The four faces of EVIL
NATALIE DORMER PLAYS A QUARTET OF ROLES IN TIMELY DRAMA PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS, SAYS KEITH WATSON
IT’S happened to me before. Interview Ms (or Mr) so-and-so for a big new drama, the PR will say. And then you watch the first episode and wait and wait and wait, and you start thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, is Ms (or Mr) so-and-so even in it?’
I thought that was what was going on with Penny Dreadful: City Of Angels. Natalie Dormer was the soand-so in question and, after a striking opening scene in which she strides across a burning wheat field in a fab floor-length frock, pretty much nada. Oh, Natalie where art thou?
And then the penny dreadful dropped: that really is Natalie playing Alex, a mousy PA hiding an inner steel behind her wire-framed specs. Dormer has the good grace to indulge me when I admit I was fooled.
‘That’s the best compliment I’ve had all week,’ she says down the line from the London home where she’s been locked down. The diving into the dressing-up box doesn’t stop at Alex and nor does it stop at Magda, supernatural demon of the fab frock. You also get Natalie as an unhappy German housewife in LA called Elsa and Natalie as a smoulderingly androgynous Latina, Rio. They are, admittedly, rather easier to spot.
‘Four characters for the price of one – I enjoyed that very much,’ she says. ‘I loved the challenge of the different accents and voices. And the important thing was to play each of the characters so they were fully fleshed out, not just sketches.’
But while there’s pleasure to be had in watching Dormer, who has made striking impressions in Game Of Thrones, the Hunger Games films and The Tudors, get to stretch her considerable acting chops, Penny Dreadful: City Of Angels is more than a thespian Olympics. There’s an eerie resonance about it which, for all that it’s set in Los Angeles in 1938, makes it feel relevant to now.
‘We filmed in early 2019 and it’s set in 1938 but it’s very much about today,’ says Dormer. ‘What resonated with me was the portrayal of the demonisation of other cultures and the dangers of demagoguery. That’s down to John’s writing.’
The John in question is screenwriter and dramatist John Logan, whose credits include Gladiator, Hugo, The Aviator and the first series of Penny Dreadful, which played fast and loose with iconic characters from 19thcentury British fiction, including Frankenstein and Dracula. City Of Angels is no sequel, though: it is, on the face of it, a more straightforward drama. If straightforward is the term to use for a show where kids disappear into their mother’s bellies and Mexican spirits wreak havoc.
‘There’s a shared DNA between the two shows,’ says Logan. ‘I wanted to dramatise Mexican folklore and the element of the supernatural adds another layer to what you are able to portray.’ What fuels City Of Angels most strongly, though, is Logan’s dismay at the state of play in America and beyond. It began with anger at Trump’s suggestion of a wall on the Mexico-US border, a theme underlined by making Tiago Vega, a Mexican detective on the LAPD, hero of the piece. But as Dormer notes, its themes of racial division and political corruption feel timeless.
‘It’s set in 1938 and there’s a feeling that the world is on the edge of change,’ says
Logan. ‘That change led to the marginalisation of entire cultures. It’s distressing. You can’t live in California, as I do, and not have a reaction to the way the Mexican community has been treated.’
City Of Angels’s story nods to writer Raymond Chandler and movies such as LA Confidential and Chinatown. Dormer slices through the action with towering performances that take us across the spectrum of evil and despair. And, oh yes, she gets to dance.
As the sexually fluid Rio she kicks up a storm with partner Johnathan Nieves in a scene straight out of a period musical and she also whips out an inimitable catwalk-style strut as havoc-causing demon Magda.
‘Listen, I’d like to see you put Magda’s leather – I stress, faux leather – frock on,’ she jokes. ‘Then you’d walk like that!’
All episodes of Penny Dreadful: City Of Angels available from today on Sky Atlantic and Now TV