WIMPLE WOES

One of the keys to understanding Mr Dean is his hat, which he names ‘Old Felty’. Alessandro Nivola discovered the perfect hat in a secondhand shop in New York.

The nuns’ linen costumes meanwhile were all handmade, and for the actresses they gave an immediate feel of what it must be like to give up both your body and soul. ‘The physicality of the costume was important to us,’ says Gemma Arterton, who like the other actresses spent time with

real nuns for research. ‘When you’re wearing a wimple, you feel like everything is constricted. Your ears are covered, you can hardly see your face and you have a veil. So it blinkers you and you can’t really be expressive. As soon as I started playing Sister Clodagh, I felt myself getting very tight.’