It was a combination, also, of the special effects working so beautifully. It’s like a dance, isn’t it, with things like that — let me say that the planets were aligned, and everything worked. Acting, tick! Special effects, tick! Camera, tick! Sound, tick! Weather, tick! [Laughs.] It was all good in that moment. That’s what I like to think, anyway.
You’ve worked with so many of the greats: Spielberg, Lynne Ramsay, Spike Jonze. But the way you’ve described working with Nolan makes it sound extra special — you’ve repeatedly called it a “pinch me” moment.
I think that when I worked with Spielberg, I was very young. And it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate it, but I was there to do a job, and there to do a job to the best of my ability. And I suppose Lynne Ramsay is a very dear friend, and so we’ve been on a filmmaking journey together. Darren Aronofsky, Spike, Harmony Korine… These are extraordinary filmmakers. And everybody has a musical note, if you like. With filmmaking, everybody is so different. And they all possess something incredibly different.
Emma and Chris, as producers, Chris as a writer and director, they set the tone of behaviour. They set the tone of compassion. They set the tone of commitment. And the film seems to be bigger than any one individual. Sometimes, when you work with other filmmakers, there might be a movie star on that film who’s the star, and it’s about them, and facilitating their day, and whatever they need. There might be a job that I’ve been on where the director has an extraordinary ego. I think Chris and Emma are rarer than rare in the history of cinema, and I can’t condense it in enough words.
I’ve seen the word “villain” used a lot for Circe, but that seems to be a bit of an oversimplification.
Well, it’s all down to narrative, isn’t it, and how things are edited. I did a TV show called The Walking Dead for some years, and I played the main villain — I say villain in loose terms, because ultimately, I played a woman [Alpha] who had been sexually assaulted and beaten by her husband. Then the end of the world hit, and she was full of trauma, and that trauma had made her pretty tough. We went through the show where she was this bad, bad person who did what she did, but the whole thing was that the “goodies” in the show had attacked her crew first, so it was retaliation.
But the way the show was edited and cut was that when you saw Alpha’s backstory, people were blown away. They were like, “Oh my gosh,” and they cared about her then, but it was just narrative. So I think with Circe, my interpretation is that she’s every woman. And this is the kind of goddess, witchcraft element of it; you’ve gotta remember, back in the day, midwives were considered witches, and they were burned at the stake. Society has always vilified women. It has been that way since time immemorial. That’s what we’re dealing with. So my version of Circe, I would say, is that she’s everybody’s daughter, everybody’s wife, everybody’s lover, everybody’s mother, grandmother. And I tried to encapsulate the all-woman of her.
