Indira Varma interview: ‘I don’t believe Meghan is manipulating Harry’
Indira Varma emerges from the rehearsal room as if she’s just jumped out of a cockpit, chic casual in a flight suit, and full of enthusiasm for her latest part. Varma is playing Lady Macbeth, opposite Ralph Fiennes, and the Game of Thrones star has been working through her thoughts on the play.
The relationship between Shakespeare’s murderous usurpers “feels very domestic”, she says. “These are people who know each other. She lists all his weaknesses and how she’s going to empower him. She mans him up.” To Varma, the play’s about “Who do we blame? Like in life.” She’s been thinking about Ghislaine Maxwell in relation to the role, asking herself: if you blame the woman, are you absolving the man?
I mention the WhatsApp messages that have emerged from the Covid inquiry in which Boris Johnson’s cabinet secretary, Simon Case, says: “I was always told that Dom [Cummings] was the secret PM. How wrong they are… the real person in charge is Carrie.” And the words of royal biographer Lady Colin Campbell, who writes of the Duchess of Sussex: “Meghan’s influence is very reminiscent of Lady Macbeth. To gain a toehold over Harry she appears to have played to his weaknesses.”
What does Varma make of the way our culture returns time and again to this image of a woman shaping events through her control of a powerful man? “I feel it’s reductive,” she says. “We want to name the baddie, and it’s really nice for people to go, ‘It’s her behind him.’ And I suppose as a woman, not that I defend either of those people, but I just don’t believe it’s one person – Meghan manipulating Harry, Carrie behind Boris – it’s the two together, it’s that combination.
“Often Lady M is portrayed as the instigator or the one who’s responsible for it all, but it’s far subtler than that. Because he wants [the crown]. He wants it from the off.”
I notice Varma avoids referring to the character by name, as if thinking about the fabled curse, but she insists, “I’m not worried about things like that.” More than any of Shakespeare’s other plays, of course, the plot of Macbeth is driven by supernatural forces: witchcraft, prophecy, ghosts and visions. Does Varma discount those things too? She worries that she’ll say no and then “some poltergeist throws me around the room tonight,” she says. “I have a terribly active imagination and I am scared of the dark.”
Varma is equally at home playing the lethal Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones as she is in the light comedy of No?l Coward’s Present Laughter, for which she won an Olivier for best supporting actress in 2020. More recently, she’s been highly visible on TV and film – as a double agent for the resistance in the Star Wars spin-off Obi-Wan Kenobi, as the cheated-on wife in Netflix’s erotic thriller Obsession and as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the latest Mission: Impossible movie. Up close to Tom Cruise, “the voltage is crazy,” she says.
She’s often cast in roles that require an imperious quality – where does that come from? She laughs. “Good posture? People think I’ve got a scary face. I don’t think I am that.” Maybe she can be? “I think I can be withering. It probably comes from deep insecurity, and I have to put on this fa?ade.”
In the imminent return of Doctor Who, for example, under the helm of Russell T Davies, she’ll play a character called The Duchess; advance publicity has suggested that we should all beware. “A whole new audience will be hiding behind the settee when The Duchess unleashes her terror,” Davies has said.
She’s not sure how much she’s allowed to reveal. “I spent a lot of time in make-up…” It took about four hours to create The Duchess. Varma can’t bear the early mornings in the chair, she says, “but you can sort of go into a zombified state”.
What else can she tell us? “They are doing some serious time-travelling. I know they always do, but it’s going to be pretty spectacular in terms of what they can do.” This is because it’s a co-production with Disney, with budgets to match. And The Duchess? “She’s from the Regency period…”
This at least is a satisfying detail, as Varma herself grew up among the Regency splendour of Bath. “I took it for granted, the beauty of it,” she says. She never made it to the Jane Austen museum, “but I went to No 1 Royal Crescent and checked it out.” The atmosphere of “wow, this is how people used to live” was exciting to her, but at one remove. “It wasn’t a place anyone would have seen me in, as a brown Swiss person. I was always from elsewhere.”
Her late father was Indian, her mother Swiss, of Genoese heritage. She experienced racism as a child, she says, “mildly – name calling here and there. And I watched people patronise my parents quite a lot because they both had accents.”
As a child, she was an avid reader (she still is – she has narrated audiobooks and is a judge for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction) and a risk-taker, too. “My dad was so strict,” she says, “so to go out and drink and wear make-up and dress in a certain way is a risk if you have someone scary at home.”
She tells me a story about finding herself alone in Italy aged 15 or 16. “I’d gone to see a friend, and I got kicked out because I kissed one of his cousins. And I had to leave their village outside Naples. I got a lift up to Rome…” With a plan to get to Geneva, but very little money, she thought about sleeping in the train station but instead convinced a young guy “who had nice luggage” to pay her fare to his parents’ house. “The following day, they were like, ‘Who the hell are you?!’ ”
She throws her hands up at the idea of her own 16-year-old daughter alone abroad without a phone or access to cash – “Nightmare!” Varma is married to fellow actor Colin Tierney and lives in north London.
She now sees her acting career as “a continuation of doing stuff at school and making people laugh,” she says, though back then “I didn’t know it could be a job.” She was in Bath’s Musical Youth Theatre with The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln – they still keep in touch – then got into RADA, in the same year as Matthew Macfadyen.
Her first role after graduating was in Mira Nair’s racy 1996 film Kama Sutra. It wasn’t called that when she signed on, she recalls. “And also, I remember distinctly, in the script, it said, ‘And then they make love’ – just that sentence. Then there was the actual nitty gritty of, ‘You have to do what?’ Oh my God, it was so hard. Suddenly, you’re being looked at, objectified and told, ‘Oh, you’re not going to like the way your belly wobbles when you run, you’re going to want to lose weight…’ ”
She welcomes the recent introduction of intimacy co-ordinators, and suggests they will make the sex we see on screen more interesting. “One of the things I’ve always felt was so dull with sex scenes is that they didn’t tell a story. And often [as a viewer] you switch off or you perv or whatever, whereas now I feel it is a continuation of the story; if you’re going to do it, you may as well inform the audience as to who these people are in the way they do it.”
There is a real “sisterhood” with the actresses she came up with, she says, women who’ve all experienced the reality of “it’s a cast of five and there’s one woman and we’re pitted against each other… There’s such a support network. I’m on a Whats-App group of actresses of a certain age. And we are all there, we’ve got each other’s backs, trying to think, ‘Don’t give up. It’s going to be OK.’”
She played Priti Patel in the rebooted Spitting Image, which gave the former home secretary a roasting. Was it deserved? “Absolutely.” How does she feel about Patel’s successor Suella Braverman, and her speech on how multiculturalism has failed in Britain? “My stomach just flipped over. I can’t bear her. I think it’s absolute bull----.
“I’m not a very political, as in party political, person,” she adds. “There’s just far too much posturing and personality politics and lying that goes on… [but] I wish people actually spoke to each other. The whole thing about cancel culture, of not having a dialogue, feels to me that it breaks everything down.
“I’m not very opinionated,” she worries, as she gets up to leave. Does she get recognised in the street for her big franchise roles? Not if she avoids the traditional celebrity “disguise”, she laughs. “If someone’s got a baseball cap on and a pair of dark glasses, you’re much more likely to remember them.” And with that, she slips back into the crowd.
Macbeth is at The Depot, Liverpool, from next Nov 18, then touring. For details, see: macbeththeshow.com
