Upstairs and downstairs
Odessa Young has it ‘maid’ in steamy WWI period piece ‘Mothering Sunday’
“Mothering Sunday” begins not long after WWI in a rural England of afternoon tea, familial mansions and expensive roadsters.
At the center is Jane Fairchild (Australia’s Odessa Young), a maid, whose love affairs and ambitions above her working-class origins propel a film that’s been dubbed an erotic “Downton Abbey.”
As for what Mothering Sunday means, “It’s the early 20th century phrase for Mother’s Day,” Young, 24, said in a Zoom interview.
“The origin is that on one Sunday in March every year, the maids and the health service staff were given one Sunday to go spend time with their mothers. It was a day where their employers were left to fend for themselves. So a lot of funny stuff happened.
“But,” she added, “Jane, being an orphan, does not have a mother to go spend time with. She’s gifted with this really valuable day’s freedom.”
As “Sunday” weaves in and out of various periods in Jane’s life, discoveries, some startling, are made and pieces of a life are connected. Who is Jane really?
“If you’re interpreting the movie through a linear reality,” Young, a veteran of TV’s most recent version of Stephen King’s “The Stand,” answered, “I think that she’s a sponge — and an extremely non-judgmental presence. She’s our perspective into the film. She allows the plot to happen around her. But I’ve always interpreted it as ‘older Jane’ — as we know her in the scenes set in the ’40s — is actually looking back at her past, at her memories. through her younger self.”
“Sunday,” adapted from Graham Swift’s novel of the same name, is a literate British period piece with distinguished co-stars like Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. Directed by French filmmaker Eva Husson, there’s much casual nudity.
While “intimacy coordinators” are now available to assist naked actors, “Sunday” had none in Young’s scenes with Josh O’Connor (a Diana-troubled Prince
Charles in “The Crown”).
“I’ve done intimate scenes before. These were definitely a step up from that. But in regards to the Britishness of it and that kind of surprising sexuality, I think that Colin and Olivia were sent a fake script with none of the sex in it. So they’d say yes.”
Young knew early — in her case when she was 11 — she would act.
“I do really count my lucky stars every day just for having some sense of purpose at that age.
“But I never actually really considered it a job or a career until I was a little older. Then I had this very long, slow, painful realization that I needed to do this — and there was no other option.”