — The Observer, Sunday 10 July 2011

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Helen, played by Claire Foy, is Kay’s girlfriend but she’s less certain of her sexuality than Kay and struggles with social taboo.

“Helen is a lost soul who doesn’t really see herself as a lesbian,” explains Claire, 27. “She doesn’t like living a lie and she can’t justify being with a woman in her mind if other people think it’s a bad thing to do.

“So when she falls passionately in love with a woman, that’s a shock for her.” (Source)

The Night Watch will air next Tuesday, July 12, on BBC2, at 9pm.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Daily Express Saturday (UK) – July 9, 2011
- Scans: Daily Mail Weekend (UK) – July 9, 2011
- Scans: Woman (UK) – July 11, 2011
- Scans: Clippings from 2011

Big thanks to Lorna.

Tell us a little bit about Helen.
“We’re introduced to her at the end of the story. People get to a tipping point and they can’t go any further and they’re so anxious all the time and on a knife edge all the time – that’s where she is at the end. She’s in a relationship that isn’t going very well and she’s so vulnerable and so insecure and lacks confidence. I was reading the script going, ‘Oh no, don’t do that’ because it’s like watching one of your friends ruin a relationship. She says things like, ‘Where have you been? What are you doing? Where are you going? Who are you seeing? How do you feel about me? Do you love me? Tell me you love me’. All those things that you should never, ever, ever do, she does them all. It was quite difficult to play in a way because I’m not really like that. Well, I am like that, but I’m quite self-controlled. I had to really get in touch with the inner Desperate Housewife sort of person.”

And she works in a lonely hearts’ club…
“She’s working in a – irony – introduction agency. I never even knew they had them after the war. So she’s trying to set people up, but she can’t even sort her own love life out, which is so ironic. She’s living a lie – nobody knows she’s living with a woman, nobody knows that she’s desperately in love with a woman, and so every day she’s pretending to be someone she’s not. Even when she’s at home she can’t really be who she is because she’s too scared of losing the person she’s with. It’s just awful, it’s desperate, it’s horrible.”

How does telling the story backwards work?
“I think it is interesting for the audience because you don’t know it’s going to be like that at the beginning. When I watched it, I forgot it was a different time period. You don’t know you’re going to be introduced to things like that so you sort of forget. It’s that lovely thing like the beginning of Moulin Rouge when you realise that Nicole Kidman’s dead – you forget it by the end so when she’s dying you’re like, ‘Ahh…’ I think it’s nice to see characters at the end of their journey. It’s quite nice to watch it the other way round. But there are so many things that happen off screen with the relationships that you’ll have to play catch up a little bit. It’ll make the audience work quite hard to keep up, I think.”

Do we see different emotions from her in the different time periods?
“She is happy. But I think she’s just terribly, terribly confused. I think even before she embarked on relationships with women she was probably very confused, didn’t really know where she fits in. She’s just a bit of a malcontent, she’s a bit ill at ease with herself even though for all number of reasons she should be really happy. She just wants one person to love… She’s very, very young and this woman comes into her life and says, ‘I’ll take care of you’. It’s the war, she lives away from her family, she’s working in London, she’s already been out with a boy and it’s broken up. She’s kind of really lost and this woman says, ‘I’ll look after you and love you’ and that’s what she does. And silly girl, she just goes from one relationship to another.”

What was it like filming the love scenes?
“Brilliant. So much easier than with a man! It really was so lovely and so nice to be with a woman. It sounds silly, but as in you can talk and not feel awkward and everyone’s got the same bits and pieces so you don’t feel embarrassed. I’ve been really lucky, all the men I’ve had to kiss on screen I’ve got on really well with so I’ve been able to say, ‘Gosh, this is a bit embarrassing isn’t it?’ But when you’re doing it with a woman we were all a bit like, ‘Oh God, do we have to do this again?’ and we’d have a conversation… I think all of us were a bit scared, but as soon as you find it really funny that all of a sudden you’re snogging Anna Maxwell Martin, it’s just really amusing.”

Sarah Waters’ previous novel Tipping The Velvet was quite controversial when it was made for television – will The Night Watch get the same reaction?
“I don’t think so. I watched Tipping The Velvet and it was shocking because it was all about sex toys and people being all sexy. Sex isn’t the main focus of Night Watch – it’s the relationships. Sometimes television makes a point of being, ‘Women in a relationship! Aren’t we forward thinking?’ and sometimes labours the point a bit of going, ‘Isn’t this controversial?’ And there’s no need for it to be controversial because it’s just people being in relationships, whether they’re two men or two women or a man and a woman. Sarah’s book does have bits of description which are quite vivid and sexual in their own way. The film does have sexual content to it, because it needs to. I think the actors would prefer it if it was like, ‘No sex scenes, no kissing, no nudity, no nothing’ because then you don’t have to do anything embarrassing. But you have to do it in order to get people to go, ‘This is a real situation’.”

There’s been a bit of a trend for period dramas to get a bit racier recently.
“It’s adult TV, and I think the more of that there is the better – not to bash CBeebies. But it’s stuff that doesn’t patronise the audience. There’s still going to be that massive place for big period dramas that are of the period, everyone behaving quite proper. But I think people will always be interested in stuff that is the same situation but 50 years ago or 40 years ago. It all of a sudden seems much more glamorous when someone’s doing it when they’re wearing a corset.”

How does the wartime setting affect things?
“It’s sort of the same tone all the way through, which is it affects everybody’s lives… War made life easier in a weird way because your decisions were made for you. Then after the war when none of that exists any more you don’t know what to do with yourself. [In The Night Watch] Kay thinks there’s going to be this big women’s movement and all of a sudden we’ll have equal rights because we helped during the war and everything, and then it doesn’t happen. And you still can’t live with a woman even though so many women had relationships with each other during the war… Wartime turns Helen into this person that makes rash decisions because she doesn’t know what day is going to be her last.”

Did you get to meet Sarah Waters?
“I was too scared to speak to her at the read through. I was even too scared to speak to Paula Milne, who wrote the script. I ran away, I was too scared. I’d even be too scared now.”

Do you think Sarah’s seen it?
“I think she’s probably seen it. This is the strange thing that happens with adaptations and things – it becomes someone else’s property and I just hope we’ve done it justice. It’s different to the book… They’ve made it work for television. That’s always the worry, that people who have read the book will go, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done that’, but you couldn’t possibly fill it all in. But hopefully she’ll be really pleased with it.”

The Night Watch airs on Tuesday at 9pm on BBC Two.

Source

“You don’t see the broad sweep of London at war,” explains Claire Foy, who appears in the one-off drama as an insecure and brittle marriage bureau owner called Helen Giniver. “It is more personal, about people trying to live their lives while a war is going on and how it affects their decisions and erodes their lives.”

(…)

“Working backwards is a really clever device,” says Foy. “You really get the sense that life was almost easier in the war because every decision was made for you and you lived day to day because you knew you might die at any moment. After the war, none of the characters knows what to do with their life and the country is in a state of flux.”

(…)

“The four main characters are outsiders, because they are not really part of the status quo,” says Maxwell Martin. “Most of them are hiding secrets, and the drama shows how the war frees them and yet binds them at the same time.”

(…)

For both Foy and Maxwell Martin, the toughest part of the shoot was filming on the bomb sites where Kay (Anna Maxwell Martin’s character) has to work. The scenes were shot in Bath, which was doubling as wartime London.

Source: Our scans located in the gallery

Claire Foy is ditching her Little Dorrit bonnet for a new period drama — with World War Two as the setting and the subject being sex not rags to riches.

“Helen’s on a knife edge,” insists Claire. “Nobody knows she’s desperately in love with a woman and every day she’s pretending to be someone she’s not. It’s awful for her.”

The Night Watch is based on the book by Sarah Waters, who also wrote the steamy Tipping the Velvet. “It won’t be quite as controversial,” says Claire. Besides, it seems filming the bedroom scenes with a woman was fun.

“It’s much easier than with a man,” Claire says. “You can chat and everyone’s got the same bits and pieces!” (Source)

The Night Watch will air next Tuesday, July 12, on BBC2, at 9pm.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Closer (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: Heat (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: Your TV Week (UK) – July 9-15, 2011

Big thanks to Lorna.

Jodie Whittaker talks The Night Watch and more.

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans: Independent Magazine (UK) – June 18, 2011, thanks to Lorna

Big thanks to Lorna.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Radio Times (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: Total TV Guide (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: TV And Satellite Week (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: TV Choice (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: TV Easy (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: TV Times (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: What’s On TV (UK) – July 9-15, 2011

Burning Desires

The Night Watch, Sarah Waters’ tale of turbulent passions set against the background of Blitz-hit London, is coming to television. Chloe Fox reports from the set.

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans: Daily Telegraph Magazine (UK) – July 2, 2011, thanks to Lorna