The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The irresistible Riseborough
Broken bones, shoot-outs, lockdowns – Andrea Riseborough is the hardest-working Brit in Hollywood. Can nothing get in her way?
Once Andrea Riseborough commits to a part, she doesn’t do things by halves. Break a leg? While filming her latest role on location in the Sahara Desert, the 39-year-old English star of Birdman and The Death of Stalin broke two. “I was rehearsing a stunt, and there was some missed communication about how fast or slow we’d be going,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. If the details are fuzzy, the result was clear: two fractured tibia. “And, of course,” says Riseborough, “in true British style, I walked around on them for two days, saying: ‘No, no, I’m fine!’”
After an X-ray revealed the gravity of her injuries, filming of ZeroZeroZero – a complex, interwoven mafia saga, adapted for television from a book by Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano – was suspended for six weeks while her bones “grew back with a vengeance. Then we just resumed the shoot, went back to Morocco and finished the project.”
A fast-paced, action-packed series that begins on Sky Atlantic next week, ZeroZeroZero follows a colossal shipment of cocaine as it travels across the world, via Mexican drug cartels and corrupt soldiers, New Orleans shipping agents and a Calabrian crime syndicate. Riseborough plays Emma Lynwood, the privileged but hard-nosed daughter of an American shipping magnate (Gabriel Byrne) who is handed control of the family business. Researching the role was, she says, a “huge eye-opener” in what it taught her about the scale and impact of an international drugs trade which “touches every one of us and its many tendrils are so vast-reaching”.
During a year-long shoot, the production roamed across five countries – Italy, Mexico, the US and Senegal as well as Morocco. “Given our current situation,” says Riseborough, “it seems almost impossible to imagine filming something like ZeroZeroZero again.”
More unscripted drama came last September in the Dominican Republic, on the set of Geechee – a thriller in which Riseborough plays a New York scientist, starting a new life in the Sea Islands. In an apparent case of mistaken identity, undercover local drug enforcement officers opened fire on a carload of crew members out location scouting for the production. One was shot several times and hospitalised, although thankfully, says Riseborough, “he’s recovered now, physically”.
“Making anything that’s of a large scale, there are always going to be risks involved,” she adds. “There are many cautionary tales since the dawn of the film industry about how difficult things can be, and how many stunt people have gone through so much.”
Yet, there is a point where even Riseborough draws the line. While shooting Luxor, a dusty, dreamlike Egyptian love story in which she stars as Hana, a doctor attempting to deal with the horrors she’s witnessed in front-line aid work, she helped persuade British director Zeina Durra to abandon one risky river scene. “Originally, my character fell into the Nile,” says Riseborough, “and then everybody pointed out to Zeina that I could potentially die or contract something that I may not recover from.” She pauses. “And there were crocodiles.”
Before lockdown, Riseborough also filmed Brandon Cronenberg’s bloody psychological horror Possessor and Louis Wain, a forthcoming biopic of the outsider artist starring Benedict Cumberbatch, directed and written by Will Sharpe. She plays Caroline, the eldest of Wain’s five sisters. “He was an interesting character,” she says wryly. “I don’t know if you’ve seen any of his psychedelic cat art…” And she’ll appear as one of several incarnations of Andrea Dworkin in Pratibha Parmar’s biopic of the radical feminist, My Name Is Andrea.
Her near-constant employment has not, however, come without compromises. “Since March, other than my partner, I haven’t really had any [social] connection with any other human beings,” she says. “We’ve both been working, and there’s a responsibility not to bring [coronavirus] to set, so we’ve only seen each other, for better or worse.”
Today Riseborough is in a white T-shirt, on a white sofa, with the Californian sunshine streaming across the white wall behind her. After a decade of living in LA, her Newcastle accent, though softened, remains, as does her pale complexion. Indeed, the only pop of colour coming through on my screen is the lurid red of her fake nails. “It’s almost impossible to do anything with them,” she says, “including wash the dishes.” The cumbersome talons belong to a character she’s playing for American Hustle director David O Russell, about which she can say nothing; she’s even forbidden from revealing the title of the film, which also stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and Robert De Niro.
In the past, Riseborough has sometimes come across in interviews as guarded, particularly regarding her personal life. Today, she’s still considered and cerebral but we’re less than five minutes in when she brings up her partner, the French-Lebanese actor Karim Saleh. They met on the set of Luxor; he plays Sultan, an archaeologist and Hana’s former lover. “We just did our jobs, perhaps a tad too earnestly,” she says, smiling.
“When you meet somebody and the connection’s that strong, it’s unavoidable, it’s impossible to deny. It was life-changing. One of the advantages of the pandemic is that Karim and I have got to spend so much time with one another. But I really miss my mum and my dad.”
She and Saleh spent time over Christmas 2019 with her family in Newcastle, and with his family in Beirut. “It’s really hard,” she nods. “This is the longest that I’ve ever not
Risky business: Riseborough in mafia saga ZeroZeroZero seen them for.”
Riseborough grew up in Whitley Bay, the daughter of a car dealer and a secretary – “working class Thatcherites” – who did well enough in the 1980s to send her and her younger sister, Laura, to private school. After showing an early talent for writing and acting, both at school and at the local youth theatre, she was urged to apply to Oxbridge. Instead, Riseborough dropped out before taking her A-levels – “I just didn’t want to go to school any more,” she has said – and took a series of “ridiculous, random jobs” in a Chinese restaurant, making greetings cards and singing in a band. After four years, she won a place at Rada, joining a class that included Gemma Arterton, Tom Hiddleston and Ben Whishaw.
Since graduating in 2005, she’s barely drawn breath, starring on stage with Kenneth Branagh in the West End production of Ivanov; as Margaret Thatcher in her breakthrough, Bafta-nominated television role in The Long Walk to Finchley, and saving Madonna’s otherwise disastrous W.E. with her portrayal of Wallis Simpson. She’s played an IRA informant in Shadow Dancer, a Broadway actress in the Oscar-winning Birdman and a dictator’s daughter in The Death of Stalin.
She’s described herself as a “Geordie punk who started in classical theatre.” Does she miss the stage? “Yes, of course,” she says. “But the psychological toll that theatre takes is something that you have to be either incredibly psychologically robust or a little detached to be able to do over and over again. I don’t have much of a choice when it comes to how caught up I get in things. So to be living out, for example, the loss of a child for seven-anda-half months, six days a week, is a hugely insightful experience, but also sometimes unsustainable.”
Today, Hollywood bustles with production companies founded by actresses eager to take matters into their own hands (Reese Witherspoon and Natalie Portman among them) but Riseborough was ahead of the curve. In 2012, after some disillusioning experiences, including filming the Tom Cruise action movie Oblivion – for which, she has said, “There were only two ladies on set and a small female presence on the crew… There was a lot of talk about whether my body was the right size or not” – she vowed never to make another blockbuster and established Mother Sucker. The production company’s first film, Nancy, was made with a crew that was 80 per cent female, and 60 per cent people of colour, all on equal pay. “If you get pissed off enough about anything,” she says, “you can only moan about it for so long before you have to do something.”
Riseborough has big plans for Mother Sucker, but for now its productions are on hold. “We make films for a very small amount of money, and I’m not yet in a position where I can wrangle the kind of capital that I would want to keep everyone safe during this time. In order to do it as safely as I’d want to do it, we’d probably have to have five or six times the budget,” she tells me. “At the same time it does raise the question: should I be doing this? Am I contributing to the problem?”
On cue, her phone beeps: Derek – “lovely man, with a lovely man-bun” – is outside her door, waiting to administer her daily Covid test, as required by the David O Russell production. “There’s so much money being spent to keep the machine going, film projects have almost doubled in budget because of Covid,” says Riseborough, stretching out those mended legs and getting to her feet. “So, in a sense, the place that I feel safest really is work.”
‘I was supposed to fall into the Nile. Then they realised there were crocodiles’