BROKEN PIECES
Vanessa Kirby left no stone unturned to play a mother who loses her baby during birth, write Hillary Morgan and Holly Byrnes
PREPARING for her acclaimed role in Netflix film Pieces of a Woman, Vanessa Kirby had to go to dark places and stay there for the duration of the shoot.
The story follows the grief of a mother who loses her baby in childbirth and loses herself in the days and months afterwards.
For 32-year- old Kirby, the key to getting inside her character was to speak to women who had gone through the agony and trauma of burying a baby.
“The thing that helped me most was one of the women I spoke to,” she says.
“One woman I spoke to, Kelly, was so generous in sharing her story. She had a very similar story with her baby, who died just after being born. I was really trying to imagine what that feeling was and how it would be to feel it alone. She said, ‘Just imagine you are on the tallest mountain, on the top of Everest. You are trying to scream and the wind is just pushing past you so you can’t make a noise. Then, you look down and all of the people you love and everyone else in the world is just carrying on as normal.’”
Kirby, clearly moved by the imagery, continues: “I had to try and access that headspace all the time. I had lots of little things to help me remember that loneliness and isolation is the very personal journey of this character, given the nature of her family. But it was difficult for me because I would want to express it all.”
The Mission: Impossible star threw herself into the challenge of the movie, building on the plaudits she received for her stellar performance as Princess Margaret in seasons one and two of Netflix’s royal drama
The Crown.
“I was really looking for something that scared me and I find that those projects are international ones,” she explains.
“I felt a duty to every mother to represent them on screen, true to life and raw. Also, accessing the level of grief my character experiences was enormously challenging, because I don’t have a child. I wanted to accurately represent the women that I spent a long time with who told me their stories. I wanted to try and somehow include all of the essences of the loss of those unborn children. That was my first scene in the movie and the most challenging. It was also a great honour.”
Accessing that kind of emotion was a shared experience with her co- star Shia LeBeouf, who plays her husband.
“I am quite an expressive person, quite emotional, so to try and just push it all down inside was really tough. Shia is so present, so immediate and so giving in those scenes, it was hard sometimes to meet both his and [co- star] Ellen Burstyn’s power and restrain in it all.”
The cast, Kirby says, “talked a lot about the process and how to create a space in which we felt trust and respect for each other. I have to say, I haven’t felt as much respect in my life than I do for the two of them, for allowing me to go to the place that I needed to go to, especially when the characters are having such different experiences of their own grief. We had to be really together in that and it was an incredible bond between all of us. It allowed me the space to go that deep every day, which was scary but also was one of the best film experiences of my life.”
Shaking off those intense feelings at the end of the day was part of the struggle.
“The first time I really felt like I took a character home with me was Three Sisters and that was a particularly destructive character. I just found myself getting more and more irritable. The availability of anger in me was much greater and that was horrible for my housemates and my poor sister.”
Her experience was similar but different on The Crown, where she played the Queen’s sibling. “With a character like Princess Margaret,” she explains, “the thing that I felt most was inferior to Claire Foy all of the time. I just felt like she was just amazing and much better. I always felt like I was not as good. The amazing thing about The Crown was it’s a very immersive experience for an actor. You are on location in these big houses that then became your natural habitat. It got to feel like it became ours. You stopped noticing how grand it was, you got used to it.”
It made leaving her princess alter ego behind after season two all the more difficult – passing the baton to Helena Bonham Carter who now plays Margaret.
“It actually took me months to get over it,” Kirby confesses.
“I always knew it was only ever going to be two seasons but I didn’t really realise what an amazing journey it would be. We became like a family, I guess because we were playing a family,” she laughs. “I just fell in love with Margaret. Whenever anybody is really nice about the show and the performance I’m always like, ‘ It’s not me, it’s her.’ It was just a gift to play with somebody so amazing. It was like the best time of my life.”
Still, she is noble enough to heap praise on Bonham Carter for how she has taken custody.
“I love her. She’s amazing and so perfect for it,” Kirby says.
“It was quite hard and daunting at the beginning for me but Helena has just gone headfirst into it. She asked for all my notes, all of my playlists and she has become a great friend because of that. I always knew, whoever it was, I would get to share Margaret with them. Helena is just the best actress, so deep and funny. I am very jealous though!”
PIECES OF A WOMAN
STREAMING FROM THURSDAY, JANUARY 7 ON NETFLIX