Rebecca Ferguson
Nothing is impossible for the rising Swedish star.
Chances are, if you ever find yourself sitting opposite Rebecca Ferguson in a café or airport lounge, you might be the subject of a little game. “I love studying people,” she says. “If you start tuning into the conversation next to you, you can gather a lot of information from people. It’s great fun.” And if she’s sitting with a friend? “Then the bet is on,” she grins. “You can go, ‘Right, who can find out the most in 15 minutes?’”
No wonder this striking 32-year-old made such a good spy in last year’s Mission: Impossible
– Rogue Nation. Playing the enigmatic Ilsa Faust, she is arguably the only actress in the five-film franchise to give Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt a run for his dollars. Prior to that, this half-Swedish, half-English former soap actress was best known for her Golden Globe-nominated turn in BBC drama The White Queen, a brief role in Hercules and Biblical mini-series The Red Tent.
In person, she’s a charmer – full of compliments and coy looks. “I’m really goddamn lucky that Tom took a chance on me after The Red Tent,” she says, in an accent that floats between British boarding school (cultivated from watching Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect) and sultry Scandinavian. “If you don’t have a lot of credits, there’s so much involved when it comes to box office: Will you pull money in? Will you be a safe option? And he just took a gamble, didn’t he?”
Cruise simply got there first, talent-spotting the brunette, blue-eyed Ferguson before others did. Now she’s on a roll that sees her stacking up some of the most anticipated movies of the forthcoming year, including “this year’s Gone Girl” ™ – AKA Tate Taylor’s take on The Girl On The Train, and drool-worthy Jo Nesbø adaptation The Snowman, co-starring Michael Fassbender and directed by Ferguson’s fellow Swede, Tomas Alfredson. “I feel like I’ve been in heaven now for the last year,” she says without exaggeration.
Before either comes Cold War romantic drama Despite The Falling Snow and – for a change of pace – the Stephen Frears-directed tragicomedy Florence Foster Jenkins. The last time Total
Film met with Ferguson, all dolled up in Burberry on the Mission: Impossible merry-go-round, she had yet to meet with her co-star Meryl Streep, who plays Jenkins – a real-life 1920s Manhattan socialite and amateur soprano who, as she performed in front of paid-off sycophants, was blissfully unaware that she was tone deaf.
Back then, Ferguson told TF that she hoped Streep, like Cruise, would be “caring and considerate”. They eventually met, unexpectedly, when the actress had a scheduled lunch with
Hugh Grant, who plays Florence’s husband St. Clair Bayfield. “And she walked in as well. So there I am – I get two for one. I wasn’t prepared.” So how was she? “You know what? She is absolutely a humdinger!” laughs Ferguson, almost spilling her coffee. That’s one way to describe the triple-Oscar-winner.
Ferguson plays Kathleen, mistress to Grant’s seemingly charming St. Clair, though as the actress points out, with Florence suffering from syphilis, their affair may well have been sanctioned by “a quiet understanding” between husband and wife. “She probably knew about it,” she says, though it rather feeds into the theme of delusion that rattles around this increasingly moving story, as the continually off-key Florence relentlessly pursues her stage ambitions.
The tragedy comes with those around her – notably St. Clair – enabling her fantasy, usually by bribing critics. Eventually, though, it becomes impossible to hide her appalling voice from the world. “There’s a lot of sadness [ to the story],” says Ferguson. “It’s mockery. It’s what humans do best, isn’t it? Sadly enough. It is very sad. [ With syphilis too], there’s so much that she was struggling with, but yet she was pushing and pushing and pushing for her dream to come true.”
Like Florence, who can be heard still on YouTube murdering Mozart’s aria ‘Queen Of The Night’, Ferguson’s character Kathleen is real. “Hugh sent me a picture of St. Clair and Kathleen – there is one image of them. There is a little bit of information. We do know that she’s a piano teacher, we do know she came from England; so there’s a little bit but not much. Stephen [ Frears] and I would sit down and make it up with the writers and create our version of her.”
While Florence is the chance to see Ferguson in something light and quick-witted, Despite The
Falling Snow presented challenges of a different sort. Two characters, two accents, two time periods – it was anything but easy.
Directed by Shamim Sarif, who adapted the story from her own novel, the film yo-yos between 1959 Moscow and New York four decades later, with Ferguson playing Russian spy Katya and her niece Lauren in the respective segments. With the latter investigating what happened to her aunt, who falls for the American government official she’s meant to spy on, it’s a curious decision to cast Ferguson in both roles – and one made more difficult by the demands of a shooting schedule, forcing her to flip-flop between characters. “We couldn’t really shoot one character first, which was the dream scenario. But it’s a great book. I love the whole Sliding Doors effect of jumping in time.”
At least Ferguson’s own dual background prepared her for the requisite versatility. Her Anglo-Irish mother Rosemary (reportedly a distant relative of the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson) came to Stockholm in her mid-20s, where she met and married Ferguson’s Swedish father. There, she swiftly ingratiated herself into the local cultural scene. “She would hang out with ABBA and help them translate songs into English,” smiles Ferguson, who sadly never got to met Benny, Björn and co (“before my time”).
Raised bilingual, Ferguson studied singing and piano in Stockholm, but – despite a little teen modelling in commercials – acting was never her thing. “I hated it at the beginning. I didn’t like having the attention,” she says. It was only when her mother signed her up “for a random casting” for Swedish soap New
Times when she was 15 that she changed her mind. “I had the camera on me, it was like a filter – I felt very, very hidden, weirdly enough.”
While she stuck with the soap for two-anda-half years, dance was always her real passion. Learning jazz, modern, ballet, street and funk, in her early twenties she even taught Argentinean tango, after briefly turning her back on acting. She only picked it up again after being cast in a 2008 episode of Wallander, a year after she gave birth to her son Isac and moved with her then-boyfriend to Simrishamn, a small fishing village in the south of Sweden, where she still lives.
It still took another five years of working in small-scale local productions before Ferguson scored big with The White Queen. A lusty take on Philippa Gregory’s best-selling trilogy, set around the War of the Roses, Ferguson’s turn as Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward IV, broke her into the big time. “I feel like I’ve been working since I did The White Queen,” she says. “It has been back-to-back-to-back.” The most she’s managed in the last year is a brief fortnight’s respite.