The actor: It’s been almost exactly 15 years since Andrea Riseborough first appeared onscreen in a pair of British made-for-TV movies; but the actor wasted very little time before attaining international acclaim as a performer of rare depth and chameleonic shading. Her BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in the title role of Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk To Finchley soon led to roles in everything from Birdman (Or, The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) to Black Mirror. She’s moved smoothly between film and television the entire time, always bringing soulful nuance to even the smallest of roles.
When The A.V. Club chatted with her via Zoom on a recent weekend, Riseborough was promoting her new film Luxor, in which she plays a British aid worker returning to meet her ex-lover in the titular Egyptian city, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. The film production was given unprecedented access to historic locations that had never been documented onscreen, lending a breathtaking air of rarefied settings to the story. So while Riseborough was happy to hold court on everything from her complicated feelings about the Waco miniseries to starring alongside Tom Cruise in Oblivion, we wanted to kick things off by asking what it was like to film Luxor in such privileged locations.
Andrea Riseborough: It was just extraordinary—and also such a fluke, in a sense, because the whole thing came together so quickly. Zeina Durra, the writer/director, had been working on a different film. She’d been hoping it would get together, and then she had some really bad news that it wasn’t going to come through in the time that she wanted it to. And then she went to sleep and had a dream about Luxor, and about this woman walking through Luxor. And we were shooting it, I think, less than two months later.
I was in Senegal. We were finishing Zero Zero Zero, and I read Zeina’s script maybe two months before that project ended. I only had four weeks off before I was going to do Possessor in Toronto. But her script was so beautiful, I felt very sure that I was going to do it as soon as I read it. So I went from Senegal to Luxor. You know, there’s been so much conflict in Egypt, and continues to be. Yet Luxor absolutely moves to the beat of its own drum. It has a sort of timelessness, and it houses so many relics of how ancient civilization expressed virtuality, that it just seems timeless. I think—also in our industry, you know, sadly, we’ve been very responsible for quite a few plastic-y looking sets, which are supposed to be Egypt. [Laughs.] Under the sort of western world gaze without any real understanding of what that is. And so it’s so strange to watch a film that’s set in Egypt, in Luxor, being shot in Luxor.
And a lot of what was happening was very quiet and underground in tombs that that tourists hadn’t yet seen, but archeologists might have, and certainly cameras hadn’t been inside of. We had to be incredibly careful. Those moments were very precious. It was a deeply moving experience. And it was a real balancing act. It was about trying to maintain the solace and peace that was already there inside of those locations, and preserve them. And move very quickly. And work with no light source, or work with our light sources, which because we were underground in a tomb, were often failing us. It felt like guerrilla filmmaking. You know?
AVC: Was your very first onscreen role A Very Social Secretary from 2005?
AR: You’re very close. I think it was Whatever Love Means was my first television appearance.
AVC: It seemed like that one of those TV movies might have been filmed first, but Secretary aired first.
AR: Oh, did it? Right. I remember I was still in with my third year at RADA [Royal Academy Of Dramatic Art], which is where I trained. So I flew to Ireland, and they slipped something under my door the night before we were going to shoot, which now I realize was a call sheet. I had absolutely no idea what the fuck it was or what it meant. And, you know, especially in drama school, so much attention is given to the preservation of that precious time when you develop the character and all the ways that, even though you’ve got to film it non-sequentially, you’re going to get around it. You’re going to have an experience as if you were always working with Mike Leigh. And you really go out there bolstered with this ideal. I think I must have spent 45 minutes just figuring out the call sheet, and then went to sleep. And at the end of it, I had realized that I have to be there tomorrow at a certain time. And I had no idea which of the scenes we were filming. I mean, it’s pathetic. Really pathetic. It’s not a very hard thing to work out. I think I was very nervous. [Laughs.]
It felt strangely familiar, the first time that I was being paid to be on-camera. I had done film before that, but it was never professional. It was student films and stuff like that in Newcastle. But it felt very strange and special and also kind of off-the-cuff. I was halfway through, and the director asked me not to be Scottish, but to be English.
So I did. So that was interesting. And I enjoyed it very much. It all seemed very showy compared to theatre. Funny, I know that sounds ridiculous and ironic.
AVC: Venus is your first feature film; you were credited as “Period Film Lover.”
AR: [Laughs.] Does that mean I’m a lover of period film? Or I’m a lover in a period film. [Laughs.] What it means is I’m a lover in a period film. A film-within-a-film. I was still at RADA, and I remember having half of a morning off to go and do this audition. And so, went in, sat down with Roger [Michell, director], played the scene which basically is my character bursting into tears. He said, “Well, that was great.” And then I left. That really was the entirety of my role. And he was so sweet when I got there on set. He gave me so much space and so much time, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is just like working in the theatre almost, working with Roger,” who obviously is a fantastic theatre director as well. And I remember thinking Peter O’Toole was surprisingly flirtatious, given his age. It was almost like a sort of 28-year-old cad trapped in an older man’s body. [Laughs.] To everyone. Nobody came out unscathed. And it wasn’t in a creepy way. It was in a Peter O’Toole way.
AR: From the moment that I walked in to read for the part, it felt significant. Because I was walking in to read with, you know, Mike Leigh actors. I was thinking, “This is never going to happen.” I was also ten years younger than everybody else. Which was right for the character, because it was a very young Margaret Thatcher.
The preparation for that was really extraordinary. I went up to Grantham a lot, which was her hometown. I sat in her bedroom, which is ironically—I mean, in my opinion—was then a massage parlor. And stood in the shop that Alf, the father, had. Looked out at the Catholic girls school across the road where everybody had better clothes and more lipstick and went out on dates with boys after school. So that statue of Newton—Newton’s the apple, right?
AVC: Yep, he’s the apple guy.
AR: Great. [Laughs.] You can tell I’m a science major. But, you know, that’s what Margaret was. She studied and worked in chemistry. And she’s having all sorts of bonkers jobs like fluffing ice cream—you know, trying to figure out a better recipe for soft serve. That was partly what she did for a while. But I was almost thrown out of the school because—I should have asked, obviously. It was this all-girls school, and I just kind of walked in, because there was a parents day. And walked around the halls and did a lot of work. It was really fantastic. But then, on the way out, was pretty much chased out by somebody who realized that I was just wandering around in there, and I wasn’t a parent. Because I didn’t check any of the age boxes; I was neither child nor parent. And I was presumably dressed like a really irritating actress, and was clearly from London, not from Grantham.
Also, it was really interesting to play somebody politically so far away from anything that I’d ever personally aspired to. Very early on… and I’m sorry to specify the demographic here, but I figured out that it was a really bad idea to bring up the reality that I was playing Margaret Thatcher to drunk white men in sort of dinner conversation or—not that I ever really had dinner conversation. That wasn’t my life. But if I was at something for work, if I was at a sort of awards thing or—let’s just say peoples’ opinions of Thatcher are not normally malleable.
And in order to play her, putting aside my own judgement—and I had so much of it, I could never forgive her for what she did in Northern Ireland, you know, there are so many atrocities—and then trying to play this young woman attempting to find her footing in the world. I realized very early on I was going to have to shut that noise out. What was very helpful was talking to people who worked with her. Because not only did they have the same sort of completely inflexible opinions [Laughs.], but they really experienced her. So then it was easier to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of who she really was underneath. And, you know, and I read many doorstops of fiction about her, which are so far from fact. [Laughs.] It was an entirely immersive experience.
AR: It was a very unusual experience. Panos Cosmatos, the writer/director who everybody knows now, which is fantastic, had made his first film, Beyond The Black Rainbow. There is some sort of folklore tale that only Cronenberg sat through it at the Tribeca Film Festival, or wherever it was—that there were only a few people who could quite take where he was trying to go. And I watched images from that first film, and was so struck by his vision. And also his lack of care for anything that had gone before. I don’t mean that in a blasé way; I think he’s looking to do what those innovators before him had done when they had thrown away the rule book.
So the script was… unusual. When it first came to us, it sort of read—not to me, but to the people who represent me—a little like horror or something like that. You know, “This doesn’t seem like it’s going to be for you,” was the sort of message coming from many angles. I watched his first film, and I was just so excited to know what this was going to be like. This film is about him coping with the grief of losing his parents. And only speaking to him, could you perhaps be let in on that. He’s so gentle and kind, and the film is extremely violent. And it really is an expression of what he was feeling inside, the helplessness and hopelessness he was feeling inside. And the vengefulness, as well.
And it’s funny, because I haven’t seen Mandy. This is not a secret. I told Panos that—because I hadn’t seen his first film in its entirety, because it was so terrifying. I said to him when I met him, “I really love your work, and I couldn’t watch it all in one go.” And he said, “That’s a huge compliment.” [Laughs.] I said, “And if we do this together, there’s a very good chance I may not be able to watch this, because I’ll be too scared.” I’m not a sort of viewer who is able to… it’s not very easy for me to detach, you know? I think if I were to watch Mandy, I would then be inside of it for the next three weeks and not able to sort of mentally get out of it. Of course, I have seen many bits of it; I saw the monitor, and I have a very clear idea of what we created.
AVC: Whenever we’ve done a Random Roles with somebody who has done a film with Nicolas Cage, there’s almost always an unexpected story, because he’s such an idiosyncratic guy. Did you have any memorable moments with him while you guys were filming?
AR: An idiosyncratic moment? God, probably all of the moments. I think it’s very odd to be in the presence of that kind of trailblazer, really. He’s a sort of trailblazer as an actor, isn’t he? He does what other actors don’t dare to do. There’s sort of no limits. He just imagines it and does it. So I think the entire experience was one of idiosyncrasy. [Laughs.] Yeah. He’s so wonderful and so very quiet. I’m very quiet when I work. Because you go through so much, creating a character and staying inside of it and popping in and out of it all the time is so hard. And so we would often just sit next to each other in our foldout chairs in complete silence. You know, which worked for both of us very well, I think. [Laughs.] And then go on and do it.
But I loved creating Mandy, because… really, she was too good for this world, whatever that means. The other thing is, when I met Panos’ wife, who is called Andrea and has long, black hair. Strangely. And is just wonderful and brilliant. Has a brilliant mind and is very beautiful. I also realized, in part, I was playing her. But it’s—you know—hugely controversial, this idea that a woman has to be dead to be beatified. Or dead to have peace. It’s dark. It’s something that I felt was worth looking at. I could talk about it for a very long time, but I liked playing Mandy a lot.
AR: Laura was probably one of the characters that was furthest away from me. She was one of those characters that almost I had to begin on the outside. I don’t mean aesthetically, I mean physically: begin on the outside in order to get inside. I think she represented, especially at that time, this real pivotal moment we were in, where craft and having an apprenticeship—learning very deeply how to do something with excellence, whatever that was, whether it was singing, science, food. We were at a time when suddenly all of the people who became noteworthy in most arenas were ones who were almost all reality television stars. At the same time, people started to enter our industry. And there were some fantastic actors and singers who come in that way, but… I think Laura represented that strange intersection. You know, this actress who really was pretty fame hungry, and would have much preferred, I think, to have Angelina Jolie’s life than to be in a play based on Raymond Carver’s works at the Kings Theatre. Which, to many, many actors, would be the pinnacle of their career.
And when I met Alejandro [Iñárritu]—I put something on tape for him, and then he wanted to meet me. And so I met him on a corner, and he came up on his moped or his bike, some sort of two-wheeled vehicle in Santa Monica. And we had this cup of coffee on a corner, and he said, very nicely, “I need somebody like you to play this role for it to make sense.” Which, as complimentary as it was, was also probably the worst way anyone has ever sold me a role. [Laughs.] But I also said to him that I would walk over hot coals to—I would have come on and said a line in one of his films. I couldn’t have loved him more as a filmmaker. So it was really fun playing Laura. And also quite sad. I mean, I know it’s funny on the outside, but on the inside, for Laura, it was quite sad. [Laughs.] She spent quite a lot of time melancholy.
AVC: Most good comedies have quite a bit of tragedy underneath them.
AR: Certainly. And if you want to have a terrible evening, go to dinner with a bunch of comedians. [Laughs.] You’ll find real pain.
AVC: In a film like that where there’s so many moving parts and these long takes, did it ironically end up feeling more like a stage play in some ways, or some sort of odd hybrid?
AR: There’s so many familiar yet unfamiliar things that were going on when we were filming Birdman, apart from the fact that we all walked into Chivo [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s nickname] maybe 20 times each, because the shots that we were setting up were so complex and so long. And our entire call sheet for the day would be one one shot. We’d have eight scenes in the one shot. Apart from the technicalities of it all, it felt so familiar being in a theater. We were shooting on-location for some of it and on a soundstage in New Jersey for another part of it. But I felt very much at home, because I was in a theater. And I was playing one of the only characters who wasn’t really familiar with or invested in the theatre. Yet I was surrounded by a cast of people who had never been in the theatre. Other than, of course, Ed [Norton]. And then… Emma [Stone] went on to do something onstage when she wasn’t playing an actor in Birdman.
AVC: That seems like a good place to jump Battle Of The Sexes, where you play Marilyn Barnett opposite Emma Stone.
AR: Yes, which was such a lovely experience. There was this piece of Philip Glass music that Jon [Dayton] and Val [Faris], the directors, very early on had played me. And in this quite long piece of music, there’s this one sound, which is a flute. And they explained to me that Marilyn, in our interpretation of Billie Jean’s life, Marilyn was that flute. She brought the sort of freedom and lightness to the piece. The possibility of sexual freedom. She represented sexual liberation. She very much represented the time that the film is set in. The positive parts of it. The sad part is that the real Marilyn actually did end up committing suicide. Which brings me slightly back to the idea that she was perhaps a little too bright for this world. If there’s any kind of through line, as free-spirited as she was, there wasn’t somewhere she could really fit in.
It’s the scintillating moments of first falling in love. So it was such a fantastic thing to shoot, because obviously Emma and I are friends—you just want something natural and easy. And it was such a strange thing, as well: To have love scenes with another woman who is a friend was almost a revolutionary experience for me, in terms of my experience with love scenes on camera before or onstage. I wasn’t faced with a stranger. It felt like there was a trust and a complicity. You know, it’s not like every time you’re faced with a stranger, but often, in a storyline, if you think about it in films, there may be one scene where the character one night sleeps with someone. And that person you haven’t actually met until the day that the scene is then filmed.
So filming that love story felt really intimate and gentle and exciting and beautiful. Making that film was one of the experiences I really treasure. And it was wonderful to play the joy. It was wonderful to be the custodian of joy in that film, the custodian of joy and freedom.
AR: Originally, Mia was a man. That’s happened with a lot of characters I’ve played. I’ve been drawn often to those characters, not quite realized why, and then realized later they’d been renamed as a woman to just sort of bump up the woman-quota in the script. That had happened a lot. But the difference here was, I read this script, and I was originally offered Kiran [Sonia Sawar]’s part. And she’s a fine, fine actor. I loved working with her so much. But I really responded to Mia—I mean, to the male role. So I spoke to John [Hillcoat, director] and asked if he thought Charlie and Annabel [Brooker and Jones, executive producers] might even consider not only her being her, but a woman then facing off with another woman. That felt like a really interesting dynamic that is much less often seen. And they supported it. And so, slightly tweaked it and rewrote it, but for the most part, it was very similar. I think what I identified with in that character was wanting to preserve one’s family dignity, maintain an appearance of really buoyancy and success at all costs, and how far that could take a person, the preservation of that.
There were lots of conversations about that in the beginning. Would people sympathize with a woman who does what Mia does? To which my response was, “Well, if we don’t see a woman do that often, then that’s why we should do it.”
Because women kill all the time. And are life-givers, and preservers, and takers. So wouldn’t that be fascinating to explore the psychology of that?
So I felt like it was kismet, in a sense. Everything really came together on that project in a way that I think nobody had expected, because that’s not what they’ve written. [Laughs.] I asked to play a different part. And then, of course, Kiran ended up playing the part that I was offered [Shazia], which she was so much better at than I could have been. She was so perfect for that part. And it was really a hard role for her to go through; we were in Iceland in a deserted shack, and she’s really being tortured, essentially. And it was very taxing, and I felt very protective of her, actually—over how many times she could do that, and how many times we could go through it. But she’s a wonderful actor.
AVC: Talk about jumping into the world of big budget movie making.
AR: It was very familiar in some ways and strange in others. The sort of massive scale of it was actually quite familiar, strangely. Because in the U.K., the way that the industry works—especially in television—is that there’s a huge amount of money. They put a huge amount of money into television. So I was very used to 200 extras and chaos, you know. I think the difference with Oblivion, and what Claudio [Miranda, cinematographer] did so brilliantly visually, was that my character and Tom [Cruise]’s character’s house was surrounded by this huge 360 screen in the studio, which was a sort of technological feat in and of itself. And that screen projected sunsets and sunrises and different points of light in the day that they’ve already shot in Iceland. So it was a disconcerting experience, in the sense that you’d sometimes be doing a breakfast scene at 7 p.m., and your body was really responding to what was happening on the screen, because it was so accurate.
Sometimes the screen would falter, and you’d get a computer screen. [Laughs.] Like all around the studio, you know? Saying, like, “EXIT” or “HOLD” or tabs would come up. It was the weirdest thing. That was something that was just completely extraordinary. The amount of money that was spent on it, sometimes the wastefulness of it was mind-boggling. In terms of what the art department do, they’re so incredible. And they’re making things from scratch. And then you see them maybe once, fleetingly. You could almost make a hundred movies out of the work that was done on that one movie, artistically. They would all be different things. And I really, really enjoyed working with Tom. That was such a brilliant experience. So much fun. We laughed so much—which was good, because Vika and Jack’s relationship was rocky. [Laughs.]
But I think the thing I didn’t enjoy about it… was more on the studio side, the pressure to look a certain way. And I was never sure where it was coming from, but that was very important to people, how the women looked. That the women sort of looked attractive at all times. Because that was still then an unashamed selling point. And I don’t think—I mean, I’m a reasonably symmetrical person, but I don’t think I am that actor. For me, the take that is always best is the one that where I don’t know what’s happening. Certainly not that I’m standing in the right way so that my ass looks good at this angle. Like, “Oh, that was a really good ass take.” I don’t really have the capacity to hold all of those things at once. Not in a way that I really like to work. And so I find that just detracted from… it just took up a lot of space and time.
AVC: This seems like the kind of location shoot that forces you into almost a sort of makeshift family for the duration of the project.
AR: Yes. It certainly did. I loved working with the women on that project. I always love working with Michael Shannon, who I’ve done a few things with, but we’ve never actually met onscreen, frustratingly. And Taylor [Kitsch] was great. He was such a fantastic [David] Koresh. That was a tricky project for me, because [they] had reached out to say, “Judy Schneider is the beating heart of this. Please, you must play her, nobody else could”—read an email like that always with a pinch of salt, you know, pretty sure some other people could play it—but that’s very nice. And I was really interested in that story, because the majority of people who are in that compound, in that family, the one that you’re talking about, were women, and mainly not white.
I certainly felt this at the time, but I also feel comfortable saying this looking back on it—I just perhaps wish we hadn’t explored that story through the perspective of two white men when there were so many other people really involved in that story. Because these people had come from all over the world, and from different backgrounds. Some were recovering drug addicts; some had flown halfway around the world to be there. Single moms. Like, there was so much meat in it. And, when you commit to a project like this—I committed to it knowing only the first episode, really—the rest of it hadn’t quite been written. And I was playing a woman who was older than myself. I very much wanted to honor playing who she was and playing it the way that she was. I just… I was a little disappointed walking away from that experience. I felt like I did a lot of free childcare. You know, I was completely aware that the project wasn’t called Judy Schneider. [Laughs.] I had no sort of crazy expectations in that way. But there were so many fantastic women in it, and there were so many different characters in there that I feel like we could have heard a bit more from.
I remember when we were doing a press conference for that one, and they asked Michael a question. Then, they asked Taylor a question. And then there was sort of me, Melissa [Benoist], and Julia [Garner] sitting together as sort of—holding the female camp together. Not that it should have been that way at all, but that’s how it kind of felt. And then they said, “And for the women: how do you feel being involved in this?” Look, that was their perspective on the story. And that’s completely understandable; that’s the way they wanted to tell it. And it’s really interesting to get inside the mind of characters like David Koresh. I think I just perhaps hoped it would delve a little deeper. Because I feel like we’ve explored Koresh and many like him a lot. And that’s where I fell down, is in hoping that something might evolve into something that it didn’t ever promise to be.
AVC: Is there a role that you wish people would ask about, or a project that hasn’t gotten the love that you wish it would?
AR: Well, I suppose Nancy. But that’s because—you know, I mean, it’s for many, many reasons. I think [writer-director] Christina Choe is extraordinary, but it’s also because my company produced that film. We developed it for five years, and it was very dear to me.
I notice I often talk about it more with women than men. And I’m not sure how that happened. [Laughs.] I’m not sure how Samuel Goldwyn and all of us only got to these people. But I would love for more of the world to see Nancy. It had a good reception. We had a really great time with it. It was a huge privilege and pleasure to produce that with Barbara Broccoli, who has been somebody in my life I consider a mentor in many ways, because she’s extended such a kind arm to so many young women in the industry, and continues to do so. And it’s really something; more people should know just how much she does.
49 Comments
The word ‘chameleonic’ tends to be overused regarding actors – but Andrea Riseborough truly is. It’s astonishing to me how different she looks in every movie.And I agree with her about ‘Nancy’ – I wish that had gotten more press. It was really good (and Riseborough was heartbreaking in it).
man, she has had some WILD looks in her recent films. it seems like she relishes that, which is cool. willing to go the extra mile for the character and performanceshe’s been insanely prolific recently, too. there was a Sundance a couple years back where i think she was in like 5 movies playing at the festival
My favorite look of hers was what she did for “Nocturnal Animals”. It could have been a blink-and-you-miss-it role, but of course Riseborough made it so much more.Just seeing her ‘look’ in it, you instantly knew the sort of actress she was portraying in the movie.
who did she play? i only remember being bored to death while watching it and wondering why Amy Adams would be in such a terrible movie, especially a month after being great in a completely great movie the month before.
Interesting. I actually enjoyed the movie.Riseborough is right at the start of the film. She plays the actress Amy Adams converses with at the dinner party. She discusses being married to Michael Sheen’s character (whose an out gay man).
I wish Death of Stalin had come up here, because I’d love to know how she approached that material/being part of that ensemble from a tonal perspective.
It remains staggering what an absolute murderers row of talent were in that wonderful movie.
It also reunited her with her Oblivion co-star Olga Kurylenko.
Was she Stalin’s daughter?
Yep
“I mean, I’m a reasonably symmetrical person”Heh, love her even more now. Some really interesting takes on what one hopes a project might be compared to what one ends up with.
That line is such a delightfully British piece of self-deprecation.
Never heard of her.
Actors love to complain about their easy job.And she was badly miscast in Oblivion.
Anyone that hasn’t – run, don’t walk, to watch her as the lead in The Devil’s Whore, four part miniseries set around the English Civil War.She’s breathtaking in it – the whole cast is ridiculously good (John Simm, Tom Goodman Hill, Maxine Peake – Michael Fassbender as Thomas Rainsborough, Dominic West as Cromwell, Peter Capaldi as Charles I.) It’s a hell of show (and not a bad introduction to the politics, including the religious side, that went on around then.)
It’s just a hell of a show – she’s radient in it.
You can get it on 4oD for free in the UK (or presumably, through ways and means and vpns outside).
I got a Mandy tiger shirt for Christmas and I can’t wait to wear it somewhere where someone might actually know what it’s all about.
I want one! Where did you get it?
https://shop.legionm.com/collections/mandy-merch
Thanks!
“he came up on his moped or his bike, some sort of two-wheeled vehicle in Santa Monica.” I enjoyed reading that in her voice.
I know people always come to Random Roles comment sections posting “why didn’t you ask about [movie/show]?”, but it seems weird there was nothing about Possessor except for a passing mention in Luxor.Something on Death of Stalin would have been nice too.
“We should probably have tea, and buns…soak up the vodka…”She was a fantastic character in that.
“And I really, really enjoyed working with Tom. That was such a brilliant experience. So much fun. We laughed so much”And the A.V. Club winces and recoils.
Most people who have worked with him have good opinions of him. The facts that he is in a cult and may be in denial about his sexual orientation doesn’t change the fact that he’s quite personable.
Agreed 100%. One reason I’d never be hired to write for the A.V. Club…
I’ve never worked with him, but he came to our city to do reshoots on a MI and many many friends I have did work with him. He learned everyone’s names, said hello to everyone in the morning, and was happy to take pics with everyone. He was, according to my colleagues, a great, hardworking guy. Whether he’s in a cult or not (he is), doesn’t affect how he is with people.
My cousin does costume design and worked with him on a film. Said you couldn’t find a nicer guy. I was just teasing the AV Club writers.
And I fully support tweaking the second-year-college-activism of the modren crop of AVClub writers from time to time.
She seems really cool. And I love that she’s starred in two of the most bonkers genre movies of the last couple years, Mandy and Possessor.
Her ass looked good in Oblivion, so congrats.
I wish you had spoken to her about “W.E.” I recall listening to her interview on the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo show and finding her arguments about the film’s romantic portrayal about Edward and Simpson to be … disquieting. Riseborough: Bertie was far less politically active. Bertie was not groomed to be king.Mayo: But the political wisdom, as portrayed in “The Kings Speech”, is that we got the right king in the end. Riseborough: And. And.Mayo: What we got was a committed king, devoted to his country and to his family and to a sense of duty. And the king that we missed out on, thank heavens, was the Nazi sympathizer who had no sense of duty.Riseborough: And that’s the thing that’s hard to be faced with …Mayo: Is that not true?Riseborough: that they weren’t Nazi sympathizers. That she hadn’t learned strange sex acts in Shanghai.Mayo: I hadn’t got to that yet.Riseborough: Oh, yes. There’s lots more. That she wasn’t a man. That she wasn’t a hermaphrodite. That she wasn’t a temptress. Or manipulator. That she wasn’t a witch. Once they had been fed to you, and they had in an extraordinary propaganda campaign, them it is hard to backtrack that they convened with Hitler.Mayo: So all the evidence that the Duke of Windsor said positive comments about Hitler, all that’s made up?Riseborough: No. That’s not made up at all. It’s at a time when a lot of people made positive comments about Hitler’s so-called socialist reform. Of course there was less unemployment. He was destroying half his population. Look, it is true that many in the establishment were complimentary about Germany but few of those people actually visited concentration camps and met with Hess, Goebbels, Goring, Speer and Hitler. His family were disgusted, then-supporters like Churchill tried to persuade them from going and Speer said that Hitler was certain that “through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different.” Isn’t that bad enough?The notion that the world has been “sold a lie” is an incredibly disingenuous thing to say and sounds suspiciously to me like #fakenews.
Riseborough played Annie in the original pilot of Being Human (a pretty well regarded British TV series from the late 2000s/early 2010s). She was insanely good in it, so much so that I was pretty disappointed when she was replaced by Lenora Crichlow (who then turned out to be excellent as well, and a very different concept of the character). For some reason I always think of that role whenever I see her name pop up.
Watching the original Pilot is odd , especially nearly ever actor was replaced, and seeing a non Aiden Turner (Guy Flanagan)as Mitchell is kind of weird. .Oddly enough Dominique McElliot (The Boys Queen Maeve) was the original Lauren.
Fantastic interview! It’s nice to see Random Roles popping up more frequently. She’s an amazing actor and a magnificent interview.
It would have been pretty nerdy to ask her “Were you and Tom (Cruise) an effective team?”, but I don’t think I would have been able to resist…
This was a great article about her character in Oblivion.https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/oblivions-vika-the-most-tragic-film-character-of-the-year/Who really deserved better.
I always felt that scene at the end, where Freeman and Cruise defiantly blow up the enemy, should have been Jack and Vika, the Adam and Eve of this new world, defying their torturer God. It’s even worse when we see that Jack 52 recovers his memories and gets to have a life, while Vika just fades from the narrative. I mean she was just as much a victim as Jack, just as much a secret slave, even if she was happy in her servitude, at least until the the illusion of their love was inevitably pulled away. (Which is actually a kind of hell. To be constantly given your dream with the person you want so badly, only to always know they don’t really want you, and you’re the only two people in existence? Fuck, that’s cruel.)Freeman’s character didn’t have a relationship to the thing he destroyed, other than as a distant enemy. Vika being there would have meant something, it would have been growth (Jack in all incarnations was a fighter and one to push against the boundaries, Vika was not, by having her their as an act of defiance it would have said something about us not just fitting our roles, that we have a choice in who we are).
I thought there’s a strong argument about the film really being about a woman who’s desperately in love with a man and the man who’s oblivious about this (sorry not sorry) because he’s in love with someone else. That awkwardly tense dinner where Olga Kurylenko’s character starts laughing hysterically at the sight of Jack and Vika holding hands maybe indicated that she had some idea what was going on even if it was unrequited and in one direction. That comic really does sum up that Tom’s character was just a bit of a horse’s ass about the situation even after (especially after) finding out. The HISHE version actually did cover that pretty well, plus the fact there is multiple copies of both of them all over the world. Ending is especially appropriate.
True, between that and the fact that apparently Jack was the literal face of the apocalypse, and now makes up a significant part of the world’s population…things are gonna be awkward for a while. Lot’s left unexplored on that front.“I thought there’s a strong argument about the film really being about a woman who’s desperately in love with a man and the man who’s oblivious about this (sorry not sorry) because he’s in love with someone else.” First, no apology necessary, I almost spat out my drink. Second, dead on, (I actually forgot about that scene.) which makes me wish the movie was just more of that, and less actiony. I’m way more curious about that aspect of things, than about blowing up angry space bots.
I really enjoy her as an actor, so this was pleasing to read. I’m glad she enjoyed her work on Mandy so much, as I found it pretty subversive and interesting despite (and because of) the violence, but also because it has heavy deep-acid-trip dark-fantasy vibes.I also thought she was great in Oblivion (which I think is an underrated film, especially visually), and so I’m sorry she had some negative experiences with the studio with that.I’ll be checking out the projects here that I’m not familiar with. Especially Nancy. Good or bad, I am always fascinated by a creative’s personal project, but given her talent and personality, I think I’ll probably really enjoy it.
the three highlights of Oblivion were Andrea Riseborough’s naked butt, Olga Kurlyenko’s hotness, and when it ended. I understand that being used or exploited sexually can be uncomfortable for actors but that movie was boring garbage. At the very least Riseborough made a valuable contact in Tom Cruise. Birdman is a great movie. it must have been so fun to make. When people think of Waco they think of David Koresh and the fire that killed the residents. any story of that incident IS going to focus on that. Although prior to reading this interview i had assumed almost all of the Branch Davidians were white. Now that I learned otherwise i will do some research into the people who died. (It was also shocking to me when i learned, fairly recently, that most of Jim Jones’ followers were black, or not white. So maybe those stories do need to be told.)
So much missing the point in one paragraph
Which one? The Birdman one? I bet it’s the Birdman one.
Weird not to ask about Death of Stalin or Possessor or the Madonna film. I do admire her commitment to each role, it is a rather theater-y thing. Btw, if you are ever anywhere you shouldn’t be and you are a student, flash your student ID card. I got into so many places in NYC you wouldn’t imagine just saying I was doing research for a thesis, never had to say on what. Oblivion is an okay time-waster, surprisingly long, only noteworthy as a waste to some extent of everybody in it and who worked on it (especially M83). I’m not sure I saw the potential for greatness in it, so shrug, but the original screenwriter thought it was going to be a classic before it was rewritten…it definitely has the feel of something altered so international audiences understand it more and so that it is paradoxically less coherent. Possessor really had a shot, but failed to tie it all together in the end in a way, disappointing because one or two lines could have fixed the whole thing.
My favorite was Death of Stalin.
Loved Possessor. Would have enjoyed hearing her talk about that one. And I figure that if Mandy would be too scary for her to watch, Possessor would probably fall into the same category. Just a guess.
I’m not surprised you didn’t ask about seasons 2 and 3 of Bloodline, because they’re terrible, but she is very good in them (as is the rest of that overqualified cast). And no offense to Olga Kurylenko, but as I watched Oblivion, I kept wishing Andrea were the lead actress instead. Very cool that it was her own idea to make her Black Mirror character a woman.
I’m sure I read somewhere that at one point they might have been up for the opposite roles.Might even have been in here once.https://collider.com/andrea-riseborough-olga-kurylenko-oblivion-interview/
A perfet candidate for Random Roles. She’s so young and has such a damn diverse set of roles on her resumé. Incredible actress.