Lesley Manville has new appreciation for TV.
LOS ANGELES — British actress Lesley Manville made a vow in her 20s to never to be typecast, no matter the consequences. She stuck to that promise for four decades and has the résumé to prove it.
In the past year, Manville landed her first Oscar nomination for her supporting role as the no-nonsense sister in “Phantom Thread” and garnered critical kudos as the coldblooded brothel proprietor of Hulu’s series “Harlots” and the ghostlike morphine addict Mary in a stage revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” that played in London, New York and Beverly Hills.
Now with the Season 2 return of “Harlots” on Wednesday, Manville resumes her role as the cutthroat businesswoman Lydia Quigley, a formidable player in 18thcentury London’s booming prostitution trade. Replete with an ice-white wig and even icier stare, Quigley is just one of many characters Manville will inhabit this year. She’s also the selfless protagonist of the British family sitcom “Mum,” a scatter-minded pixie in Disney’s forthcoming “Maleficent 2” and was recently cast as Salvador Dali’s other half, Gala, for a feature film co-starring Ben Kingsley.
During her final week of “Long Day’s Journey” in LA, Manville, 62, spoke about her life in theater, her changing relationship with television and why fame is better with age.
Q: I read that you were once hesitant about taking on television roles. Is that true?
A: I was. Television is in such a wonderful place now, but that wasn’t always the case. You had to pick and choose very carefully. I’ve always done that with all the projects but with television especially because you could really get burned. It could really do a lot of damage to your career. Yes, it was probably the biggest audience you’d get, certainly bigger than my plays, but there were risks.
Q: You’ve gradually done more and more TV productions, including the BBC period miniseries “Cranford,” “Harlots” and “Mum.” What changed?
A: TV is such a different place than it was. Writers started decamping and going to television, we’re talking like 15 years ago or more, because they couldn’t get films off the ground. Writing film scripts is very hard and it’s hard to get them made. So a lot of the great writers started going to HBO and getting TV series made, so the standard of writing now is really elevated. Television is now a feast of good writing, great acting and great directors.
“Harlots” came out around the same time as Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Both are dramas by women, starring women … and I see them as complementing one another.
Q: Because they both tackle female oppression in different ways?
A: Yes. With “Harlots,” it’s set in 1763, when one in five women in London were prostitutes. That’s a staggering statistic. But there were few other options. They couldn’t say, “I’m going to be a doctor or a lawyer.” A lot of them were doing it for reasons of independence, so they wouldn’t have to be in a hideous arranged marriage. You either got married and had children or did menial jobs and starved.
Prostitution looks so much different on screen when it’s depicted from a woman’s perspective. It’s business transaction, and the real drama in the show is how these women run their businesses — and treat one another.
In “Harlots,” people are having sex in the streets, in carriages, or in a house like Lydia’s, where she’s supplying clean, beautifully dressed girls in elaborate surroundings to men of high standing. But its about women trying not to be trapped. It looks at their limited options of being autonomous.
Q: Was that dynamic part of what attracted you to “Harlots”?
A: Honestly, it was the script. If you read a bad script, it doesn’t matter if it’s a female-led piece, with women all over the place; if it’s bad, it’s bad. You’re not going to want to do it. But Moira Buffini’s work as a writer sucked me in. She’s the series creator, and she’s written lots of the episodes. I also met Coky Giedroyc, who directed the first three episodes of Season 1 and 2, and she’s the kind of overseeing director. They didn’t have a whole lot of episodes to show me, but the script was enough. And I could see that with Samantha Morton and me and Jessica Brown Findlay at the helm of this — both actresses whose work I’d admired — this could be really good. The ingredients were all there.
Q: Lydia is such a wonderfully wicked, scary character. She couldn’t be more different than Cathy of “Mum.”
A: Cathy’s the protagonist, a mum who’s sweet and gentle and kind and giving and good. She’s the exact opposite of Lydia, which makes my life as an actor more interesting. And Dorothy Atkinson, who is in “Harlots,” is also in “Mum.” Our roles are kind of reversed. In “Harlots,” she plays the Bible-bashing Florence. In “Mum,” she plays the horrible, snobby, vile girlfriend of my brother. So when in “Harlots” I’m horrible to her, we call it Cathy’s revenge.
Q: You’ve done a lot of period roles. How much did you know beforehand about the London era that “Harlots” is set in?
A: Not a lot. It was fascinating because one of the ideas for (the series) came from a book that was made called “Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies.” It’s a real book that was produced back in the day by a guy who ran a pub in London. He wrote, like, a little directory of prostitutes, rating them, like, “Lucy who lives on Whatever Street at No.9, she’ll do this but she won’t do that. She’s got big breasts, she’s saucy, etc.” It was based on his own experience or other men’s who added to the book. The book grew as it was added to. It’s a hilarious story.
Q: Do you think coming up in the theater made you a better actor?
A: There’s no doubt about it that you learn most about acting through the theater because you’re really on your own. You cannot be edited and made to look better in the edit. You’re exposed. The audience can look wherever they want. It’s up to you to make them pay attention.