‘Be made to think, be made to feel’: Actress Ruth Wilson on new gothic thriller
From Luther and The Affair, through to His Dark Materials, actress Ruth Wilson has become the go-to actress when it comes to playing some of modern TV and film’s most complex characters.
Rather than play it safe, the actress says she likes the idea that viewers who watch her work will be “triggered”.
“It wouldn’t be as interesting for me to just take on pure entertainment,” she told Sky News.
“I kind of want people to be triggered. I mean, everyone is like ‘don’t trigger people’. No, no, no, just let them be triggered. That’s the point of art to me, you know, feel something, be made to think, be made to feel.”
Her latest TV venture, The Woman In The Wall, certainly packs that emotional punch, but it also goes to great lengths to ensure it is a story told with authenticity and sensitivity.
Unconventional and unsettling, the gothic thriller is set against the backdrop of one of the most traumatic and formative scandals in the modern Irish state, the Magdalene Laundries.
Exploring the psychological effects of the horrific abuse suffered by many thousands of Irish women and girls in state-funded, church-run homes, Wilson plays Lorna Brady – still haunted by her time in one – who wakes one morning to find a corpse in her house.
Suffering from extreme bouts of sleepwalking, she then has to work out who the body is and whether she might be responsible for the apparent murder.
“This character is so brilliantly unusual but deeply human,” Wilson explains. “She is someone that is a survivor but she has these deep repressed memories that come out in sleepwalking.
“It was a great device… a way of dealing with trauma in a creative, unusual way. She’s treated as an outsider by the community because of what she’s gone through… but that gives her power in some ways.”
Pic: BBC/Motive Pictures/Chris Barr
Daryl McCormack as Detective Colman Akande. Pic: BBC/Motive Pictures/Chris Barr
Survivors talk openly about suffering trauma
While the genre-mixing drama is surreal, strange and, at times, even funny, writer Joe Murtagh says he went to great lengths “to make sure we were never ever veering towards exploitation”.
“Paramount was authenticity and sensitivity… when we felt confident enough, we began speaking to survivors.”
Survivors of the homes talk openly about suffering trauma to this day.
From at least 1922 through to 1996, about 10,000 so-called “troubled” women – including unmarried mothers and abuse victims – were imprisoned against their will in what were essentially religious workhouses, any children taken away from them.
“The first Mission Impossible was released when the last mother and baby home was closed, that’s how recent it is,” Wilson explains.
“More people [outside of Ireland] need to know about it… and drama is the best way of getting stories out there.”
Pic: BBC/Motive Pictures/Chris Barr
‘I left because I missed boys!’
Around the same time in England, Wilson herself was being educated at a Catholic school for girls.
“It was a great education,” Wilson admits, before joking: “I left because I missed boys!
“While for some women in Ireland it was a different story…”
Wilson hopes the drama is a means to help people understand the horrific abuse many thousands of women are still processing.
“Hopefully it never happens again. That’s the only way you stop it from happening again, telling these stories in the first place.”
The Woman In The Wall is on BBC One and iPlayer at 9:05pm on Sunday 27 August.
Angelina Jolie says although she appreciates being an artist, she would prefer for her legacy to be “a good mother” and to be known for her “belief in equality and human rights”.
The Oscar-winning actress stars as Maria Callas in the new Pablo Larrain film about the opera singer’s life.
Pic: StudioCanal
She has called Maria “the hardest” and “most challenging” role she has had in her career and put months of preparation into immersing herself into the world of opera.
Jolie, who recently reached a divorce settlement with actor Brad Pitt, told Sky News: “To be very candid, it was the therapy I didn’t realise I needed. I had no idea how much I was holding in and not letting out.
“So, the challenge wasn’t the technical [side of opera], it was an emotional experience to find my voice, to be in my body, to express. You have to give every single part of yourself.”
The biopic combines the voice of the Maleficent actress with recordings of Maria Callas.
Jolie believes it “would be a crime to not have [Callas’] voice through this because, in many ways, she is very present in this film”.
Who was Maria Callas?
Born in New York in 1923, Maria Callas was the daughter of Greek immigrants who moved back to Athens at the age of 13 with her mother and sister.
After enrolling at the Athens Conservatory, she made her professional debut at 17 and went on to become one of the most famous faces of opera, travelling around the world and performing at Covent Garden in London, The Met in New York and La Scala in Milan.
Callas’s final operatic performance took place at Covent Garden in 1965 when she was 41 but she continued to work conducting master classes at Juilliard School, doing concert tours and starring in the 1969 film Medea.
Written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, Maria focuses on the artist’s final years in the 1970s when she moved to Paris and disappeared from public view.
She died on 16 September 1977 at the age of 53.
Pic: StudioCanal
Jolie on changing motivations as an actor
Maria follows the life of an artist fully consumed by the art she creates and even remarks that “happiness never developed a beautiful melody”.
Reflecting on her own life in the spotlight, Jolie said she noticed her own career motivations change over the years.
“There’s this kind of study of being human that we do when we create, and we communicate with an audience because our work is not in isolation – it’s a connection.
“I think when I was younger, I had different questions about being human and different feelings and now as I’ve gotten older, I understand some things and now I have different questions.
“It’s a matter of life, right? And so maybe that’s interesting that this now is a character really contemplating death and really contemplating the toll of certain things in life that I, of course, couldn’t have understood in my 20s”.
Jolie at the New York Film Festival in September with three of her children (L-R) Pax, Zahara and Maddox. Pic: AP
A family affair
Two of Jolie’s children, Maddox and Pax, took on production assistant roles during the filming of Maria and witnessed their mother perform opera for the first time in public.
She says the film allowed them to create new experiences together and for her children to see her approach to playing a difficult role.
“Everyone in my home, we all give each other space to be who we are and we’re all different.
“I’m the mom, but I’m also an artist and a person and so my family has been very kind and gives me their understanding. They make fun of me, and they support me and just as you’d hope it would be.”
She adds: “When you play somebody who is dealing with so much pain, it’s very important to come home to some kindness.”
Maria is in cinemas now.
Tom Holland’s dad has confirmed his son’s engagement to Zendaya – revealing how the 28-year-old meticulously planned the proposal.
Zendaya, also 28, sparked engagement rumours when she attended last Sunday’s Golden Globes wearing a sparkling diamond on her ring finger.
Neither star has publicly addressed the rumours but Tom’s comedian father, Dominic Holland, has now confirmed the pair are set to wed.
He wrote in a post on his Patreon account: “Tom, as you know by now was very incredibly well prepared. He had purchased a ring.
“He had spoken with her father and gained permission to propose to his daughter.”
“Tom had everything planned out… When, where, how, what to say, what to wear,” he added.
Zendaya arrived at the Golden Globes with a noticeable piece of new jewellery. Pic: Invision/AP
Dominic also noted that while most men worry about being able to afford an engagement ring, he suspects his actor son was “more concerned with the stone, its size and clarity, its housing, which jeweller”.
Tom and Zendaya met on the set of Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2016, when they played the titular hero and his love interest MJ, respectively. Their romance was confirmed in 2021.
In his post, Tom’s father admitted fears over whether being in the spotlight could put a strain on the couple’s relationship.
He wrote: “I do fret that their combined stardom will amplify their spotlight and the commensurate demands on them and yet they continually confound me by handling everything with aplomb.”
“And even though show business is a messy place for relationships and particularly so for famous couples as they crash and burn in public and are too numerous to mention […] yet somehow right at the same time, I am completely confident they will make a successful union.”
More entertainment news:
Paris Hilton’s home destroyed in fires
RuPaul pays tribute to The Vivienne
Zendaya rose to fame after landing a role in Disney sitcom Shake It Up, and became a household name after starring in Euphoria.
Holland – who has starred in three Spider-Man films opposite his now-fiancée – made his stage debut in Billy Elliot the Musical in 2008.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports9 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway