Harriet Walter: ‘When I’m asked to play scary people, I go to my grandmother’
Harriet Walter plays formidable matriarchs on screen. Surely she’s not quite so withering in person?
Is Harriet Walter just a tiny bit terrifying? If you’ve seen any of her recent spate of withering screen performances, you might imagine that her eminently poised scariness goes without saying. Still, emboldened by sitting safely on the other end of a Zoom link from Walter as she sits in her west London home, I say it to her anyway. This, after all, is the smilingly neutering English mother of the Roy clan in three seasons of Succession. This is the chain-smoking Russian assassin who mentored Jodie Comer’s Villanelle in the third season of Killing Eve. This is the tough mother to Matt Damon’s medieval knight in last year’s Ridley Scott historical drama The Last Duel.
That’s not the end of the mother figures from hell, though. She is as effortlessly formidable as ever in the new BBC drama This Is Going to Hurt. And if you are looking for any biographical context to explain her intimidating presence: Christopher Lee, sinister for decades in everything from Dracula to the Lord of the Rings films, was her uncle. Shiver.
Except that – you’ll have guessed the twist by now – Walter turns out to be a good-humoured delight. The 71-year-old responds to the idea that she could emasculate for England with the same mixture of intellectual precision and affable generosity as she does to more or less every other idea you might throw at her. She’s nobody’s fool. Yet she insists she only intimidates people as part of her job. “I wish I could always turn it on,” she says, “but in real life I’m a wimp.”
Some actors, she argues, are good at playing themselves. Some actors are good at playing the sort of people who have frightened them. She is one of the latter. “Because, at an impressionable age, you watch them, you observe, it’s like a mouse watching a cat. When I was a kid I had a frightening headmistress, I had a frightening grandmother, and those were the people I felt I needed to defend myself against.”
The granny was Granny Lee: aka Countess Estelle Marie Rose, mother of Christopher Lee and of Walter’s late mother, Xandra. If you see Walter being nice in a role, that’s Xandra; she says her mother was “a divine, sweet kind of woman. When I’m asked to play scary people, I go to my grandmother”.
She never just plays the effect, though; she looks for the cause too. Take Veronique Kay in Adam Kay’s semi-autobiographical medical drama This Is Going to Hurt. At first glance Veronique is just there to show zero sympathy for her harried son, an NHS doctor. But Walter read Kay’s real-life diaries, which the show is based on, and realised her character should be more nuanced. “Underneath there is a beating heart and someone who loves her son, who thinks she is administering tough love.” She laughs. “But all he gets is tough.”
What rationale, then, does she have for her Succession character? Lady Caroline Collingwood is the ex-wife of Brian Cox’s media magnate billionaire Logan Roy. Her remarriage party in Tuscany at the end of the recent series not only gave Walter and the rest of the cast somewhere amazing to spend some of their summer – yes, every bit as beautiful as it looks, she confirms with an apologetic grin – but also gave the rest of us some of the best television drama of the year. Very much including the moment where Caroline casually told her daughter Shiv that she shouldn’t have had children: “I should have had dogs.”
Yet it’s Walter’s job to see things from Caroline’s angle: as someone trying to protect herself, not as a villain. “If she is vicious, she enjoys the viciousness of it. Life is a bit of a laugh to her, she converts pain into laughter. She is a tricky, volatile, slightly damaged person. But I’m quite defensive of her, because there is this attitude that prevails that the bad mother is 100 times worse than the bad father. And I’m going, ‘Hang on, what would you do if you were married to Logan Roy? What would it be like to be on the wrong end of that hard-nosed cruelty?’”
Yes, much of that is in the writing. Walter loved Succession the moment she was given the pilot episode to read. The word “Shakespearean” has been used to describe the show’s vivid power play. I wonder if Walter agrees. After all, she worked for years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I do. I think Shakespeare would love this series. One of the questions people often say to me is, ‘Why should I watch these terrible, irredeemably horrid people?’ And I think the answer is that we all want our parents’ approval and attention. And we also want independence from them, and we hate ourselves for needing that approval. These are essential things, and Shakespeare deals in essential things. That’s why he’s lasted for centuries, because he is interested in immortal human quandaries.”
It’s a show, I suggest, in which you start off not knowing if you can care about any of the characters and end up caring about all of them. “Yes, but I think this is a recent phenomenon, this talking in terms of who we care about. When I was younger I didn’t go to a Shakespeare play and go, ‘Would I want to know Hamlet? Would I like King Lear?’ And yet somehow you do sort of identify a bit with everybody by the end. But this phenomenon of trying to be likeable, of trying to please people, is quite recent.”
Not that television’s most withering matriarch is immune to the need to be liked. “Approval-seeking is a strong force in the acting profession. So I do still want to be liked, but the field of who I care about pleasing is narrowing. There are some people I think I can’t possibly please.”
When she started acting, at boarding school in Dorset in England’s south, she found a confidence she didn’t have in the rest of her life. She turned down a place at Oxford to go to drama school. Acting was her great education. “I remember still saying when I was 35 that I was shy. And someone said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because I hadn’t realised that I’d actually grown in the job, not just got better at acting but had grown as a person.”
Walter has always been busy. As well as her television work she has appeared in films such as Sense and Sensibility, Atonement, Babel and – for seven seconds – Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In 2011 she was appointed dame for services to drama. It’s only in the past few years, however, that she has become almost inescapable. In the past decade she has played parts in Downton Abbey, The Crown, Call the Midwife, Belgravia and the Anglo-American sitcom smash Ted Lasso. It’s an extraordinary hit rate.
“This career thing is such a luxury, such an accident,” she says. She changed agents five years ago. That apart, she suggests that her profile on television has risen simply because she has made herself available. “Before, I had to say, ‘Sorry, I’m going back into the theatre, can’t do it’.”
Walter lives with her husband, the American actor Guy Paul, whom she met when they appeared in a Broadway play together in 2009. She spent Christmas visiting his family in New York and goes to her second home in Dorset when she can. Can stage work still fit in with all this? It’s five years since her last play, playing Prospero in The Tempest. She doesn’t rule out more theatre. “But it takes so much of your time and energy and I just think I have different criteria for accepting theatre jobs these days. I’ve got to absolutely feel I would die if I didn’t do it. I might think it’s great, but would I be just as satisfied to sit in the stalls and watch someone else do it?”
She hopes Lady Caroline will return in season four of Succession, but hasn’t been told. “I am crossing every finger and toe.” Coming soon, though, are big roles in Wool, a dystopian American drama series, and Burial, a film imagining Russian soldiers taking Hitler’s remains to Stalin. She says both are unlike anything she has done before. Even if both are characters with “tough exteriors” once again.
“But I think that comes to old people,” she says. “I mean, I’m one myself, and you can appear tough because life has hardened your face. But we have to get beyond those first impressions and ask questions, because there are such stories in old people.” She wishes she had asked her granny questions rather than being scared of her. “But it was not the done thing, you didn’t ask your grandmother how they were feeling about anything, you were the one who had to listen to them.
“The tough exterior is probably just to do with my appearance. I can’t help that. But what I hope is that there is always something different or contradictory in the parts I play to make people understand we aren’t always what we look like. We shouldn’t judge people by appearances.” She laughs: human history suggests we do exactly that. “I mean, we do, but we have to get beyond that.”
This is Going to Hurt is streaming on Binge
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