How do you direct an Oscar-winning actor? There’s just one trick...

Olivia Colman walks past me as she heads down a hallway on one of the upper floors of the InterContinental Hotel in Sydney. She’s off for a quick cup of tea before our interview.

“Sorry!” she calls over her shoulder before disappearing into another room.

And that, apparently, is the key to directing the Oscar-winning actress, star of everything from The Crown to Wonka, The Lost Daughter, The Favourite, The Night Manager and her early days on Peep Show.

“What she needs quite a lot of is cups of tea,” confirms Thea Sharrock, director of Colman’s latest film Wicked Little Letters, which covers the sweary real-life poison pen scandal that rocked an English village in the 1920s.

Colman with director Thea Sharrock on the set of Wicked Little Letters.

“But in every other way … she’s so game. I mean, honestly, she’s remarkable. She really is. You learn very, very quickly, that she has got incredible experience behind her. If you think about it, she’s hardly ever stopped in all of the years she’s been working. And through that, every time she learns a new lesson, and she has just honed and honed and honed her craft.

“But she’s a real laugh. And she’s a bit of a mum figure, too. She’s there when the going gets tough.”

A real laugh is what I’m counting on, as I have brought Colman my favourite F-word – a finger bun – as a morning tea treat.

“What is it?” she says, once I have handed over the pink-iced bun.

“I think I completely love you already,” she says. “That’s a great way to start.” (Insert extremely flustered journalist here, who has just realised one of her life goals is complete.)

Olivia Colman at a screening of Wicked Little Letters at Randwick’s Ritz Cinema in Sydney.Credit: Getty Images

Colman, 50, is on a flying visit to Sydney to promote the film, after spending a few weeks in South Australia working on a project with Adelaide director Sophie Hyde. She’s become quite fond of our kangaroos. “Gorgeous, like a T-Rex,” she says of the animals and their tiny arms. “That’s why they’re angry, itchy balls.”

Has she caught much of our sweary language?

“I haven’t heard an awful lot of swearing,” she says.

Maybe people are being very polite. Seems like we’ve held our manners around the Queen (Netflix era, seasons three and four).

“It doesn’t take long to realise they don’t need to be [polite] around me,” she says, laughing.

In person, Colman is utterly delightful. Completely as you would expect: big brown eyes that hold contact and self-deprecating to a fault. Ask her about her producing credit – Wicked Little Letters is the first feature film produced by the company she founded with her husband Ed Sinclair – and she waves me away.

Olivia Colman plays Edith Swan, who is targeted by insulting letters in the film Wicked Little Letters.

“I think I’m useful to try and maybe get people on board,” says Colman. “But I’ve seen what real producers do. And I don’t do that. I’ve got no patience with that. I’d be bored … I’d rather turn up, learn my lines, have a ball, get paid.”

When I tell Sharrock this, she heartily disagrees.

“She was always there if I needed advice, or I needed something from a producer or her point of view,” says Sharrock, who is on Zoom from the UK. “She was [important] to me. She was always there when I needed her. So, there you go. Two sides of the same coin.”

Wicked Little Letters, as the introduction to the film says, “is truer than you think”. It is based on the Littlehampton Letters case, when a note addressed to Ms Edith Swan (played by Colman) arrived at her home in County Sussex in either 1919 or 1920 (there are conflicting timelines). The letter read: “You bloody old cow, mind your own business and there would be no rows. – R”. The “R” was thought to belong to Edith’s next-door neighbour Rose Gooding (played by Jessie Buckley).

The women had once been best friends, but when their friendship soured, Edith reported Rose to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, falsely claiming she’d heard Rose beating her newborn baby.

Colman with Jessie Buckley, who plays Rose Gooding, the woman accused of sending the offensive letters.

Shortly after that, the first letter arrived for Edith, with many more “wicked little letters” following, targeting not only Edith, but her parents, Edward and Mary Ann, as well as other neighbours and friends. The language in the letters was creative to say the least, with insults such as “foxy ass piss country whore” and “You bloody f---ing flaming piss country whores go and … ” (I’m stopping that one there).

A few months later, Rose faced trial for libel. And, well, I won’t spoil the rest.

“About 80 per cent of the letters that are in the film are the real thing,” says Sharrock. “I think they’re extraordinary. I really do. They’re incredibly layered, I suppose, and on one level, you can just bet they’re hilarious. They’re rude. They’re funny.

“But for me, underneath it, there’s also such a voice that’s trying to come out. It often makes me think of when a small child just gets really, really angry, all of a sudden, and it doesn’t quite know what to say and how to form the words. It’s got that energy behind it, which of course, once you’ve seen the film, and you’ve understood much more about the woman, it really makes sense. It was finding her own voice and screaming to try and get out of this horrible situation she was in.”

Colman keenly felt Edith and Rose’s sense of repression and the pressure there was back then to be a respectable woman.

“If you repress anyone, this is what happens, something will come out,” says Colman. “[Edith] still had to very much live under her father’s thumb. She was 50 or 49 and not allowed to express anything of her own mind.

Colman and Buckley as Edith and Rose in Wicked Little Letters, which is based on a real-life story.

“And Rose was looked at in those days as a fallen woman, and we’d look at her now, present day, and we’d go, ‘That is the woman I want to be. That is the woman who’s going to say, “F--- you all’ and this is who I am.“’ Although she still wobbles and goes, ‘Oh God, I should try and be better. I should try and toe the line for my daughter.’

“And it’s still happening now. We think we’ve got a handle on it. But, you know, we’ve still got a long way to go.”

I ask Colman if she feels Hollywood is a little bit that way as well: to get ahead, you must be a respectable woman and not rock the boat.

“I personally haven’t ever felt that,” she says. “But then I think I’m in a different sort of box. I’ve never been expected to be the ingénue, the beauty. Probably when I was a bit younger I was a bit, ‘Why not?’ But I don’t care now. I’ve been really lucky. I’ve had jobs I’ve been really interested in, and I’m really grateful for that.

“I think it’s probably really hard if you’re a proper beauty. I love the fact that Margot Robbie is clearly the most beautiful human being and she’s f---ing owning it and doing amazing stuff. And she’s powerful. And funny, you know?

“I don’t know, I don’t have enough experience of that [being told to behave a certain way] to be able to answer that. I, personally, haven’t been expected to behave in a certain way, but then I would never be bad. I think that’s unacceptable.”

The faces of Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown (from left): Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton.

On the surface, Wicked Little Letters is a straightforward case of a neighbourhood tiff turned very, very nasty – think analogue trolling – but Sharrock also sees it as a story of lost friendship between two women.

“It’s about female friendship and how we treat our friends, and how important those friendships are, and also how incredibly painful they are,” says Sharrock. “I mean, not to be excluding in any way, but woman to woman, a friendship between one woman and another can be life-changing.

“It can give you oxygen in a way that other things can’t, but equally, when somebody comes along and takes that away, particularly for reasons you don’t quite understand why, sometimes there’s nothing more painful.”

And while female friendship and repression are at the heart of the film, what’s been getting the most play, of course, is the language. It’s got every four-letter word you could think of, with a few riper ones thrown around with abandon.

And Colman’s favourite? Well, let’s just say she’ll see you next Tuesday.

“I love the power of that,” she says. “I love it. I love that word. And it can be done in an affectionate way, too: ‘Oh, he’s a terrible c---’ or particularly in Scotland, I think they use c--- as an affectionate term. But I love the fact that you can use it and instantly know who in a room you’re going to get on with. If you say c--- and people start to flinch, it’s, ‘Wow, no, we’re never gonna get on.’”

Sharrock, meanwhile, is delighted at the glee with which audiences have embraced the rampant swearing, particularly in the final scene.

“I just get the feeling every time I sit with an audience that they don’t realise it, but they’ve kind of been waiting for it [the final word],” says Sharrock. “I think it’s genius.”

It’s a release for everyone.

“It’s the freedom, though, isn’t it?” says Sharrock. “It’s a sense of taking something back and re-owning something. It’s interesting. There’s something very basic there that is really important.”

Back in the fancy hotel room with Colman – where the last piece of important information I have been able to extract from her is that she is playing a singing nun in Paddington 3 – she returns her attention to the finger bun as we wrap up.

“Is that butter in there?” she says of the hearty slab sitting in the middle of the bun.

It is.

“Oh, that’s really nice. That’ll go well with a cup of tea,” she says, taking a bite. “Oh yummy, that’s filthy, isn’t it?”

Wicked Little Letters is in cinemas now.

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