‘You need hurdles for a 20-year story to matter’
◆ Ahead of Channel 4’s new drama Alice & Jack, Domhnall Gleeson and Andrea Riseborough talk to Jessica Rawnsley about the importance of showing messy love stories on screen
Do soulmates exist? Is there such a thing as fatal attraction? Or love at first sight? Can you love every part of someone, even the darkness and despair?
Alice & Jack is an ode to the messy profundity and absurdity of love. Channel 4’s new drama chronicles the can’t-live-with-them, can’t-live-withoutthem turmoil of the protagonists’ love affair across 16 years.
It does not gloss over love’s mess nor the trails of destruction left in its wake – tugging at the fabric of imperfect yet undeniable human love, and offering something refreshingly different to the idealised picture of romance so often depicted on screen.
“People often roll their eyes about the notion of romance in romantic fiction or romantic movies because it seems naive or not real,” says About Time actor Domhnall Gleeson, who plays Jack in the upcoming drama.
“This is real romance because there’s mess, and there’s collateral damage, and there’s innocent bystanders and they hurt each other. And it’s difficult, but it is truly romantic in terms of finding real love in the middle of it.”
“We’re very used to seeing very narrow versions of human nature in drama and on television screens,” continues Birdman’s Andrea Riseborough, who plays Alice. “But we all experience it every day – how people are wonderfully spicy in all sorts of different ways.
“I think this is something a little different,” she continues. “It’s one of the reasons we were so passionate about it. The authenticity of this piece of writing and about the way we’ve managed to translate it to screen is that you really feel that you have absolutely no f ****** idea how this is going to work out.”
“Or if it should,” interjects 40-year-old Gleeson.
“And such is life,” continues Riseborough, 42. “There’s a sort of compelling sickness that love often holds – real deep love.”
Created by producer Victor Levin, Alice & Jack is a searingly honest, bitingly humorous portrayal of true love between two complicated, multidimensional individuals. On their first fraught meeting in a London bar, Alice interrogates the gentle Jack before whisking him off to her flat. The following morning she shows him the door before asking him not to call her.
We later discover that she is dealing with terrible trauma. The two are vastly different and yet something continues to wrench them together.
“When we meet Jack, he’s very much an open book,” says Gleeson. “He’s sort of just living out there, he’s a very open person who believes the world is a good place and you’ve just got to find the next thing and he’s very, very hopeful and naive in some ways.
“He’s had lots of tragedy in his life but he is a believer in love… But he’s just a moth to a flame with this, the love of his life, who he believes to be, and I think is, his soulmate.”
“For Alice, I think so many people go through difficult things in life and it’s easy to lean toward making one of the protagonists of any piece really good and unsullied and optimistic and morally sound,” says Riseborough. “But people who have gone through complicated things do behave quite often in quirky, sometimes brutal ways.
“And I think it’s really interesting to explore protagonists in the centre of a piece who are perhaps different – one of them has gone through an awful lot and the other one can see that – and in this lifetime have been drawn together to heal something in each other.”
“Because they’re together for so long and the series takes place over 20 years, you need proper hurdles to get over for a 20-year story to matter,” says Gleeson. “You need both characters to change a lot for a 20-year journey to matter. And so you can’t start with them both perfect and end with them both perfect, you have to start with them both really, really flawed in ways that we don’t expect. And then they find the best in each other.”
Acting romance and intimacy is not easy, and the strong existing friendship between the pair was essential to the nurturing of their tender on-screen chemistry. It is the third project Gleeson and Riseborough have worked on together, having played a couple in Never
Let Me Go and brother and sister in Shadow Dancer.
“Acting love and intimacy is a delicate thing, isn’t it?” Gleeson says, turning to Riseborough beside him.
“It is,” she affirms. “I’m happy that we went into it with trust and history and friendship because often for me – basically I’m a terrible liar – so it’s difficult to embark upon something like that that demands a certain amount of intimacy, without trust or history or a professional connection already. So that definitely made me more open to the story, to feeling secure, because it is a really vulnerable place to be. It’s a very vulnerable story to tell.”
“In the same way as the characters wash in and out of each other’s lives and affect each other, and meet up unexpectedly and keep having these amazing moments together, I’ve really felt like I’ve had that with Andrea over the years,” adds Gleeson.
So do soulmates exist?
“I feel like I have certainly found my soulmate in Karim, in my other half,” Riseborough shares. “Undeniably. There aren’t words to put to it but when you meet somebody and it’s such a profound meeting, and you’re trying to avoid it and deny it and get on with whatever’s going on on a Wednesday, the world just grinds to a halt, emotionally, spiritually, internally it just grinds to a halt in the most wonderful way. And it’s an awakening.
“And so it’s strange and extraordinary to be able to come together and tell a story and celebrate that. It’s with a friend, but it’s celebrating the core of the same, or the kernel of the same experience, I suppose.”
There’s a sort of compelling sickness that love often holds – real deep love
Alice & Jack comes to Channel 4 tomorrow at 9pm.