There’s a set of behavioural rules for becoming a star: first you’re hungry
and ambitious; then you’re cocky and annoying. Finally, after about 10 years
at the top, you settle down and become a reasonable human being. Charlotte
Riley hasn’t reached the third stage yet, but she has broken all the other
rules so far. Incredibly humble, hugely self-deprecating and so polite that
she writes thank-you letters to journalists after interviews, she’s so
normal that you wonder if she’s really an actor. Then you discover she’s
actually a clown.
“At college, I wrote for a sketch show with my friend Tiffany, and when I
graduated, I was too scared to go into acting,” the petite 27-year-old
recalls, scoffing risotto in a bistro during a break from rehearsals at the
Royal Court Theatre. “We ended up writing a play together that won The
Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival, but I was still too nervous,
so we toured with the play and I did a clowning workshop. It suddenly all
made sense. I thought, ‘This is me. This is how I want to perform.’ And that
gave me the confidence to go to drama school.”
The clowning story briefly jerks the interview to a grinding halt. It’s like a
red button (or red nose) at an oil refinery: clowning? But how? “It’s not
red-nose clowning, it’s about finding your clown, which is often a character
within you,” she smiles, her face lighting up. “For example, if a clown was
going to do the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, they’d think about things
in very different ways. They’d think, ‘That’s a really long way up and I
really shouldn’t be here.’ And they’d suffer from vertigo. It’s a visceral
way of thinking. I have a couple of clowns I’ve worked up over the
years: one called Martha, who is bespectacled, with a blue dress, and shy and
clumsy and very overly loving.” And she reaches forward awkwardly, suddenly
in character as her clown, investigating shirt buttons as a cat might sniff
cautiously at a proffered hand. Then Martha withdraws and Charlotte is back
in the room.
It still seems strange that Riley should revel in such mannered performing.
Under the camera’s harsh glare, her acting is raw and emotional. Her Cathy
in the recent television adaptation of Wuthering Heights is spirited and
complex, her large, expressive eyes overflowing with torment as she is torn
between her one true love and her choice of comfort and safety. Her
sensitive, ambitious gangster’s wife, Maggie, in the television series The
Take, based on Martina Cole’s novel, carries the horror of an earlier rape
behind her eyes every time she looks at her husband and child. This seems at
odds with the physicality of clowning.
“No.” She’s very firm. “It’s because of the clowning. You can tell when actors
are enjoying their work, when there is lightness to their performance. You
can see that in anything, including that rape scene from The Take. You can
find the pleasure in representing what is happening to someone. Working from
clowning when doing a rape scene is so much better than sense memory,
trawling your mind for some awful experience. Because, if you’re watching an
actor in pain, then actually that’s painful. Tom Hardy [her co-star in The
Take] has elements of clown about him, so much so that when we did that rape
scene, by the end of the day the camera crew were more traumatised than we
were. I’m absolutely not saying that we went into it in a light-hearted way,
but if you’re going to play a scene like that on stage every night, you
can’t put yourself into that place again and again.”
As if to prove her point, she starts running through the research she is doing
for Laura, the character she plays in The Priory, Michael Wynne’s new comedy
at the Royal Court, which also stars Jessica Hynes and Rupert Penry-Jones.
Laura arrives at a fraught college reunion on the arm of one of her troubled
former classmates, Ben. They met at a party the night before and have
decided to get married. “They’re just gone,” she smiles. “Proper in love.
Like when you meet someone and you just know. Then, as the evening goes on,
things unfold; you see her veneer change and things start to crumble
underneath.”
Laura, it transpires, is a woman with an eating disorder and borderline
alcoholism. Riley spent months studying eating disorders to find the right
one, and observed mannerisms in sufferers to give her performance a physical
spine. “You look at the world in a different way when you’re in the head of
someone like that,” she says thoughtfully. “Today, we went out looking for
costumes, and to some people this may sound trite, but I’ve always painted,
and I love colours and textures more than anything. But I realised today
that I’m not looking at stuff with my head, I’m looking at things as
she’d look at them. Doing the research about bulimia, the things that
interested me most were the shadow moves, the idiosyncrasies of sufferers’
movements — things like her leaving her sleeve rolled up when she
comes back into the room, having purged.”
It seems unfair that she keeps playing tortured women, I offer. “I’m a huge
fan of tragic love stories,” she shrugs. “People just don’t love that hard
in real life. I love doing characters that challenge me. I’d love to do
something that requires me to change physically or learn a skill. ‘We’re
going to sign you up two months early because we need you to become really
good at archery,’” she delivers in a deep, booming voice, then switches back
to tiny Charlotte, looking up, all filled with glee. “Okay, and if you need
me to grow my left arm longer than my right, that’s fine too.”
Perhaps it’s her family that gives her such stability. Her father is an
engineer who runs his own business with her older brother, and her mother is
a nurse and bereavement counsellor. Charlotte came along 10 years behind her
older siblings. “I was the brat,” she grins wickedly. “My older brother and
sister, when I was younger, did all sorts of things. I won’t embarrass them
by going into it, but when they were teenagers and I was 10 years younger, I
watched what happened to them, and happened to the family, and was, like,
‘Right, don’t take drugs, or do this or do that.’ So, when I hit 13, I had
quite an easy adolescence, because I knew the cause and effect.”
She chose to study at Durham University to stay close to her Teesside home,
but since finishing at Lamda two years ago, she has barely had time to
visit. She has been working almost constantly, appearing in the movie Easy
Virtue with Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas, playing Anya in The Cherry
Orchard with Diana Rigg and, for some reason, regularly playing opposite the
explosive and talented Hardy, who was Heathcliff to her Cathy as well as her
rapist in The Take. They make for a powerful double act.
“Tom is an incredibly intense actor,” she smiles slowly. “We’ve been through
it together. He can get so het up sometimes, and he likes using his Charles
Bronson persona — he played Charlie in a film last year — to scare people.
But,” and she smiles, conscious of repeating her point, “I think that’s just
his clown coming out.”
So dedicated is she to her form, she spent the summer at the Ecole Philippe
Gaulier, in Paris, studying a form of physical theatre called bouffon. “It’s
where Sacha Baron Cohen studied and where he created his characters,” she
says. “When you watch Borat, it’s so clear he’s a bouffon character — he
pushes things so close to the edge, but has this innocence about him.”
Studying clowning in Paris is, of course, another thing that rising stars
don’t do. She even opted for it in the face of American excitement over her
role in Wuthering Heights, perhaps because of the uncomfortable side
effects. “Wuthering Heights came out in America in January, and I made the
mistake of going online.” She shudders. “That messed my head up for a week.
I don't look at anything now. Some people were actually complaining that I
looked too clean and that my skin was too good for Cathy. The internet just
gives me anxiety, and it doesn’t do anything for my wellbeing. If you hear
nice things about you, it’s not good for you. If you hear bad things,
it’s not good for you.”
Nonetheless, she can feel the interest rising around her. “It means I get to
go up for stuff that I wouldn’t have been going up for a year ago — films,”
she shrugs, looking pretty unimpressed. “I do go to auditions now where
you’re going, ‘Why don’t you just put Sienna Miller in this? Why are you
even pretending you want to see me?’”
She is so grounded that one of her chief joys about a theatre run is the time
she can spend with her three flatmates — old Lamda buddies with whom she
shares a place on a council estate in West Kensington. She’s “single but
dating”, and revels in making “salad and couscous and a pretty good curry”
before heading out to swing-dancing classes. “I love the 1940s,” she
explains. “Luckily, my grandma is a real hoarder, so I have lots of vintage
stuff from her wardrobe.”
There’s her family again. So central are they to her thoughts that when I pull
out the journalist’s final question — is there anything we haven’t talked
about that you think is important? — she laughs and says: “You have to
mention my sister. She’s always saying I never mention her in
articles, but I’m always talking about Simon, my brother. You have to put at
the end, ‘Charlotte loves you lots, Joanne.’” And she smiles so winningly
that it’s hard to tell her, I’m really sorry, but there’s absolutely no way
I can do that.
The Priory previews at the Royal Court Theatre, SW1, from Thursday
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