Bridgerton’s Ruby and the family secret she longs to uncover ...
BRIDGERTON star Ruby Barker would one day love to write to the parents, who put her up for adoption as a baby, to let them know she ‘turned out alright’. The 24-year- old plays Miss Marina Thompson, the spirited country cousin who arrives in Regency London concealing a scandalous secret in the Netflix series. And she is one of a handful of highly talented young actors who have sprung to prominence during lockdown, as we’ve been glued to our screens.
Ruby knows that she was born in Islington — and considers herself a Londoner, even though her adoptive mum and dad raised her in Glasgow. She also knows that her birth mother and father were from Ireland and Montserrat. ‘It’s one of those things that’s always at the back of my mind,’ she told me. Ruby is a nickname. Her first name is ‘a secret’, known only to those close to her, including her sister, who’s a year older. She said she felt incredibly lucky — and thankful — that the two of them were adopted by the same family.
But there’s always been something holding her back from sitting down and actually composing that letter. ‘Sometimes life gets in the way but it’s something I want to do,’ she said. ‘ I want them to know that I turned out alright, you know?’ For starters, she’d tell them about How To Stop A Recurring Dream, a film she made before Shonda Rimes and her team cast her in Bridgerton (which has become a global smash hit since its launch two months ago).
And if they watched the picture (due out next month) I’m sure they’d be impressed with her ferociously raw portrait of Yakira: a rebellious 17-year-old who kidnaps her younger stepsister and shuts her in a car boot before driving off on what turns out to be a poignant pilgrimage.
The moment she read director Ed Morris’s screenplay she knew she had to play Yakira, who lives in an unhappy household with her father, stepmother and stepsister (a superb Lily-Rose Aslandogdu).
‘I know it sounds crazy, but it felt like it was something I would have done in my teenage years,’ she said. Her Bridgerton character has a ‘rebellious streak’, too; which is why she believes she was cast. ‘Marina’s definitely got this edge,’ she noted. Barker said when growing up, she was encouraged to be herself. ‘Well behaved women seldom make history, as my mother used to remind me,’ she said. She described her adoptive mum as ‘quite a feisty lady’ who gave up being a beautician to train and then work as a solicitor. ‘Very motivated and independent, and those qualities rubbed off on me,’ she said, adding that her dad had been encouraging, too. While making How To Stop A Recurring Dream she’d often discuss the role with director Morris. ‘I’ve been a 17-year-old mixed race girl, and a tearaway teenager, so I know how my character will act,’ she reasoned. When still living in Glasgow, her favourite thing was to sneak out of the house and meet up with her best friend in Kirkintilloch and ‘sit under the stars together and drink Mad Dog 20/20’. ‘Proper Scottish stuff,’ she said proudly. Aged 15, she went to school in York. ‘That’s when I sorted out my priorities and started getting my head down.’ Strong A-level grades won her a place at the London School of Economics to study international relations — a subject close to her heart after she spent a summer in Tanzania, working on environmental conservation projects. But still, she found herself drawn to drama and dance. (As a child she took Saturday morning classes at the Elizabeth Murray School of Dance in Glasgow. ‘That’s where I fell in love with performing.’) Ruby was chatting from her home in Leeds, where she lives with her beloved black and white cat Mr Morse, who has been with her since she was two; outliving Columbo and Miss Marple.
‘He’s an old man with arthritis,’ she said of Morse, who eats his medication out of her hand and has heated blankets scattered around the place, plus tiny steps to help him onto her bed. ‘ He can have whatever he wants. He’s my oldest friend, and the best lockdown companion anyone could ask for.’
Reluctantly turning her back on the London School of Economics, Barker got a job at the National Railway Museum in York. She became involved in community theatre and built up her CV.
And then came her first lead role, in How To Stop A Recurring Dream (out on digital streaming platforms on March 9). Followed by Bridgerton.
Marina doesn’t quite have the ‘ happy ever after’ ending of Bridgerton’s heroine Daphne, played by Phoebe Dynevor. Nor does she enjoy any hanky-panky with Rege- Jean Page’s swaggering aristocrat Simon Basset. She remained tight-lipped about whether she’ll be involved with Season Two, though I’d hazard a guess that she’ll be reuniting with the Bridgertons and the Featheringtons before long.
She told me she’s ‘living proof’ that a change is coming, in terms of roles being offered to non- white actors. ‘I never thought I was going to be in a period drama — unless I was playing the help,’ she said.
Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry
Verdict: Worth your focus ★★★II Zappa
Verdict: Compellingly frank ★★★II Pele
Verdict: For footie fans, a ball ★★★★I
THERE is quite a lot dividing Billie Eilish and Frank Zappa. More than six decades between their respective births, gender, a fair amount of facial hair and, of course, the fact that she is very much alive and he is very much not.
Yet a pair of documentaries, coincidentally released within a few days of one another, reveal them both emerging from Los Angeles as true originals.
Eilish has already shown herself to be at least as complicated and idiosyncratic as Zappa was, if less sure of her place in the firmament. But then she’s still a teenager.
This prodigiously talented singer-songwriter with 76 million Instagram followers and a James Bond theme already to her name, doesn’t turn 20 until December.
Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry (the subtitle invokes one of her lyrics, referencing her mental health struggles) offers an intriguing insight into her extraordinary life.
At well over two hours long, the film could have used a proper trim, but then couldn’t we all these days? None of Eilish’s zealous fans will mind being locked down all evening with R.J. Cutler’s documentary for company.
That life of hers is all the more extraordinary for being, in many respects, so conspicuously ordinary.
The film follows her on tour and working on her debut album, but for large chunks of it she’s in the unremarkable family home, where we see her back-chatting to her mother, horsing around with her brother and learning from her father how to wash her car, having just passed her driving test.
Admittedly, ‘all I want is a matt black Dodge Challenger’ is not a realisable yearning given to many teenagers from middleclass suburbia.
And there’s another telling moment when Eilish’s brother and musical collaborator, Finneas, shows her how many Spotify downloads she’s up to. ‘Is that million? Oh my God! I thought it was thousand. I was, like . . .’ For the record, the figure is 720 million. ‘ That’s nuts, dude,’ says Finneas.
Nuts, indeed. But this film’s message is that she’s being properly nurtured and protected by her parents, unlike so many prodigies down the years. And also, that she’s entirely typical of her generation, not atypical. There’s a sweet sequence when she meets her childhood idol Justin Bieber for the first time, and is overwhelmed. How does she feel when Bieber lets it be known he’d like to feature on her album? ‘He could ask me to kill my dog and I would.’
THE best music documentaries strike a balance between delighting fans and informing non-fans. They can’t afford to bore either of those contingents. Neither Cutler’s film, nor Alex Winter’s Zappa get that quite right. They are really for devotees.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth watching, or at least dipping into, if you have even a passing interest in their subjects.
I can’t claim ever to have been much of a fan of Frank Zappa and his band The Mothers Of Invention, but Zappa assiduously archived his own life and Winter (less famous as a film-maker than he is for playing opposite Keanu Reeves in the Bill & Ted movies) has been given irresistible access.
Besides, anyone who collaborated with symphony orchestras, John Lennon and Alice Cooper has to be worth serious documentary attention. There are lots of terrific clips, and it’s worth concentrating just so that you don’t miss my favourite malapropism of the year so far. To some people, says musician Ray White, the truth is ‘like Gaelic to a vampire’. That’s definitely what he says; I re-wound three times to check. There are some advantages to not watching films in cinemas.
Zappa (who died of prostate cancer in 1993) wasn’t one of those vampires recoiling from the Gaelic. If anything, he had a tendency to be too truthful.
Some of his lyrics were inflammatory, he all too cheerfully admitted on-tour dalliances to his wife Gail (extensively interviewed here) and, admirably, he didn’t mind anyone knowing that he disapproved of drugs.
It was a stance lampooned on the TV show Saturday Night Live in 1978. ‘What a mindblower,’ cried John Belushi, that Zappa wasn’t high while working on (his 1966 album) Freak Out!. n DRUG abuse loomed large in Asif Kapadia’s brilliant 2019 documentary Diego Maradona.
Happily, the private life of one of the other principal claimants to the unofficial title ‘greatest footballer of all time’ has been less populated by demons.
But a comparatively untroubled existence is not always a gift to film-makers, so Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn do a fine job with Pele, focusing on how the great Brazilian — now 80, and born within a couple of months of Frank Zappa, as it happens — wasn’t merely a symbol of his nation’s coming- of- age in the 1960s, but actually ignited it. Fascinating stuff. n Billie eilish: The World’s A little Blurry is on Apple TV+ from today. Zappa is available on altitude.film, and Pele is on Netflix.