The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On the money
Tuppence Middleton, seductive star of the BBC’s ‘War and Peace’, is about to become an (unusual) household name
Equity, the professional actors’ union, insists that each new member register under a name different from any other already on its books. That was never going to be a problem for Tuppence Middleton.
“Most other people in my year at drama school had to go through the whole namechange thing. I didn’t have to bother,” says the 30-year-old English actress who burst into our living rooms as the scheming Hélène Kuragina in the BBC’s War and Peace.
“My grandma used to call my mother ‘Tuppence’ as a term of affection but she was worried when my parents actually put it on my birth certificate. She thought I might get bullied.”
In fact, the name has given her very little grief – except when ordering take-away coffee: “I have given up with baristas who never spell it right on my cup,” she says.
Now Tuppence Middleton is on the brink of becoming a household name. Last year, as well as War and Peace, she also appeared on British television in the BBC’s “Dickens soap opera” Dickensian as the young Miss Havisham.
Meanwhile Sense8, a wildly ambitious continent-spanning science-fiction epic, which has just returned for a second series on Netflix, has been winning her new fans further afield. In it, Middleton plays Riley Blue, a bleached blonde Icelandic DJ, one of eight disparate strangers who are telepathically linked.
Created by the Wachowski siblings, directors of The Matrix films, in collaboration with Babylon 5 writer J Michael Straczynski, Sense8 is a curious combination of eye-popping action and pop philosophy about the nature of identity.
And then there are the sex scenes: straight sex, gay sex, group sex. The now-notorious Christmas special featured an orgy involving all eight of the “sensates”.
“That scene always gets talked about because it’s something you don’t really see on TV that much – or, in fact, ever,” says Middleton, sitting cross-legged on a chair in the London hotel where she promoting Sense8’ s second season. “I’m sure it’s one of those things that will follow me around but I’m really proud of the way it was shot.” Before shooting that scene, across four locations, the director Lana Wachowski explained to the actors what she hoped to achieve. “Lana pointed out that actors never quibble over playing roles in which they have to use guns to shoot people. She said that sex is a much more natural and common part of life than violence,” says Middleton. “Most people you meet will have had sex butbu will never have handled a gun. SheS said she wanted to changechang the idea that the latter was funfu but the sex was shameful.” It wasn’t the lastl time that Middleton’s explicitexp on-screen antics would causeca a stir. In one scene of War anda Peace (or “Phwoar and Peace” as some wags dubbed it) Hélène Kuragina hasha sex with a lover on her husband’shusb dining table; another findsfin her in bed with her brother.brother “I think the idea of the ince incest was what people found shocking,”shoc she says. “And the wayw in which Hélène usedus sex as a manipulativemanipulat tool to get what she wanted.”w She’s happyha to do risqué if required and just as happy not to. “I think there’s an assumptionassumptio that if you get your kit off or show certain body parts in one pr project, you’re then going to do it in another – and that’s not necessarilynece true. You have to be 100 per cent behind