Wilson learning to love the camera
Ruth Wilson is pushed to extremes of guilt and grief in The Affair. As the second season debuts, she talks to Benjamin Secher about sex, quantum physics and playing the bad guy.
Ruth Wilson has an unremarkable name and an unmistakable face. ‘‘I think I’ve got quite a weird face,’’ she tells me, across a table in a south London restaurant.
‘‘It sort of moves a lot. People have always pointed out my distinctive features – my top lip or my eyebrows, even when I was very young. They’d call me ‘skijump lip’ and all sorts of stuff; my family as much as anyone else. So I was always aware that I had these features that I couldn’t do much about.’’
For a stage actress who, at 33, has already won two Olivier awards and was this year nominated for a Tony for her Broadway debut in Constellations, that face – those architectural eyebrows, the extravagant curve of the upper lip – has proved a major asset.
‘‘I think it is the biggest gift that I’ve got,’’ she admits. Its natural expressiveness has helped her become one of the leading British theatre actresses of her generation: even in silence she has an uncanny, and deeply affecting, ability to convey a character’s innermost feelings.
‘‘I am transparent in that way. I can’t really hide anything. I can’t lie.’’ She smiles and withdraws her hands into the sleeves of her chunky woollen jumper. ‘‘Which is awful in many ways.’’
But when it comes to screen acting, different rules apply. She has achieved a successful parallel career in film and television – from her 2006 breakthrough in the title role of the BBC’s Jane Eyre, and the smoulderingly sociopathic Alice Morgan opposite Idris Elba in detective drama Luther, to smaller parts on bigger screens in The Lone Ranger, Saving Mr Banks and Anna Karenina – only by reining in her instinctive expressiveness.
‘‘How I am talking to you now, I would never do this on camera,’’ she says. ‘‘I have to pull down the amount of expression I make. Otherwise it would be too much for the screen.’’
For proof that Wilson has beaten her aversion to the camera, you need look no further than The Affair.
In the slick American drama, Wilson plays Alison, a grieving mother working as a waitress in the Long Island coastal resort of Montauk. At the start of last year’s first series, she stumbled out of the fog of grief and into a reckless affair with Noah (Dominic West), a Brooklynite on vacation at his in-laws’ beach house with his wife and four children. Wilson describes the high-concept format – in which each scene plays out twice, once from the perspective of Noah, then again from Alison’s point of view – as being an exploration ‘‘of narrative and truth and the extent to which everything is coloured by your own perception’’. West calls it ‘‘a real bonk-buster’’. (‘‘Ha!’’ says Wilson, when I quote West on this. ‘‘Of course he does.’’)
Sex was – as the title suggests – most certainly on the menu; indeed, in the first series it was dished out in portions rather more generous than one might expect from an actress who has previously criticised the glut of female nudity on our screens.
‘‘If you are going to show sex then you have to try and make it as real as possible,’’ Wilson says now. ‘‘That’s what Dom and I were pushing for. Of course The Affair should have sex in it because sex is a major part of relationships. Major. But then you need to get behind the psychology of it, make it more than titillation.’’
She says that for the actors, the build-up to a sex scene is, almost invariably, the most interesting bit. ‘‘The sex itself is a little, you know, anticlimactic.’’
As the sister of three elder brothers growing up in Surrey, Wilson was ‘‘thrown off things and pushed off things and beaten up on a daily basis’’. She attended a Catholic girls school where she was a not-quite-straight A student – ‘‘One B. Maths’’ – and captain of the netball team. ‘‘I also did rounders and athletics. If anything defined me it was sport. I didn’t do any acting then. The school show was always a musical and I hated musicals so I refused to be part of it.’’
At 16, she had a short-lived flirtation with modelling after a scout for the London-based agency, Select, spotted her working in a cafe during the school holidays. For the rest of that summer, Wilson would go up to London for castings on her days off.
‘‘I didn’t put much effort into it,’’ she says. ‘‘Four seconds, they look at a sheet of Polaroids and you are out the door. Or they look at your legs, lift up your skirt, and I instantly thought, ‘This is bizarre’. I remember a woman who would inspect your face, really stare at your skin. And all of the models that were walking through were like four feet taller than me and willowy and blonde and Polish.’’
Within six weeks, she’d landed the cover of teen magazine, Mizz ‘‘with my hair in bunches and an inane grin on my face, looking about 12 years old’’. She quit shortly after.
From school she went to Nottingham University where she read history and fell in with a theatre crowd that included Michael Longhurst who, 15 years later, would direct her in Constellations on Broadway. Then, after two years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, she almost immediately got the role in Jane Eyre and has barely been out of work since.
When work on the second season of The Affair finishes next month, she’ll probably plump for a film role, she says, but she’s sceptical of the received wisdom that Hollywood is the only destination for an actress with soaring ambition.
‘‘What, being in 15 Avengers films, is that really the ultimate goal?’’ she asks. ‘‘These days in terms of satisfaction for an actor, I’m not sure that’s where the pinnacle really is. It’s a strange industry, the film industry.’’
Although, she adds quickly, she had ‘‘the best time’’ filming The Lone Ranger, the 2013 film that was meant to launch a new mega-franchise for the Pirates of the Caribbean team. Wilson had