Emma Thompson’s new TV role in Years and Years sees her become an ‘absolute monster’
British actor Emma Thompson issues a warning with her new chillingly prophetic drama, which sees her take on a political role that’s stunned her fans.
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Ask Emma Thompson to describe her latest TV incarnation and she’s less than flattering.
Playing a potty-mouthed entrepreneur, turned independent MP, Thompson is brutal in her assessment of Vivienne Rook — part rent-a-racist, Katie Hopkins meets Pauline Hanson — who drives much of the terrifying political tension in new UK drama series, Years And Years.
‘I had to try to make her as funny, self-deprecating and as charming as possible because we need to understand why people vote for her,” she tells News Corp.
“But she turns into an absolute monster.”
Indeed, Rook is embraced by the British masses — fatigued by the battle over Brexit, and fearful of their future — when she seemingly slips up on a political panel show, a la Q&A, and tells the audience bluntly that she doesn't “give a f*ck” about the debate of the day; but rather appeals to grassroots votes on issues like parking, bin collection and litter.
It’s all very anti-Establishment and makes a shiny new media star of Rook, or Viv as they come to call her.
When she creates her own her Four Letter Party in a real push for power, her more sinister agenda is eventually revealed.
At one point, she campaigns that the right to vote should only be extended to those with an IQ over 70 (Hitler-esque in its savage simplicity).
What is clever about this series, written by Dr Who’s Russell T Davies, is its ability to marry contemporary headlines, populist politics and where this all ends — a dystopian future; time-travelling through 15 years in the space of just one episode.
Central to the story is three generations of the working class Lyons family, based in Manchester, all plagued by issues of their time.
Siblings Stephen, Daniel and Rosie all start out liking the sound of Rook, but by episode’s end, housing officer Daniel — at the coalface of the refugee crisis — despises her.
He marries his partner, Ralph, a schoolteacher, but finds love with an attractive Ukrainian migrant, Viktor.
Stephen and his accountant wife Celeste live in London with their two daughters; while single mum Rosie, born with spina bifida and confined to a wheelchair, struggles to juggle her two sons, and any semblance of a sex life with her humour in tact.
They are all guilt-tripped by their grandmother, Muriel (Last Tango in Halifax favourite, Anne Reid), as well as a fourth sibling, activist Edith, who makes irregular appearances over Skype from whatever international crisis point she finds herself in.
When the Chinese drop a nuclear bomb on a disputed island in the Pacific, the sirens which last screamed their warnings to Britons in World War II, are fired up again, sending the Lyons family scurrying in various directions and different degrees of personal chaos.
Thompson likens the broken world penned by Davies to George Orwell, “in which he’s imagined the future of our relationship with AI [artificial intelligence] and has so many shades of all the best science fiction writing.”
Davies recently revealed to Variety that he drew inspiration for Rook from current British PM Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Brexit villain, Nigel Farage.
“[Johnson] spent many years appearing on panel shows on television, on comedy shows, and saying outrageous things to get a laugh. There’s Nigel Farage over here, too. The truth about Vivienne Rook, though, is we could all point to Trump or we could all point to Boris Johnson, but actually, and the point of this gets revealed in the last episode, is she’s all of us. When too many of us reach for that hostile decision, that simple racism, that simple exclusion of the other, that cheap line that’s who we become,” he warns.
“It’s not giving too much away to say in the last episode has a monologue where she sits down the entire family and says, “It’s your fault. It’s the fault of every single person around this table. We did it. We made the world.” And you can’t blame history, you can’t blame the weather, it’s us,” he says.
Thompson flags the error of their ways: “In the beginning, many members of the Lyons family think [Vivienne] is great. They think that somehow there’s decency and humanity there when actually it’s a will to power and someone who clearly has no moral fibre whatsoever … it’s terrifying.”
It was his writing that first attracted the BAFTA, Oscar and Golden Globe-winning actor to the six-part HBO series, which enjoyed booming ratings in the UK when it aired there earlier this year.
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“What’s clever about Vivienne, in terms of Russel’s creation of this creature is that she presents as a down-to-earth, ordinary working woman who just wants the best for everybody and feels passionately about ordinary people and ordinary issues,” Thompson says.
“Of course, she’s not that at all, but rather something a great deal more sinister and is someone who wants power.”
It’s the writing she says that is “absolutely wonderful, extraordinarily brilliant and chilling. The tension of it ratchets up slowly and then suddenly these terrible things start to happen,” Thompson teases “and you can see how everybody got there and how difficult it is to stop once the genie’s been let out.”
While the world of this series is a bleak one, its star is confident the takeaway message is a lot more optimistic.
“There’s always hope because it’s about human beings and so whenever we go into a dark era, we know that the only way is to get better and it will get better. I hope it will really provoke a debate because it’s a discussion that we need now.”
By way of warning, Thompson blasts the media for giving characters like hers the oxygen they need to breathe.
“If you give that kind of rhetoric airtime it proliferates because people find it a lot easier to hate and discriminate than they do to include and to feel compassion and empathy about people who aren’t directly related to them. It’s easy to scare people into feeling loathing and we’ve seen it happen again and again.”
Over years and years, you might say.
* Years And Years, 8.30pm, Wednesday, SBS