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ROCK STAR ANTICS
Natalie Dormer relished her role in the eerie TV series of Picnic At Hanging Rock – apart from wearing a corset in the sweltering heat
Natalie Dormer on her new role in the stunning and spooky TV version of Australian classic Picnic At Hanging Rock
Standing in an opulent but faded Victorian drawing room, a figure in black has her back to the camera. Slowly she turns her head to reveal a widow’s veil. These arresting opening frames set the eerie tone of Picnic At Hanging Rock, BBC2’s new six-part adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s famous novel.
Set in turn-of-the-20th-century Australia, the plot centres on a high-class boarding school, run with a rod of iron by headmistress Hester Appleyard. On Valentine’s Day 1900, three pupils and a teacher vanish while they picnic at a local beauty spot – the Hanging Rock.
Shot in light that is both dazzling and muted, it is all white petticoats and gloves, yet as Natalie Dormer, who plays Hester, affirms, this is no conventional corsets- and- bonnets affair, because of its supernatural elements. ‘It’s a trip,’ she laughs. ‘It’s a costume drama, but it’s more psychedelic.’
The mystery of Hanging Rock, in Victoria, south-eastern Australia, has haunted Australians – and the world – since Lindsay’s novel hit bookshops in 1967. The story is pure fiction, but for years many believed it was true, encouraged by its author, who littered her novel with pseudo-historical references and in a tantalising foreword suggested readers must ‘decide for themselves’ whether the events she had described had actually taken place.
The mystery remained in 1975, with director Peter Weir’s cult film adaptation. ‘It’s amazing that a PR stunt from the 60s, reinforced by Weir, remains,’ says Natalie.
The actress, 36, confides she wasn’t fully familiar with Picnic before filming. ‘Weir’s film has a place in history. But it’s a slice of the novel. Our Picnic is a re-imagining of the book. It’s a love letter to the novel, really.’
It’s clear Natalie – who gained a cult following as master manipulator Margaery Tyrell in Sky Atlantic’s Game Of Thrones – loved playing a character with a dark secret behind her icy exterior. ‘Hester is so buttoned up physically and mentally, she’s one of the least self-aware characters I’ve played,’ she says. ‘She’s running from her past. She’s constructed herself as something, then with a tragedy like the girls disappearing, you see how flimsy that is. It’s fun to play someone losing her mind. That’s Hamlet, Blanche DuBois.’
A middle-class girl from Reading, Dormer stumbled into acting by way of a dressing-up box. ‘I was an only child until seven. I had a dressing-up box that my family used to throw old clothes into, so I’d dress up as characters and talk to myself,’ she recalls. ‘I always wanted to act.’ She studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, whose former pupils include Angela Lansbury and Anita Dobson, and six months after graduating she won her first role as Victoria, Casanova’s virtuous fiancée, in Lasse Hallström’s 2005 film Casanova. She then played Anne Boleyn opposite Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the lecherous Henry VIII in raunchy TV series The Tudors.
‘There was I, a straight-laced classically trained stage actress with three years of Shakespeare and Chekhov behind me, and JRM, as we called Jonathan, was a ball of raw energy,’ she says. ‘I just shut up and watched him and the other amazing actors. It was a learning experience – with good pubs each night to talk things over!’
She declines to say if it was in one such pub that she met her fiancé, Dublin-born writer and director Anthony Byrne, to whom she has been engaged since 2011. They live together in London, and try to limit shop talk at home. ‘You have to stop talking about it when it gets too much.’ That’s been tough to avoid lately as they collaborated as writers and producers on noir thriller In Darkness, recently released in America, in which Natalie also stars as a blind pianist caught up in a murder mystery. Anthony directs the film.
‘It’s a psychological thriller,’ she says, ‘like a modern Hitchcock.’
Natalie was fresh from Game Of Thrones – her character died at the end of season six – when she was offered Picnic At Hanging Rock. ‘I felt no need to get into a corset again!’ she laughs. ‘But then I read the scripts and spoke to the director. I knew it was very special and different.’ Special, different – and revered in Australia, where the series was released earlier this year. Did she worry about reinventing a national treasure? ‘If you Google reviews, we got away with it,’ she laughs. ‘Of course, there was a lot of scepticism. It’s like our Dickens or Brontës. But an incredible original text can be reinvented.
‘Lindsay had a concept: time doesn’t exist, it’s nonlinear. Watches stopped on her, and that’s used in Picnic. Our cameraman’s watch stopped at the rock,’ she laughs. ‘Whether you believe it’s magnetic fields or not, that’s up to you.’
For Natalie, filming in Australia was its own adventure. ‘To see the landscape, to be hit by its sheer scale, no acting was required,’ she says. The intensive shoot didn’t leave much downtime, but she drove the Great Ocean Road on the southern tip and spent a weekend in Tasmania. My favourite things are their coffee, red wine and smashed avocado, and you get great Asian food. I had to say, “Pull the corset in more” – Melbourne is a good city for eating.’
The corsets were torture, not least because of the searing heat. ‘Oh God,’ she groans. ‘That big black dress at the beginning was pure wool. The hair and make-up people were standing round me with annoying whirring little fans. You have to sweat it out and hydrate. Don’t be anywhere near me when I take my corset off.’ The book is a one-off, so she doesn’t have to rush back into one as there will be no second series. Or will there? ‘They said that about The Handmaid’s Tale,’ she laughs. ‘Never say never.’
‘It’s a costume drama but it’s more psychedelic. It’s a trip’
Picnic At Hanging Rock starts on Wednesday at 9.05pm on BBC2.