Jennifer Ehle: 'They had to reshoot Contagion because I injected my tights'
Early on in Saint Maud, Jennifer Ehle’s wonderful, terrifying new film, a nurse describes her character Amanda rather succinctly: “Bit of a cunt.” Ehle laughs. “Amanda’s quite quicksilver,” she says, displaying slightly more tact. “She’s going through a lot. She’s on a lot of drugs, she’s bored, and she has an enormous amount of charisma and intelligence and ambition.”
Amanda is a famous dancer and choreographer, holed up in a creepy, rattling seaside mansion, where she is slowly dying of cancer. Morfydd Clark plays Maud, her carer and a recent religious convert. The pair end up at a kind of odds. In Ehle’s hands, Amanda is camp and wild. “She was so much fun to play, just a fabulous box of Quality Street.”
Fun is not necessarily the word that comes to mind when first viewing Saint Maud, a psychological horror that delves into fanaticism, trauma and loneliness. I’m not just saying this, I tell Ehle, but I loved it. “I love it,” she agrees, with genuine enthusiasm. “And there are not many things you’re in where you believe someone when they say, ‘I’m not just saying this.’ But in the case of Saint Maud, I believe you. I love – love! – horror. I can’t do the Saw movies, I don’t want to watch anyone suffer or be tortured. But I think suspense and creeping dread are great.”
Ehle is at home in upstate New York, calling from the house where she has lived for the last 18 years. She was born and mostly raised in North Carolina, though moved around a lot. Her English mother, Rosemary Harris, is an actor, and her American father, John Ehle, a writer. She says a lot of actors come from a peripatetic background. It made her good at reading a room, she says, working out “how to arrange yourself to fit in”.
She has been largely holed up with her husband and two children since December, when she finished shooting The Comey Report (she played the former FBI director’s wife Patrice). She worries that she has become socially awkward. “I’m gradually just becoming a bowl of porridge, personality-wise. I have a very limited spice shelf at the moment, in my daily interactions. I probably wouldn’t normally tell you all that. I don’t have a lot of filter going on. But there’s not a lot to filter.”
I am not sure how much she lacks a filter. Ehle is friendly and warm, but extremely precise, restarting a sentence if she is not happy that she has conveyed her meaning properly, not overly keen on talking about herself, happily batting away lazy questions. She says that when she was younger, she didn’t want to be an actor, she wanted to be a writer. Does she still hold that ambition? “I don’t know. Yes. I think I would love it, but I don’t do it, so I don’t know what that’s about. We’ll see.”
On the day we speak, it is almost 25 years to the day since the BBC’s nowclassic Pride and Prejudice first aired. “Oh yes,” she says dryly. “I have a calendar alert.” Her Lizzie Bennet turned her into a star – and people are still surprised to hear her speak with an American accent. “I really don’t get out much, and that’s even before quarantine, but sometimes, if I meet a stranger somewhere for work, I realise they must think that I’m putting on an American accent. It’s actually more embarrassing than that, because I put on a British one.”
Ehle turned 50 last year, and seems rarely to have been out of work. The common narrative of her career goes: she starred in Pride and Prejudice, then turned her back on the Hollywood life and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company instead. “Well, I don’t know,” she says. “It’s not like anyone said, ‘Come to Hollywood.’ I just was a working actor. You choose what you’re interested in and what inspires you.” Besides, she says, she joined the RSC before Pride and Prejudice came out. “So it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, I have a big hit TV show, now I’m going to the RSC.’”
She lived in London for most of her 20s, doing films, TV and theatre, before moving back to the US. In 2000, when she was 29, she won a Tony for the Broadway transfer of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. She won another in 2007, for his The Coast of Utopia trilogy, and in 2017 was nominated again for JT Rogers’ Oslo. But, while her theatre roles have been acclaimed, they have been spaced out. “That is mainly because of being a mother,” she says. She has a son, George, and a daughter, Talulah. “I don’t live in a city, so doing theatre is like moving to an offshore oil rig. Theatre is much more consuming than you remember.”
Is the acting world set up for parents? “I’ve been really fortunate, in that I’ve had babies in dressing rooms and Winnebagos. I used to haul my whole family around with me, but when they got older and were in school, obviously things change.” She pauses and hmms a bit. “I’ve definitely made choices to work a lot less, or to take parts that are much smaller, but that’s just making a reasonable choice. I don’t think that’s the profession’s fault.”
In 2009, Ehle was cast as Catelyn Stark in Game of Thrones. She filmed the notorious unbroadcast pilot, but asked to be released, and the role was filled by Michelle Fairley. She was due to do an off-Broadway play shortly after, a two-hander with John Lithgow called Mr & Mrs Fitch. “We did the pilot of Game of Thrones, then I was all ready to just go back home and be with baby Talulah, six-year-old George and my husband.” When she tried to get out of Mr & Mrs Fitch, she says, “John Lithgow wrote me a really wonderful letter, and that did it. I said, ‘OK, well, if I can wear Talulah.’ That’s how Talulah and I ended up strapped together rehearsing a play.” They remained that way until dress rehearsals.
As well as her theatre work, Ehle moved into blockbuster land with Contagion, the 2011 film that, for obvious reasons, has become one of the mustwatch movies of 2020. It was a pivotal role. “If your life’s a pinball table, Contagion was the thing that ricocheted my ball in another direction,” she says. Ehle was Dr Ally Hextall, the scientist who helps discover the vaccine that saves mankind. In one crucial scene, she bravely injects herself with the new serum. “We had to reshoot that. I’d done it through a pair of tights, and the virologist said she would have done it on bare skin.”
In March, Ehle was one of several stars who recorded a short clip for the #ControlTheContagion campaign, explaining the basics of Covid-19. “That this happened is not a surprise to a lot of people,” she says. “The fact that we – as a global community, and certainly your country and my country – were so unprepared is tragic, and horrifying, and was avoidable. Because this was known to be inevitable, at some point.”
Two people she has been speaking to these last few months are Scott Z Burns, who wrote the short film, and the epidemiologist Dr Ian Lipkin, who was scientific adviser. Is she asking them about the virus? “They’re friends and it’s something we’re all experiencing, but it’s not like we’re pow-wowing on how to fix this. I’m not, anyway.” She laughs. “I do check with Ian sometimes. Who wouldn’t, if you can text somebody who actually knows?”
Despite the state of everything, I ask what is next. “I have no idea. I’m so not in that place right now, Rebecca, I don’t know.” Earlier this year, on Instagram and YouTube, she read Pride and Prejudice cover to cover, and would like to do another book, but not a Jane Austen. She was looking at older works, out of copyright, but couldn’t find what she wanted. “I began to feel the level of privilege,” she says, “and the sexual politics. They’re not worlds I want to be visiting right now.” Then she remembers that she started with the best. “Apart from Austen. Who is just amazing.”
• Saint Maud is in UK cinemas from Friday.
I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had babies in dressing rooms and Winnebagos