Two weeks ago, Louise
Brealey was on a train coming up to Glasgow to begin rehearsals in
the title role of Miss Julie at the city's Gorbals-based Citizens
Theatre. Sitting opposite the quietly dynamic actress was a young
woman who, without warning, asked her what it was like kissing
Benedict Cumberbatch. The woman was referring to the now legendary
scene in the first episode of the third series of Sherlock, Steven
Moffatt and Mark Gatiss' twenty-first century reboot of Arthur Conan
Doyle's equally seminal detective stories.
In the programme,
Brealey plays mousily put-upon pathologist Molly Hooper, whose
massive crush on Sherlock, played by Cumberbatch as a dashingly
dysfunctional socio-path, has slowly captured the viewers
imaginations. With Sherlock apparently returning from the dead in
this season, one of a myriad of possible explanations for his
resurrection saw Cumberbatch crash heroically through the windows of
Molly's St Bart's Hospital lab and fall into her arms for an almighty
snog destined to become one of the programme's defining moments.
Brealey's response to
her interrogator was blasé, before she “looked shifty”, as she
put it on her Twitter feed, which at the time had some 64,000
followers. Once the final episode had aired, that figure had almost
doubled to 125,000 plus.
Brealey is sat in the
Citz foyer, on a break from rehearsals of Zinnie Harris' 1920s-set
version of August Strindberg's iconic play. Dressed in a green shirt
worn over a long-sleeved grey vest and jeans, and with her long brown
hair tied back when she's not fidgeting with it, Brealey ponders the
response to both the kiss and a scene in the final episode when Molly
thumped Sherlock after he was found in a drug den.
“My Twitter basically
broke,” Brealey laughs, “and I kept on having to reboot it,
because I think in the end there was something like seven thousand
people tweeting me asking about the slap that I delivered to
Benedict's lovely face at the beginning of the episode.”
After the similar
reaction to the kiss, Brealey should maybe have expected it.
“Obviously everyone
adores Benedict,” she says, “and it was such a James Bondy
moment, but I was standing on a crash-mat, so was slightly unstable.
In one take I actually fell off the crash-mat. I slowly slid off like
Del-Boy going through the bar.
“But you don't often
get to do fantasy shots like that. In the script it was just a James
Bond style clinch, but I really wanted it to be a proper snog and not
a peck. In one take Benedict did the hair ruffle to get the glass
out, and in the next take he didn't do it, and I was like, 'Put the
ruffle back in. It's really hot!'
“There were all the
usual anxieties about what I've been eating, so I was getting chewing
gum off the crew and everything, but it looks good, though, doesn't
it?”
Brealey isn't showing
off when she says this. Rather, her tone is one of utter fan-girl
glee, albeit a fan-girl who got to do what most of the show's female
populace would like to do. Several times at that.
“Within I think a
minute of a half of that kiss I had something like six thousand new
followers on Twitter,” she says, “and I had thousands of tweets
that night. That's the great thing about Twitter. It sort of turns
telly into theatre for an actor, because it's this feedback loop
without any filter, and people can say something's brilliant or shit
instantaneously.
“One of the reasons
Molly works is that women who love or fancy Benedict can quite easily
imagine themselves as her, so, of course, when he snogged her, they
all just...” she pauses, “lost their shit. It was such a
collective...” she squeaks to illustrate, “because no-one was
expecting it.”
While Brealey seems
both bemused and quietly amused about the attention that has winged
her way since she started playing Molly, she takes a certain amount
of responsibility for both her and Molly's fan-base to the extent of
defending them when they're called geeks.
“I don't think of
fans as geeks,” she says, “and also I don't think of being a geek
as a negative, because I'm a geek, but this groundswell of what they
call fandom I think is brilliant, because it means there's this
international fanbase which works in the same way as Dr Who, who are
still talking about the show after two years, and are keeping the
ball in the air. Their enthusiasm, writing stuff and sending
pictures, their passion and creativity I find genuinely inspiring.
“It's interesting on
Twitter, because I've got quite a lot of young women following me,
and it's great to be able to have a dialogue with them. I'm a
feminist, so it's great to be able to prattle on about feminist
things. Bizarrely I find myself suddenly a role model for some of
these girls. At first it was hilarious, thinking how can I be a role
model, which sounded like a terrifying prospect for them, rather than
me. They ask all sorts of things, and occasionally ask something to
do with sexual politics, and I can say, you know, you don't have to
shave your hair off if you don't want to. You don't have to do
anything you don't want to. Just be your own woman.
“All that stuff about
thigh gaps, and all that stupid shit like that that's emblematic of
the pressures young women are under even more than when I was young.
I can say fuck the thigh gap, and people go, oh, maybe that is okay,
then. Even just to have one contrary voice in that sea of voices
telling them to be thinner, or they've got to have perfect flawless
skin and have no body-hair or no-one will date them... I wasted so
much time when I was younger worrying about fat legs. Fuck it. It's
bollocks.
“It's funny that's
happened, and I don't want to come over all po-faced, because
ultimately Sherlock is just entertainment, but if I can, I want to
try and set a good example.”
Brealey hunches into
herself as she talks, keeping her arms wrapped in tight. Navigating
her way through an idea, she scrunches her face up, her voice
dropping to an almost inaudible level, only to whirl around and
offset everything with a dirty giggle that's almost a yelp.
This mix of a shy but
steely intelligence punctured by extrovert flashes may have something
to do with Brealey's training. She studied both at the Lee Strasberg
Institute, the spiritual home of method acting in New York, as well
as with master French clown, Philippe Gaulier. This followed a
history degree at Cambridge, where she studiously avoided the
university drama set.
“I played football
and drank,” she says. “I went for one audition and panicked in
the queue, and literally crawled out of the church they were
auditioning in. I crouched sown and walked out of the room like a
strange frog. Also, it was quite cliquey, all that, and I didn't have
the confidence to feel like I could be part of it.”
Brealey became an arts
journalist, interviewing the likes of Liv Tyler and the Pet Shop Boys
and for publications such as Total Film, The Face and Wonderland,
where she was deputy editor.
“I think people quite
a lot get into careers right next to the one they really want to do,”
she says. “That happens a lot in the creative industries, and it
happened to me without me really realising it. I'd always wanted to
act, but I'd been too afraid to try it and really stick my neck out
and risk failing or whatever. Then I decided I didn't want to end up
being forty and wishing I'd done it.”
Brealey's first
professional job was playing a gobby fourteen year old schoolgirl in
Judy Upton's play, Sliding With Suzanne, directed by Max
Stafford-Clark. A couple of years in Casualty followed, after which
she toured America and Russia in Dennis Kelly's play, After The End,
played Sonya in Peter Hall's production of Uncle Vanya, and appeared
at the Traverse in Edinburgh in Simon Stephens' post 7/7 play,
Pornography. She was the Mayor's sex-mad daughter in The Government
Inspector, and in 2012 performed naked as Helen of Troy in The Trojan
Women.
Brealey isn't sure
where she got the initial impetus to act from. It wasn't from her
family in Northamptonshire, although “I think I must have got some
love and attention as a small person by doing some acting at some
point, and it just lodged itself in my subconscious.
“When I was a little
girl, about eight, I auditioned for the school play. They were doing
Snow White, and I auditioned for the Wicked Witch, and then the
teacher came up to me and asked if I'd like to play Snow White, and I
asked who was playing Prince Charming.”
Such precociousness has
clearly held Brealey in good stead for Sherlock.
“Molly's funny,”
she says, sounding like a supportive sister, “but I think it's
perfectly possible for someone to be so in love with someone that
they make a massive twat of themselves, while being intelligent,
loyal, full of dignity and capable of standing up for themselves.
It's absolutely wonderful gazing longingly at Benedict for a couple
of scenes, but you have to go somewhere with it, otherwise it's just,
oh, there's Molly pulling her longing face again. Which I can happily
do, but it's nice to do other stuff too.”
Recent accusations by a
tabloid newspaper of Sherlock having 'left-wing bias' passed Brealey
by. Once informed about them, however, she makes her views plain.
“Good,” she says.
“I'm a socialist, so I'm quite happy if it does, especially when
you've got rampant Tory propaganda like Benefits Street going on. But
honestly,” she laughs, “I don't know where they could have
spotted that. It wasn't something I spotted, but that would be
marvellous. I would be proud to be involved in a left-wing drama.”
Miss Julie may not
quite be that, but Strindberg's sexual cat and mouse game between an
aristocratic young woman and the servant she grew up with is
certainly getting there.
“It’s one of the
great parts written for a woman,” she says. “Zinnie's focused on
the sexual politics of the play, and we're looking at what happens
when boundaries are transgressed, and the things that hold society
together are broken for a moment. It's about these two people who
have this thing between them, and negotiating what that is. Once
Julie's allowed something to happen with this sexual attraction, what
does that mean, and can you go back to where you were before? If
you're friends with someone and have sex with them, can it ever be
the same again?
“Zinnie's moved the
play forty years into the future from when it was originally set, and
I think just that tiny shift and hopping over into the 1900 mark
makes it more contemporary, and makes the whole thing for me resonate
more as a story. It's set on midsummer as well, which is difficult to
imagine in the middle of January, so there's that whole sense of
opening a shirt, and your hair's all damp at the nape of your neck,
and there's this atmosphere at the beginning of the play, so I'll be
wearing a lot of thermals under my costume to give my little body the
impression of warmth.”
Beyond such hidden
layers, Brealey is still finding her way into Julie.
“She's unconventional
is the short answer,” Brealey says. “I really haven't worked out
who she is yet because we're effectively on day one of rehearsals,
and I don't like to put too much down beforehand because otherwise
you end up closing down possibilities, but she's a very
unconventional woman. Strindberg is a great contradictionist in the
literary world, in that some of the things he says about women makes
him misogynist, and yet he's written this extraordinary woman.
“I'm a feminist, and
it's interesting reading Strindberg's preface to the play, where he
talks about Julie as a half-woman, a man-hater and a degenerate as a
type that can't survive in the real world, because they will always
come up against failure when it comes to trying to be equal. But you
have to remember just how shocking the play was for its time. These
people in the play are talking about sex. They have sex.
“It's quite
interesting when he talks about this love or whatever it is that
flares between them. He talks about a hyacinth, and how it has to
grow its roots in darkness, because I'd forgotten when I put this
hyacinth I'd bought in the cupboard at home with a vase of water. It
has to grow in the dark, and then it blooms really quickly, and I
think that's a really lovely way of looking at what happens between
them. It grows in secret, flashes up, and is gone or not gone.”
A friend recently told
Brealey about the steamy South African take on Miss Julie that
dazzled Edinburgh audiences a couple of years back.
“They told me it was
completely filthy,” she laughs, “and I just said mine won't be
anything like that. Obviously she'll be wildly sexy,” she deadpans,
followed by a self-mocking “Hmm. That's not going to come over in
print, is it? I'm going to sound like a twat.”
Brealey doesn't take
anything for granted as an actor. Despite the Sherlock factor, she's
aware of the fickleness of her profession from first-hand experience.
Out of work after the first series of Sherlock, she ended up as a
researcher for TV documentaries, and created The Charles Dickens
Show, a mock chat-show in which Dickens' characters appeared on the
sofa.
“It suited my magpie
brain,” she says, “but acting is my first love, and it's a
jealous lover at that. You can't just leave it. I've been incredibly
lucky, but you have to be incredibly careful about thinking that
acting makes you happy, because acting doesn't make you happy.
Nothing makes you happy, actually. You've got to try and make
yourself happy. Now I've learnt that ,it makes it easier. When the
phone doesn't ring, if you let that make you feel unwanted, then
you're on a hiding to nowhere.
“Also, there's no
point of arrival in acting. You don't get somewhere and that's it. I
remember being quite wide-eyed, and interviewing Minnie Driver, and
I asked her what was it like in Hollywood, and she said, well, I'm
losing parts to Gwyneth Paltrow, who used to lose them to Tara
Fitzgerald. You don't get rewarded for being good. It's all about
luck. There are so many good actors who don't work, and there are so
few good parts for women, so you have to do it for yourself, or learn
to do it for yourself, and that's what's changed for me, not letting
whether the phone rings or not make me feel like I'm a good person,
or make me feel like I'm happy.
“Sometimes when
you're thinking about where a particular job can get you career-wise,
you can end up missing the actual job you're doing. I was certainly
like that when I started out, but I'm not anymore. I'm happy to work
with nice people. Of course you want to work with people who make
your mind light up, and who push and challenge and make your work
better. That's a given. But I don't want to work with brilliant
wankers. Life's too short.”
Last year Brealey wrote
a play, Pope Joan, for the National Youth Theatre, about the legend
of the ninth century female pontiff.
“I'm so glad I did
it,” she says, “but it cost me a lot. It was very exposing, and
there wasn't enough time to write it, but I learnt a very valuable
lesson.”
Taking her clothes off
as Helen was even more exposing.
“It was amazing to do
that,” she says, “because I don't run round in the nuddy as a
rule, and it was quite hard to do in a room as small as the Gate,
which only holds seventy people. You're only six or seven feet from
the nearest person, and you're going, look at me, I'm beautiful, and
you've got your bum out.”
If Brealey seems to
thrive on pushing herself in this way, playing Sonya was another
learning curve.
“I would play her
again in a heartbeat,” she says. “I think that part really made
me a stage actress. I learnt so much from that job, but in a way, in
terms of unrequited love, Molly is sort a mini TV Sonya.”
Ah, Molly again.
“Molly's opened up
all sorts of doors for me, but I've been offered about ten
secretaries who are in love with their boss, and I've turned stuff
down. After Molly I need to play someone who's a complete gun-toting
megalomaniac.
“It's funny, isn't
it,” she says, “about ambition, because it's a dirty word,
especially for women, but I just want to learn. The thing about
acting, and it's hard to say without sounding like a twat, but with
the best jobs, you learn to be a better person as well as a better
actor.”
Miss Julie, Citizens
Theatre, Glasgow, February 6-15
A version of this article appeared in The Herald, January 25th 2014
ends
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