Uneasy lies the head that wears the crowns
Rencontre avec l’actrice britannique Olivia Colman.
La Favorite, actuellement au cinéma, est le nouveau-né de l’excentrique réalisateur grec Yorgos Lanthimos. Ce film met en scène la reine Anne d’Angleterre, qui régna sur la Grande-Bretagne au début du XVIIIe siècle. Olivia Colman, qui sera également à l’affiche de la troisième saison de la série The Crown, y tient le rôle principal, pour lequel elle vient de décrocher un Golden Globe. Rencontre avec une actrice couronnée de succès.
LONDON — Olivia Colman does not have a process. She is apologetic, since she understands that this makes for uninteresting conversation about the many fascinating characters she has played — most recently the imperious, needy, vulnerable, monstrous Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, for which she is hotly tipped as a best actress Academy Award nominee.
2. “I’m really sorry,” she said, squirming slightly, during a recent interview at a London hotel. “Let me think.” She brightened up. “I ate a lot to put on weight,” she said. “Does that count?” Colman, 44, is unshowily famous in her native Britain, where she is known both as a comedy stalwart (Peep Show) and as a forceful dramatic actor (Tyrannosaur). She is fairly often described as a national treasure, so there was general rejoicing when it was announced that Col- man would take over the role of Queen Elizabeth II from Claire Foy in coming seasons of the Netflix series The Crown.
A NEW FAME
3. Until now, she has been relatively unknown in the United States (although connoisseurs of prestige British television will know her from Broadchurch and The Night Manager). As she points out, she has never been the type to be cast in glossy leading lady roles. But The Favourite bagged the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, won Colman the best actress award and has already garnered serious Oscar chatter, dragging her squarely into the spotlight even before her coming star turn in The Crown.
4. The spotlight is not where she likes to be. “I hate the loss of anonymity,” she said. “No one teaches you how to deal with that. I now just tend to stay home because it’s so weird not to be on an equal footing with people. They know your face, and you don’t know them.”
5. Colman is the most ordinary extraordinary person you have ever met. She is smiley, charming, apologizes frequently and plays down her talents at every opportunity. Her colleagues trip over their words trying to find enough adjectives to describe her likability, decency, kindness, her friendliness to the entire crew on any shoot, her lack of divadom. After several attempts at describing how much she adored Colman, Emma Stone — one of her co-stars in The Favourite — gave up. “You can tell I’m in love with her,” she said.
UNFLATTERING ROLES
6. But Colman has no trouble being less than lovable on screen. In Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, she played a meekly religious, abused wife; in Fleabag a hilariously poisonous stepmother; in Run, a tough-as-nails inner city mother; in Broadchurch she was >>>
an often tearful, often irritable, willfully unglamorous police officer. She also seems to have little vanity about how she is perceived. For the role of Queen Anne, where she is frequently shown in deliberately unflattering scenes, she put on 35 pounds without a murmur.
7. “I much prefer these sorts of roles because there is no pressure to be something you are not, and I am obviously not glamorous,” Colman said. “For Anne, I wasn’t meant to look nice or be nice, and it was liberating and brilliant. I find it more embarrassing to try to look good. I think I’ve been fortunate to be cast in these roles, because it’s very difficult for young women or men who are seen in one way, and then they are not allowed to age.”
QUEEN ANNE
8. In The Favourite, Colman’s Anne is jowly, lumbering and capricious; a willful childwoman who screams for attention and vulnerably displays her chronic insecurity and the deep unhappiness occasioned by losing 17 children to miscarriages, stillbirth and childhood death. Anne ruled from 1702-14, during a turbulent period that saw the incorporation of Scotland and England into the single state known as Great Britain, and the country’s long involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. But the movie focuses on politics only to the extent that they influence the stratagems of the Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz) and her cousin Abigail Hill (Stone) as they scheme for the favors (all of them) of the Queen.
9. In a telephone interview, Lanthimos said that after seeing Colman’s performance in Tyrannosaur and working with her on The Lobster, he couldn’t think of anyone else to play Anne, and had shifted the schedule to accommodate her. “I don’t think I would have made the film without her,” he said. “That role is quite difficult, quite complex. It needed a lot of different qualities from an actor, the ability to alternate between different states at different times. It has a lot to do with instinct. She reads the lines and goes to the right place without thinking about it too much.”
10. Colman says she doesn’t think about it at all. She hates rehearsal periods when actors and directors break down the script and motivation. “For me, when I really love a script, it’s visceral,” she said. “I can’t explain why, but I feel it; I want to say those words, be that person.”
11. In 15 years Colman has moved from the broad comedy of Peep Show to the high seriousness of The Crown, and rumors of an Academy Award nomination for The Favourite. “I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “Talking about the Oscars seems like a silly dream. If you wake up one day and it hasn’t happened, you’ll be cross for feeling disappointed.”
“For me, when I really love a script, it’s visceral.”