Bad girls have all the fun, including me, says Pippa
PIPPA Bennett-Warner loves playing a badass ‘because they’re fun’.
Take the seemingly demure Shannon Dumani, in Sky’s terrific Gangs Of London. ‘ Suddenly she’s got this massive gun and she’s blasting away!’ said the actress. ‘No one sees it coming,’ she continued, adding (in a singsong voice) ‘because she’s so sweet and nice’.
Bennett-Warner said she could see Shannon going on a bear hunt in Gangs Of London’s second season, which has been commissioned to shoot next year, tracking down those who betrayed her. Top of the list will be Elliot Finch, her erstwhile lover, played by Sope Dirisu.
She doesn’t wield a firearm in the delicious four-part political thriller Roadkill, written by David Hare. This time, Bennett-Warner’s badass weapon of choice is her ‘smarts’.
Rochelle Madeley is a sleek and ruthless barrister who has just won a libel case for her client: a smooth-talking Tory politician played with effortless guile by Hugh Laurie. (‘My favourite cases are when i know my clients are guilty,’ Rochelle says, in an aside to a colleague.)
Rochelle is ‘pugnacious and smart’, and she liked playing her so much she paid for her costumes and came away with a snazzy black coat, a black leather shirt and a yellow polo neck. ‘i should have bought the wig and gown for Halloween,’ she joked.
Hare told me he’d wanted to work with the North Londonbased 32-year-old ‘for ever’, but she was always busy; in plays at the National, Royal Court and Donmar; or miniseries such as MotherFatherSon with Richard Gere, Billy Howle and Helen McCrory (who happens to play Conservative prime Minster Dawn Ellison in Roadkill).
i first saw her as the young Nala in The Lion King. But i started paying attention when i watched her sublime performance as Emmie Thibodeaux in Caroline, Or Change at the National Theatre in 2006. Soon after that, she enrolled at RADA. ‘i realised why people go,’ she said. ‘You end up with a little box of tools. This is such a funny industry; it’s quite flighty. But if you make the commitment, your front foot has to be very active.’
Hare called her ‘a wonderful actress’. ‘She can do anything,’ he said. Except football. Bennett-Warner laughed and said Hare had written a scene designed to demonstrate Rochelle’s aggressive streak. a football scene. But her skills were so poor they had to switch to hockey. ‘it still has that same aggression,’ she insisted.
Hare denied that any Roadkill characters are based on real politicians. But i detected echoes, in McCrory’s pM (and her wigs) of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
‘Unfortunately, we’re very short of role models in terms of women prime Ministers,’ Hare sighed, ‘so it’s inevitable, if you have a woman pM, people will think it’s one of them — and i promise you, it’s neither.’
The playwright said Roadkill is about shamelessness. ‘it used to be, when you committed a crime, there was something called disgrace. But we can see that in politics now, disgrace is no longer obtained.’
it will be on BBC One soon.