The ObserverAndrea Riseborough This article is more than 12 years oldInterviewAndrea Riseborough: rise and shine
This article is more than 12 years oldElizabeth DayOutstanding in the Madonna-directed W.E., the Rada graduate may just be the best and brightest actor of her generationAndrea Riseborough does not so much walk into a room as float through it; a fragrant, other-worldly presence who seems to appear out of nowhere like a shimmering will-o'-the-wisp. Her physical presence is slight – translucent skin and tiny, fine-boned fingers – and she gives the impression of operating on a different plane from the rest of us, as though earthly concerns are something of a mystery to her.
We are seated upstairs in the studio where the 30-year-old Riseborough has just finished the Observer photoshoot. On the table is a tray of baked apples. She peers at them detachedly, as though they are a strange piece of sculpture she cannot quite understand. Would she like one? "Oh no, I can't eat them," Riseborough says, smoothing down her floral tea dress. Why not? She gives an enigmatic shrug of the shoulders. "Oh, you know…" She smiles, displaying a row of precise, shiny teeth, and instead picks up an avocado, which she proceeds to slice delicately and eat throughout the interview.
Her real sustenance, it seems, comes in the form of profound thought – even the most straightforward question can engender a furrowed brow and a bout of extended soul-searching. At one point, an innocent enquiry about cooking prompts a philosophical disquisition on the existence of the divine. "I subscribe to no religion," she says, when I'd simply been expecting some light-hearted tale about cooking pasta carbonara for her boyfriend. "But I believe that in the creation of art, there can be moments of God." Blimey.
Her latest role is in the forthcoming film W.E., in which Riseborough plays Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Edward VIII gave up his throne in 1936. The lush biopic, which is directed by Madonna and took three years to research, has garnered much press attention and has already been attacked by the critic Xan Brooks for being "extraordinarily silly… [and] fatally mishandled." Still, if Riseborough has read any negative pre-reviews, she's not letting on. Madonna, she says, "was so prepared and so passionate and wanted everything to be seamless. She has a wonderful eye for the aesthetic. She's just a brilliant human being… I have a huge admiration for her."
Does she have Madonna's number in her iPhone? There is a sharp intake of breath. Riseborough seems genuinely taken aback. "I can't answer that, sorry," she gulps, as if I have just asked her something terribly shocking about the state of Madonna's underpants.
In fairness, W.E. is an extremely watchable film, almost wholly because of Riseborough's outstanding performance. She is mesmerising on screen and disappears utterly into character, one moment dancing in a Schiaparelli gown; the next insisting the candlesticks must be at a certain height on the dining table with a voice as dry as a freshly mixed Martini. And yet, Riseborough also manages to invest Simpson with an unexpected vulnerability, in much the same way as she winkled out the softness beneath the young Margaret Thatcher for the BBC's The Long Walk to Finchley in 2008. She has said in the past that, although not a natural Tory, "I did end up feeling very warm towards the character."
Was there that same shift in emotional connection with Wallis? "Of course. As with any character you play, because initially they start off as words, pictures, thoughts and then you cease to be able to have any kind of objective relationship with them at all, which is why it is so interesting posthumously, after the project ending, talking about them [in interviews] because you get to talk about them objectively again. I find it very useful to exorcise characters." She looks dreamily into the mid-distance and then, concerned I might get the wrong end of the stick and believe she's talking about going to an aerobics class with Baroness Thatcher, she adds: "Ex-or-cise, like The Exorcist."
I think she honestly means this to be helpful rather than patronising: Riseborough clearly feels the need to communicate with absolute accuracy.
Professionally, she is driven by the same urge and does extensive research for every role. For Wallis Simpson she read several biographies, pored over archival film footage and studied photographs. "Especially if they're holidaying or wedding photographs – you see so very much of somebody and how they feel about everybody around them through their body language," she says.
The result is that, barely out of her 20s, Riseborough is already one of the leading British talents of her generation. Since graduating from Rada six years ago, she has been accumulating critical acclaim for a wide variety of roles on stage and screen. In 2006, she won the Ian Charleson Award for exceptional classical stage work by an actor under 30, for her roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company's productions of Miss Julie and Measure for Measure. Sir Peter Hall, who directed her, hailed her as "one of the bravest and most impressive actresses I've come across in recent years".
From there, she has made a name for herself playing intriguing, complex women. On television, she was the feisty Angelica Fanshawe in Channel 4's civil war epic The Devil's Whore, and the single-mindedly ambitious Kirsty in the short-lived (and much loved by those who saw it) political sitcom Party Animals. On film, she was a spirited Ford factory machinist fighting for equal pay in Made in Dagenham in 2010 and the naive, mistreated innocent Rose in Rowan Joffé's remake of Brighton Rock, released earlier this year. Joffé later praised her "bona fide chameleon-like ability to be totally different part to part". Geraldine James, who acted alongside Riseborough in Made in Dagenham, also describes her as "a chameleon… a brilliant actress".
Then, in November, she appeared in Resistance, a drama based on the eponymous bestseller by Owen Sheers. Set in a Welsh valley in the 1940s, the film imagined Britain losing the Second World War. In it, Riseborough played a farmer's wife who formed an uneasy relationship with the occupying Nazi commander.
She has an undoubted ability to inhabit widely varied roles, but Riseborough insists there is a common thread: "I think, really, what I'm interested in is whole women, real people. Often, I'll read a script and the female character's an extension or serves some sort of purpose in terms of the male character's narrative and it just isn't fully formed." She pauses. "But they will be very beautiful," she continues drily. "Whether a secretary or a doctor or a vet, they will be very beautiful."
She states, as if reading from a script: "'Enter Kelly. She is hot. Hotter than they come.' That's when, as an actress, you almost feel like running for the hills. Because I'm not sure how one plays 'hotness' as a characteristic, but I have on occasion asked for a character to be given three key character words and received, you know, 'hot, sexy and sharp'… I mean, knives are hot, sexy and sharp."
And whatever you might think of Madonna as a director, it is clear that the female roles in W.E. (a modern-day storyline involving a woman in an abusive marriage intertwines with the abdication story) are more interesting, more fleshed-out than the usual Hollywood fodder. Is that part of what attracted Riseborough to the project?
"I think it's a very good question," she says, a bit like a polite university tutor who is about to rubbish your argument, "and I think without undermining the question, what I'd like to say is that I feel sad that, where female characters are involved, we constantly reduce the film… because you and I both know that if this were a film with two male leads, we wouldn't even be having a conversation about gender.
"Still, I feel like we've come so far in so many ways. And there are ways we've reverted. I mean, you've just watched me do a photoshoot with all these very beautiful clothes on – exquisite things – but because I'm a female practising my art form, it has merged with fashion so that we've become another vehicle for selling and for aspirational promotion."
It is telling that, both before and during the shoot, Riseborough had considerable input in styling her outfits, insisting she wanted the look to be androgynous and determinedly not high-gloss glamour. In person, she is extremely striking. Yet she seems wary of her own beauty and is concerned, perhaps, that she might be dismissed as a superficial starlet if she focuses too much on trivialities. When I ask her whether she had to lose weight to play Simpson – who once famously declared you could never be "too rich or too thin" – she looks at me sharply.
"This is a really uninteresting part of it." I press her, because I am interested, even if that makes me a terribly shallow person. "I ate, but I did a lot of exercise that didn't involve building any muscle – an incredible amount of dance cardio in high heat."
Part of me admires her disinclination to answer the questions that always get asked of female actors. But it must be exhausting to take things so seriously and feel everything so intensely. Do her parents worry about her?
"I think as much as any parents," she replies. "I think we all worry about each other. It's such a human condition isn't it?"
Riseborough was born in Newcastle, into a family of miners and factory workers. Her father, George, was a car salesman and her mother, Isabel, a secretary and beautician. Her parents worked hard during the 80s economic boom and made enough to take Riseborough out of her local Whitley Bay state school and send her and younger sister Laura (who has just left drama school) to be privately educated. She remains close to her family – the night before we meet, Riseborough had celebrated her birthday with them. Every time she is in a foreign country and gets given a restaurant bill with a free postcard, she sends it to her mother, she tells me. "When I think about my mum, she brings me joy every day of my life just feeling that she's there," she says in a rare, unguarded moment.
As an adolescent, the shift in family circumstance made her more aware of the nuance of class – she softened her northern accent (although to this day, she has not lost it entirely) and became an obsessive watcher of people, taking in how they acted, spoke and revealed themselves. At one point, she remembers trying to imitate exactly how her little cousin Chloë drank her juice from a cup. "It was like this," Riseborough lifts a mug of tea to her lips and takes a giant, unladylike swig. "I used to think it was so cool.
"The cultural currency that move afforded me – going from a state school to a private school – made me see a flipside of the coin. Then, of course, we lost it all, a short time after that, so there were lots of different – what's the word? – different forms of survival that I experienced… I think that was very valuable."
Although her teachers thought she was destined for Oxbridge – "I mean, it's not like they came round to my house in the middle of the night and dragged me out in my pyjamas, but the advice was that because I had a talent at writing and because I had a talent as an actress that I should go" – Riseborough dropped out of school before her A-levels, claiming she was bored. Instead, she took on a series of part-time jobs (including a stint making greetings cards and singing in a band to pay the rent). She also ran a Chinese restaurant with her best friend Cyan. If she were a Chinese dish, what would she be? "Steamed white jasmine rice with some chilli sauce," she says immediately. Why? "It would be my death-row meal: the simplicity of feeding, of literally nourishing the body and soul with something that is pure, with something that is a bit disgusting on the side."
She says now that her adolescent rebellion sprang from a lust for experience, an instinctive knowledge that she needed to be out in the real world, gathering material. She is an inveterate people-watcher: "That's part of the reason I walk around a lot. I take the bus everywhere, because I need to. I mean, more than that, I enjoy it. People are fascinating. They're so unique and I think what's more fascinating is the reason behind the physical characteristic, the enigma, that's where the gold dust is."
Do guests at dinner parties treat her warily, fearful they're being analysed? She laughs. "Oh I hope not… I would hope I have a plethora of interesting things to say other than 'Why do you scratch your nose like that?' and 'Did you have a strange relationship with your uncle when you were seven?'"
These days, Riseborough is based in Boise, Idaho, where she lives with American artist Joe Appel in a bohemian haze, surrounded by other "artisans and poets". The couple do not own a television, preferring to spend their time making paintings together and reading improving literature (a copy of Joan Didion's Blue Nights pokes out from Riseborough's handbag).
She is much in demand: next year sees her appearing as an embittered news anchorwoman drawn into the murky world of internet chatrooms in Disconnect, alongside Jason Bateman and Alexander Skarsgård, and starring as a former IRA terrorist who turns informer for the British security forces in Shadow Dancer, directed by James Marsh.
Her life is, by necessity, an itinerant one. "Joe and I were apart for seven months during this [the filming of W.E. which took place in London, New York and Paris]; I was on set and totally absorbed in the making of the film. There's really so little time for anything else. My relationship and my close relationships are, I think, the thing I'm most proud of in my life and I put a lot of energy into them."
She smiles, but you sense that already her mind is eager to be on to the next thing. She has to go, in any case – she's due to record a DVD commentary for Resistance – but even as Riseborough leaves the photographic studio, her internal cogs are still whirring. A bag of food from Sainsbury's has been left behind and she is sweetly worried it will go to waste, so she takes it with her and tells the reception staff about a bottle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar still upstairs. "Will you use them?" she asks. The staff reassure her solemnly that, yes, they will henceforth dress their salads with the leftover condiments.
Relieved, Riseborough walks out to a waiting taxi. She hugs me, thanks me for "intelligent questions", and I watch her go: a pale slip of a woman in the dark night air, deep thoughts trailing behind her like exhaust fumes as the car turns out of the road.
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