In a Georgian townhouse on the outskirts of Windsor, Anna Friel is staring into a pint of purple sludge. “I have to treat myself like an athlete at the moment just to cope,” says the 33-year-old Rochdale-born actress, as she perches on the edge of her sofa and tilts the first glutinous helping of “breakfast shake” (broccoli, flax seed, carrots, coconut oil, walnuts and frozen berries) into her throat. The former Brookside staple turned Hollywood starlet buzzes gleefully about the boosted brain function that the shake will give her. “And I need it!” she says, “I’ve got about a thousand lines to learn!”
Breathlessly, she lists her workload: shooting The Departed screenwriter William Monahan’s directorial debut London Boulevard opposite Colin Farrell, Ray Winstone and Keira Knightley; flying to and from Seattle to play Tobey Maguire’s lover in a new drama The Details; shuffling the shooting dates for an upcoming US indie romance, Ceremony; and all along rehearsing for her imminent return to the West End stage as a tougher, more complex Holly Golightly in a new Breakfast At Tiffany’s adaptation. Oh, and there’s also the tiny matter of a Hollywood summer blockbuster, Land of the Lost, to promote. Her house is like an extension of her persona. It buzzes with activity, with nanny in the kitchen, four-year-old daughter Gracie whizzing about and long-term partner (and Gracie’s father) David Thewlis pacing in the rooms above.
Land of the Lost, an amiable if undemanding revamp of a mid-1970s American TV series, features Friel and Will Ferrell as crackpot scientists who enter an alternative universe filled with dinosaurs, aliens, and proudly adolescent set pieces. Friel describes Ferrell as a sweetheart and a great friend, and remembers the filming experience, in the Mojave Desert, as intense: “Four months of being helicoptered out to the dunes every day!” She contemplates the list of named actresses who tried for her part, then qualifies sternly: “I know some of the names, but I’m not going to say. I wouldn’t want to be humiliated like that.”
More importantly, Land of the Lost is an explicit acknowledgement of what Friel calls “phase three” of her career, ie, there was Brookside, there was “after Brookside” and there is now this, the Hollywood years. She has a house in the Beachwood area of LA, where she has lived for the past three years, and where she became a Golden Globe-nominated star of the TV series Pushing Daisies. Indeed, she calls LA, not Windsor, home. And it’s easy to see why. Take a look at Pushing Daisies and you find an actress transformed. Always brittle and brooding in UK productions (see Me Without You, or The Land Girls), and often the snide butt of UK reportage (she once dated Robbie Williams, and drank a lot), she has somehow seemed a dark and difficult presence, both on screen and off. But Pushing Daises, in which she plays a childhood sweetheart whisked back from the dead, utterly inverts that notion. For here she is soft, here she is wide-eyed, open, warm and vulnerable. And here she is reaping the career rewards in spades.
“In America, people such as [the Pushing Daisies producer] Barry Sonnenfeld have seen something different in me,” she says. “And maybe even I have not had the chance to see that before. People expect me to be a lot harder than I am, but I’m ridiculously soft inside.” On cue, Gracie rushes inside, kisses her mother goodbye and says: “I love you.” Friel continues: “I was bracketed and boxed from a very young age. I became defensive. I had to say: ‘But I’m NOT a party girl! I don’t go out all the time! I work!’ But when I went over to America, I didn’t have that. I felt welcome and embraced, and something began to shine.” She pauses, and with a droll northern sigh, adds: “If that doesn’t sound too wanky!”
She says that this whole subject — the light versus the dark, the sweet versus stern — runs very deep for her. But, she explains that much of her life has been about toughening up on the outside and, indeed, that her entire career began as a last-ditch defence against schoolyard bullying. The daughter of a French teacher from Belfast and an English special needs teacher, she says that she was badly bullied at her Oldham church school. “I remember not feeling as good as everyone else and thinking: ‘Well, at least I can do this [acting]!’ I felt more confident on stage being other people than I did being myself.”
Her school stage work led to talent shows, which led to a professional debut, aged 13, playing the daughter of headmaster Michael Palin in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH. “I got ten weeks off school,” she remembers, “I got to chase Michael Palin naked down a hill, with his willy waggling like this [a pendulous hand movement], and met Julie Walters for the first time and decided that I wanted to be like her.”
Bit parts in Coronation Street and Emmerdale followed. But then, when she was 16, came the role of Beth Jordache in Brookside and, as she notes bluntly, “That was the point when everything changed.” Or, more specifically, the point at which she and co-star Nicola Stephenson executed the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss in TV history was the moment when everything changed. “The kiss itself was no big deal,” she says. “It was just: ‘Oooo, funny! You’ve got softer lips!’ But we had no idea.” That one kiss, she says, had lifelong repercussions. “When people hear my name, somewhere in the back of their minds they go: ‘Brookside kiss!’” Even her American Land of the Lost co-star Danny McBride, she recounts, used to call her, er, affectionately, “The Big Lesbo”.
She adds that it wasn’t a joke when she was younger, and that for two years after finishing Brookside she was repeatedly catcalled “Dyke” on the streets. She says that her post-Brookside career, including the conspicuous partying and lads’ mag photoshoots, were all part of a concerted effort to bury Beth. “I felt that, if I wanted a career, I had to make Anna Friel more prominent than Beth Jordache,” she says.
Looking back now, she says that she doesn’t regret her partying ways, that her four-month fling with Robbie Williams was “fun and great at the time” and that even the duff movies that she made (including Mad Cows and Rogue Trader) were part of a “learning process.” And yet, there were downsides. After a praised turn in the Broadway run of Closer, for instance, she found herself desperate and lonely, yet committed to the cast of a major Hollywood studio movie. “I can’t name it because of certain legalities,” she says, discreetly. “But Dustin Hoffman, who had become a friend, phoned me up during production and said: ‘Are you happy? Do you want to get out of this?’ And I went [she does a crying voice]: ‘Yeah! I don’t like it!’ And he got me out.”
At the same time, she says, sneering UK press coverage of her life and her career was hard to take. “My father used to say that it was like bullying. ‘You stay there! You’re from Brookside! People from Brookside don’t do that! You’re not going to get there!’” She doesn’t see any connection between this concerted negativity and the bullying in her childhood, but the analogy is nonetheless irresistible. For it seems that Friel has been on the back foot for perhaps longer than she realises. And that the recent fullness, in both life and career, only illuminates the painful gaps that existed before. Certainly, she admits, life is getting better by the day, and improved mostly by her eight-year relationship with Thewlis (“it’s a yin and yang thing; there’s a nice balance between us”) and daughter Gracie (“she has given me a true sense of purpose”). Her Hollywood dance card being full to bursting is a nice bonus.
“Look at that!” she says, surprised and pointing to her now half-pint of purple shake, which has long since solidified into mauve cement. She says that she needs a cigarette, takes me on a whirlwind tour of the garden, points out the five-mile speed-walk that she does every morning and explains how Pushing Daisies, despite 12 Emmy nominations, was torpedoed by the Writers Guild strike last year (they ran out of written episodes mid-strike, were hit by an 11-month hiatus and returned for a poorly marketed second series).
The transformative power of the show, however, cannot be underestimated. She fondly remembers a key moment on set, as she tried to perfect the persona of someone unguarded, undefended and open. “My director just kept telling me: ‘You’re ador-able! You’re adorable! I think you’re one of the most adorable people I’ve ever met!’” She dwells upon the sense of it for a moment and, knowing that it might sound “wanky”, but also that it speaks of a woman who has put away brittle and brooding things, adds: “Eventually, if you hear that enough times, you’re like: ‘Oh? OK. Maybe I am adorable.’”
Land of the Lost is on general release from tomorrow
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