Ruth Wilson on playing Emily Maitlis: ‘Prince Andrew was blindly walking to his own grave’
I open the email that has just popped into my inbox. It’s from Ruth Wilson, movie star, actor, MBE. The subheading is “Micro Questions”. And the first five “micros” go as follows:
Are you a swearer? Are you a sleeper? What keeps you awake? What is in your handbag? Do you cook?
My answers are: Yes. Light. Everything. Everything. Yes.
Over the course of our next emails I will expand. I will tell her all the things she could possibly want to know about me. And it will begin one of the oddest and most exciting challenges of my life; Ruth Wilson interviewing me for her latest role. Because her role is me.
That exchange, just over a year ago, would see my work, my family life, my character transformed into a fictionalised version of myself – and I would get to be a part of the process.
The initial email kicked off a series of encounters that would find the two of us hunched over scripts in armchairs or on kitchen-table Zooms for hours at a time, comparing notes over cocktails or squeezed together in the dark of a London theatre. There would be reams more questions – some darker, more profound; some flippant, inconsequential, funny one-line text messages to check a minuscule detail. And as Ruth built up a picture of the person she was about to play, I grew to understand the amount of sheer graft, attention and risk that goes into the preparation of a leading role. I also felt – uncomfortably at first – what it was like to be on the receiving end of such scrutiny as an interviewee.
But today when we talk the tables have turned. Or should I say, the tables have been restored. It is my turn to interview Ruth, to ask her all the things that I’ve pushed to the back of my mind until now. And in truth, it’s a relief to be here posing the questions – rather than struggling to formulate honest, cogent answers to things I maybe haven’t yet worked out myself.
When we meet this time, at 7pm on a Wednesday night, Ruth is already well into the filming of her new project, Down Cemetery Road, a thriller with Emma Thompson. But we are here to discuss the three-part Prime Video drama she’s made with Michael Sheen – A Very Royal Scandal – in which Sheen plays Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and she plays Emily Maitlis, the person I have now come to think of as my character rather than myself.
And I realise that during the last year of questions that volleyed back and forth between us I failed to ask her the most obvious one: why she took the role in the first place.
She tells me she’s never played “a real person” before. And I think back for a moment to her past work in Mrs Wilson – the critically acclaimed drama serial she executive produced and starred in as her own grandmother. Wasn’t that a real person? It was of course, but what I deduce Ruth means here is someone living, able to respond. To feed into the role and presumably to feel upset if it’s not what they imagined. We are tiptoeing around what feels like a very delicate subject here: how do you play someone who might then criticise the very portrayal you have shown them? It’s something Ruth implicitly acknowledges when she tells me, “It really scared me”.
She reminds me she watched my interview with the Duke live as it went out, in real time, on a Saturday night in November 2019 – and then watched it three more times – calling it “the best bit of drama I’d seen on TV”. She was, she admits, “gobsmacked and horrified in equal measure – and sort of entertained… so when the offer was made it was a no-brainer”.
But I am intrigued by her earlier admission – of being scared. Is it just about the risk of offending? Scared of what?
“Playing you. Because you’re a public figure. Everyone knows you. People know your voice, your mannerisms. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly technical actor – I would say I am quite instinctive. So that felt like a very technical challenge to me, trying to get the essence of a voice. I knew I wasn’t going to be totally accurate – it wasn’t an impersonation. But I wanted to get something that was close enough, in essence, to you.”
She finishes explaining and I immediately think two things. The first is that she’s got to stop saying “you” to me. It immediately makes this interview sound ridiculous. Like I am some despot trying to hire a doppelganger body double to put in the firing line to save my own life. The second, and perhaps more important, is that she had little to worry about. Her portrayal of me/the role has left me breathless. She has captured things I haven’t noticed in myself, and thrown them back at me with laughter. A klutziness that wouldn’t be apparent from my on-screen behaviour but is known to all my close friends. An impatience that makes even chewing a sandwich look like a task to be ticked off. A physical, twitchy restlessness when waiting for the red light of the camera to cue me. I have watched those scenes stunned that someone could have imbued so much without needing to articulate a word of it.
We first met in person in September 2023, just a month before the filming of the drama began. She tells me that encounter changed her perception completely.
“There’s a sort of TV persona… certainly at Newsnight that was your profession, there was a public version of you… and so to meet you, it filled in so much more for me. You’re much more physical. You use your hands. You’re sort of kinetic – meeting you in person was more clear and acute.”
I think what she’s telling me, if I read delicately between the lines, is that my Newsnight version was colder. More buttoned-up. There is a formality, a protocol, to television current affairs that (thankfully) doesn’t exist in real life. She has – on our meeting – seen something that I thought was obvious: that I talk with my whole body, not my mouth. Except, on TV, in a single close-up, it is of course just the mouth you see move.
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She has brought along Alex, her movement coach that day. Alex doesn’t offer an opinion, or a comment – she’s relaxed, observing. But later when I am watching the drama on the screen I realise what they have captured from seeing me at work. A sort of incessant, unnecessary hamster-like speed to every movement. It has a slightly farcical, almost slapstick quality in Ruth’s exquisite hands – like a rubber band being snapped back the wrong way.
She has picked up on tiny details in our News Agents podcast office that day – the Snoopy stickers on my computer, a sort of retro 1970s feel to my tech. The fact I always travel with sleeping pills because my greatest fear is operating on no sleep. “I remember you showing me in your handbag you always have eye patches on you,” she tells me in our interview. Not eye patches Ruth, I correct. That makes me sound like a pirate. Eye masks, yes. Again, for sleeping. I can cat nap anywhere.
I hear her guttural, generous laugh bubble up as she accepts the correction.
“You said you watched the interview four times – why?” I press her. I have struggled to rewatch it myself, noticing each time the things I left out, the crease on the jacket – normal flagellation of my TV self. “I just found Andrew so lost. It’s such a fascinating character study of him. He was just walking blindly into his own sort of grave.”
I want to know what she brought to her own viewing of it. Was she watching as an actor? Potential journalist? Monarchist? “Would you say you are a royalist?” I ask.
“I think I kind of am, yeah. I think there’s a part of me that feels they really create a balance of power in our country which… keeps the country pretty stable… You know when the Queen died, when the King was coronated, just the respect in that room from all the many prime ministers – you go, yeah, that’s good. Even if it feels a little bit old-fashioned and strange, it’s something that keeps our nation grounded. I do think they are kind of central to the foundations of our country.”
So did that Andrew interview – or the drama we created – change Ruth’s perception of the role of the monarchy?
“I think it made me think about entertainment. Royals as entertainment. News as entertainment. And the sort of coexistence of the BBC and the royals – journalism and the royals – actually it’s a symbiotic relationship. They need each other. And so I think it was the sort of connection of the two of those things.”
As she speaks I’m reminded of lines she speaks – as Emily – in the drama, where she asks what the interview, ultimately, achieved. “He [Prince Andrew] still has Christmas at Sandringham… so what really changed for them [Jeffrey Epstein’s victims]?”
And her words knock me, mirroring the questions that have been banging around my own brain for the past five years. The nagging spectre – that journalism has the power to scar a prince’s life, but ultimately to leave it much the same. That even an interview that brings victims’ names to the heart of Buckingham Palace may leave them, ultimately, with no clear answers.
It makes me want to hear more about Ruth’s own relationship to the roles she plays. Does she look for characters with a mission? She has played psychos, brooding young women, tortured mothers. And so I start at the beginning – asking her about her childhood, the things that mattered to her parents when she was growing up, and to her.
“They passed on the sort of duty of family and turning up for family… They sat on opposite sides of the political spectrum and argued about everything, so debates in our household were big, rife, brilliant actually. I remember when the Iraq War broke out [Ruth was in her early 20s] we had a big sit-around-the-table moment with all the family and voted. You know, a big debate and then decided what we each would do. So I grew up in a sort of household that had lots of ideas, and a non-judgment that actually comes from that.”
So politically engaged but ecumenical. I’m curious to know if she felt the need to do the things they clearly valued? Or pulled away from that? She tells me it’s more the latter.
“Being the centre of attention is slightly anathema to some people in my family. So I think for me to be an actress was really quite absurd – obscure and strange. They’ve always supported me, but I think it was like, ‘Where does that come from?’”
It’s odd to hear Ruth call it being the centre of attention. Every time I’ve watched her perform I’ve seen the opposite. How silently, skilfully, she embeds herself in a role – be it Luther’s Alice Morgan or A Streetcar Named Desire’s Stella Kowalski. I am always struck by how completely she elongates, stretches into the shape of the character until you forget Ruth completely and see Alison, or Alice, or Stella, or now, Emily.
“You make it sound like it’s showing off!” I chide her.
“Yeah. Which is very British.”
She is the least celebrity-conscious woman I’ve met, this award-winning actor – famed on at least three continents. It is, indeed, very British that she still, decades on, sounds slightly apologetic to her parents for being the black sheep. (Albeit a black sheep in possession of a brace of Olivier Awards and a Golden Globe.)
She grew up with three older brothers. All four siblings ran the London Marathon this year to raise money for Alzheimer’s Research UK, after their dad was diagnosed. She credits her brothers with giving her confidence, sociability, and says that in turn gave her the power to enjoy being alone. Long walks with the dog, wild dancing on her own: “I could be quite insular… I had an imagination and an emotion that I would often keep to myself,” she muses.
She watched one of her brothers in a local theatre club’s production of Godspell (“I was quite into God as a kid so I loved the music”) and knew then that she wanted to be on stage. But it was a teacher, Jill Roberts, who pushed her into making a go of it. Ruth calls it “validating a secret dream”. Yet she was also a realist. She gave herself two years to make it as an actor or give up. She got the role of Jane Eyre in a BBC adaptation six months out of drama school and she has never looked back.
Today Ruth admits that she takes work very seriously but finds “the public version of myself harder to negotiate”. No social media presence. No yearning to sell herself or curate her life online. “I think it’s a kind of shyness. Unless I can really believe in it I find it deeply embarrassing.”
During our chats in the past year she has mentioned a boyfriend on a different continent. “It’s a very peripatetic lifestyle,” I say to her (she lives in south London, is filming in Bristol, with a partner in LA eight hours behind…), “isn’t that dislocating?”
“Yeah, it can be… We’re very good at talking to each other on the phone and using Zoom. We’re both artists [he’s a writer], so we both need our own space. But yeah we spend hours talking to each other. Three phone calls a day.”
I have to double check that. “Really? Like proper calls? Not texts? Actual… talking… calls?” I don’t know any long-term couple who spend hours a day talking on the phone. I’m wondering if she’s discovered the secret of fire. She reads my mind.
“Yeah, I’m sure people who live together don’t spend that amount of time talking to each other on the call. So that’s how we maintain our relationship… Although we are spending a lot more time together now, I will always be travelling, as will he, because it’s both [of] our worlds. And you just get used to it. You get used to missing each other. It’s quite nice to miss each other, you know, rather than be fed up with each other.”
One of the longest-running roles that Ruth has played is Alison Bailey, Dominic West’s lover in the US drama series The Affair, a role she left abruptly in 2018. Just as I was interviewing Prince Andrew about his friendship with a convicted sex offender, The Hollywood Reporter was conducting its own investigation into toxic behaviour on the set of The Affair – offering, essentially, a reason behind her departure.
When I ask Ruth to reflect on it, she sighs deeply. “Honestly, there’s nothing new to say. It’s all in the original piece. What I will say is there’s been an extraordinary shift in the past five or six years. Women are producing really successful shows. There was always a myth that women couldn’t lead successful films or produce successful movies and that’s been completely blown out of the water; actors, actresses are taking ownership of the material they want to be in. They’re writing their own stories, putting stories out there and producers are hiring them and putting trust in them.”
So, would she write? “I don’t know if I have the mentality for it. I’ve hardly written anything – not even a diary – so probably not. But I might direct. I love being much more involved with all the creative heads so whether it’s developing material with a writer or like, talking to the production designer on what it’s going to look like – I have really enjoyed seeing a project from inception to completion. Much more holistic than acting.”
I smile when Ruth talks about “seeing a project to its completion”. She has already told me how hard she usually finds it to watch the finished product she’s acting in. So has she – you know – actually watched A Very Royal Scandal?
“Yeah, I watched the first two episodes.”
“So you don’t know how it ends?”
“Exactly.” This is vintage Ruth. Deadpan. Twinkling.
“And how did that feel? What is it like to go in there and think, what have they done with it?”
She eyeballs me, and I realise, too late, she’s exposed me. She knows me too well. This is a question as much for myself as it is for Ruth.
“It’s always awful watching because what you do inside your head is always so completely different, it’s so odd. But I think the show is great. It has a lovely balance of humour and gravitas. And I’m happy with the essence I got of you. I didn’t perfect you. But I didn’t need to.”
She’s right. I never want to be perfected. I wouldn’t even know what that means. I’m fine with essence. And as she says it I realise what that essence is. That I have trusted her with my innermost thoughts about my job, my relationships, my mistakes.
And she has trusted me to get out of her way. To let her get on and do it.
A Very Royal Scandal premieres on 19 September on Prime Video
