Andrea Riseborough, girl of the year, strides into the trendy Islington cafe
looking like a baby penguin on stilts: teetering heels, city shorts and a
great, enveloping fur-ball of a coat – cute and acute at the same time. Not
that the actress is a slave to fashion: her feet are killing her after a
photoshoot in Jimmy Choos. “I haven’t been to the hairdresser for five years
and the dentist for seven,” she says, in her not-quite-Geordie accent. She
travels London in carbon-friendly electric taxis, walks miles to recycle,
and quickly mentions Darfur when she has said anything that might make her
sound preening or ungrateful, neither of which starry vanities she can be
doing with.
Three years ago, Riseborough was at Rada playing ancient Greek crones and
virgins, and she hasn’t had a day off since – not one, her first three jobs
in television having been netted while she was a student. Sometimes, the
excitement (and the fatigue) of her rise make the hyperbole soar: her life
is “insane”, “crazy”. One thing it has not been is a struggle: exhausting,
maybe, and logistically challenging when she found herself playing Isabella
in Measure for Measure and Miss Julie for Peter Hall in Bath in the
evenings, and shooting Magicians, a film with the comedians Mitchell and
Webb, in Skegness during the day, but never painful.
Until today. She sits before me bravely clutching a cup of warm water and
wincing slightly, reaching into her bag for painkillers issued on a trip to
Harley Street for laser teeth-whitening, a procedure she had called to a
halt because of the agony. Her teeth, like her softly undulating features
and saucer eyes with their sweeping lashes, look pretty perfect to me, but
Riseborough is about to play a great beauty in Channel 4’s flagship autumn
series The Devil’s Whore. “When you get the script and it says they all fall
over when they see her, you think, ‘Do they really? With brown spots on her
lower teeth? I don’t think so.’”
No such improvements were required for her role as the young Margaret Thatcher
in the imminent The Long Walk to Finchley, a lavishly fictionalised account
of the young zealot’s struggle for a seat in a party where Jews, women
candidates and grocers’ daughters were considered an embarrassment.
Riseborough’s coquettish, splendidly invented Maggie moves from naivety at
23 to seducing the voters of Dartford by taking a job as a barmaid, twirling
through Young Conservative balls in strapless gowns, and even propositioning
an alarmed Ted Heath on a starlit balcony. “Take me on your journey to
power,” she pleads in breathy anticipation, and in a voice that – the
actress’s research told her – had shed its flattest northern vowels by the
time Thatcher left Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School.
The sexual wiles with which Riseborough (an admirer, if not a follower)
credits her character are plausible because they are entirely pragmatic:
having failed to be selected, the earnest brunette lightens her hair,
flashes her legs at the chairman of candidates and weeps helplessly at the
injustice of her exclusion, until he suggests that Finchley might be just
the ticket, and a dry-eyed ideologue is born.
Undaunted by the size of the Maggie myth, Riseborough made it her business to
know the facts before she started moulding them: spending hours viewing
footage of Mrs T at the BFI library, reading her autobiography and visiting
her old bedroom in the family home in Grantham, which is now a massage suite
in a holistic retreat, with a mint-green carpet.
“I sat in her room and I could see exactly why she wanted to leave,” she says.
“It was the amount of knowledge she had – Grantham wasn’t the right platform
for her life to play out on. I needed to think about her as a young,
aspiring woman. I never wanted to do a version of that Spitting Image
caricature. I wanted to capture her essence. We see her making speeches, or
being interviewed and talking very slowly in order to think of the next
answer, barely ever tripping up. I had to forget all that to get at
something real. If you just give people a stereotype they recognise, it’s
over before it’s begun.
“I think she flirted. I think she enjoyed being with guys. And once she
realised she could use her feminine charms, my Maggie was both relieved and
disappointed in men.” A betrayal she might or might not have avenged in a
subsequent career of mangling male egos. “She knew her politics from the
word go. Her passion was genuinely ideological, but it wasn’t enough. Then
she dyes her hair blonde and has a cry, and it works. I hope the real
Margaret watches it. I hope she sees in it some of the struggle I know she
felt. That’s what this piece is about. She had a hard time fighting against
a crazy, male-dominant world.”
Riseborough’s parents were stalwart fans of Mrs T. “Working-class
Thatcherites,” she laughs, “who did well in the 1980s boom.” Her father, a
used-car salesman, and her mother, a secretary, sent their daughters (the
youngest, Laura, is now at Rada) to private school, for academic rather than
socially aspirant reasons, the northeast being short on pretension.
Riseborough was born in Newcastle and grew up in the seaside town of Whitley
Bay, where she began acting at nine, already in love with Shakespeare. When
asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she used to say she wanted to
be a nuclear physicist one day, and a binman – “It had to be a man” – the
next. “What I really meant was that I wanted to pretend to be those things.
And I did, on my own, acting out all the jobs just for myself.” A
well-connected hairdresser told her mother about a part for a little girl in
a play at the People’s Theatre, which then housed the RSC in Newcastle. The
subject was Ranulph Fiennes’s forebear Celia, the first woman to ride
sidesaddle in England, and precocious Andrea, already marked out as academic
and a talented dancer, played little Celia on her English teacher’s
recommendation. The production toured in her summer holidays, followed by
“lots of brilliant parts”; at 14, she played Miranda in an adult production
of The Tempest. “I loved it.”
Her parents neither pushed nor cautioned against acting; she likes to portray
her family as warm, supportive, close-knit, but they were clearly more than
that. Her mother has a degree in Renaissance studies. “It’s great. I phone
her up and say, ‘Mam, where did Hamlet go to university?’ And she says,
‘Wittenberg, love.’” There were hopes their brainy daughter would sit the
Oxbridge entrance exam, but at 17 she changed direction and left home and
school without finishing her A-levels – “I just didn’t want to go to f***ing
school any more, simple as that” – paying her rent with a series of jobs.
The best of these was running a Chinese restaurant with her best friend (and
current London flatmate), until she grew tired of shredding crispy duck (“My
preferred method is to stab with the fork and shred with the spoon”) and
decided to apply to Rada. When they called to tell her she had won a place,
she cried, and then she laughed. “I said, ‘Mam, you’ll never guess who’s got
into Rada.’ And she went, ‘No. Who?’ I said, ‘Me, actually.’ Talk about
pissing on my chips.”
Riseborough is easy, intimate, unwary – but what one warms to most is her
sense of her own magical good fortune. When the journey to stardom has come
this far, this fast, nothing is taken for granted; and while the working
world whirls around her, with its contracts and agents, she is still
struggling to absorb how well it has all turned out. Her need to escape the
northeast maybe mirrored young Maggie’s great leap from Grantham;
Riseborough left her boyfriend, family and friends, but, like the thrusting
young Thatcher, she has never looked back or made light of her destiny. “I
remember clearly my second night in London,” she says. “I was living on
Gower Street, next door to Rada in Bonham Carter House, next to a Filipino
nurse with gangrene who worked at UCLH. I walked down to Oxford Circus and
stood outside Liberty and read the inscription on the arch. ‘No second gone
comes ever again. Take heed and see ye nothing do in vain.’ It seemed
incredibly meaningful.” At drama school, she grew sick of playing virgins
and wondered if she would ever escape the curse of innocence. “I felt
trapped in Virginrama, but one day I had an epiphany and realised we were
all virgins once, and that every virgin is different, so it didn’t mean I
couldn’t create different characters. Then I broke free.” Chastity is not
the quality casting directors have seen in her since then, however: her
best-known parts – scheming Kirsty in BBC2’s Party Animals (crazed with lust
for success), her wiggling Mrs T and the “devil’s whore” Angelica, who
operates “completely sexually” – have all helped refine the actress’s own
sexual politics. “The fact that Angelica is called a whore underlines the
sadness of a time when women were burnt for their sexuality. But she’s just
innocently, naturally sexual.” This week finds her beginning a three-month
shoot for the series in Cape Town, where the facade of her stately home has
been fashioned in stone and they are irrigating the lawns to conjure English
greenery. “It’s incredible, just glorious, a treat.”
Maybe the real treat for Riseborough is a weekend at home “eating and
sleeping”; or a Christmas trip to Newcastle. She calls herself “the most
boring woman in London”, a teetotal vitamin-popper currently lost to an
illustrated copy of Les Fleurs du mal she bought at the Louvre and is
reading in French. (“And I’m not even playing Baudelaire’s mistress. It’s
just for me.”) Even so, she can’t stay still for long. To research her
Croatian beauty therapist in Bruce Norris’s The Pain and the Itch at the
Royal Court last summer, she travelled to Dubrovnik, crossing the border
into Bosnia, with her dad as escort. “He was the muscle. I didn’t talk to
him a lot, but he understood. He was cracking.” In what is left of her time,
she paints and writes, her earlier “Pythonesque comedy sketches” having
matured with the help of her writing partner, the actor Tom Burke.
There will doubtless be more work with her cuddly mentor Mike Leigh, who comes
to see everything she does; she was cast as party girl Dawn in
Happy-Go-Lucky and has been inducted into the select group of actors he
favours. “He allows you not to have to think about anything, except being
somebody else,” she eulogises. Her other cuddly mentor is Peter Hall, whom
she adores for being “ready to talk verse at 7.30 in the morning. I always
want to cuddle him”. Leigh hired her having seen her in a trilogy of plays
about London teenagers at the National in 2006; one imagines he particularly
enjoyed her chavvy rude girl, Chantal, in researching whom she toured
Peckham estates without the stab-proof vest worn by the local MP. She plays
another teenager in Sam Taylor-Wood’s upcoming short film Love You More,
about the day in 1978 when the Buzzcocks’ single was released. “I love
Georgia,” says the actress of her character. “She’s a feisty, spiky-haired
punk who’s uncomfortable in her own skin.” But of all the highs so far,
winning the Ian Charleson award in 2006 for her Miss Julie and Isabella
makes her suddenly teary. She was so shocked when her name was announced
that the actors Richard Griffiths and Lesley Manville had to push her
forward to collect her prize.
“At that moment, I relived the first time I stood on the Courtyard stage in
Newcastle and said to myself, ‘Andrea, you are at the RSC.’ It was the most
happy thing ever in my life. It makes me want to cry whenever I think about
it.”
The Long Walk to Finchley, BBC4, June 12, 9pm
