The Herald - The Herald Magazine
MORVEN CHRISTIE
METAMORPHOSIS, MADNESS AND ME
MORVEN CHRISTIE is a warrior: fearless, unapologetic and strong. It’s a Thursday morning and over the next hour we will run the gamut from misogyny and the darker side of social media to why she no longer cares a jot what anyone thinks about her.
The Glasgow-born actor, who returns to our screens in BBC drama The A Word this week, doesn’t do trite. She is forthright and candid, yet exudes a warmth that negates any jagged edges. Christie feels things deeply. Sometimes a little too much.
We’re here to talk about her role as Alison Hughes, a woman whose young son Joe (Max Vento) has been newly diagnosed with autism. The opening series of The A Word dealt with the fallout as Alison and her husband Paul (Lee Ingleby) struggled to get their heads around the juggernaut news.
“Series one, certainly from my character’s point of view, was a lot to do with denial,” says Christie. “Dealing with the shock and aftermath of a diagnosis and not really understanding what it means, wanting to accept it or reach out for help.
“If anything, series two is the opposite of that for Alison. She has fully embraced what it means and is open to discovering how her son’s needs change and, in turn, their family’s needs change.”
Christie, whose past roles include Grantchester and The Replacement, isn’t the sort to simply learn her lines and show up. Immersive is the word that the 36-yearold actor uses and we’re talking both-feet-in, no-holds-barred absorption.
Alison with her often abrasive manner and lack of social niceties is glorious antithesis to the central casting, pictureperfect TV mum. “I kind of admire that,” says Christie. “I feel like she woke up those traits in me a wee bit. She doesn’t apologise for herself.
“I admire that steel in her. It is definitely a female thing, isn’t it? This need to be nice, pleasing, quiet, liked, visually pleasing and all of that. But it is a construction. It is not necessary and it is a madness. It is such a waste of time and energy, and so exhausting.
“Actually, when you remove that element of worrying what people are thinking about you – and how to behave in order to make them think the right thing about you – it is incredibly liberating. You just have so much more time to spend on other stuff.”
It sounds like Christie has had an epiphany. “Definitely,” she says. “And I do think playing Alison was part of it, the reaction to her. When you are playing a character, you are not sitting outside of them and judging their behaviours. You are walking in their shoes.
“I was like: ‘OK, she doesn’t apologise for herself’ and ‘yeah, she can be quite bullish’. But Alison has been given information that she doesn’t know how to cope with and it is overwhelming. I had a lot of empathy for her.”
Not everyone felt the same. While The A Word garnered widespread acclaim for its powerful subject matter, Alison as a character polarised many viewers. Some found her fierce, no-nonsense demeanour refreshing, yet others dubbed her “selfabsorbed”, “cold” and “unaccepting”.
There were worse terms used. “There was this whole reaction to her as a ‘terrible mother’, ‘bitch’ and ‘awful woman’. I thought: ‘Wow! Walk a step in her shoes …’” says Christie. “I found it shocking. Characters are very personal to me. I always feel like I’m playing them from a place inside myself.”
How did that criticism affect Christie? “I took it really personally,” she admits. “I felt this intense need to defend her and to
defend women. I guess what that brought out in me was a quite forceful rejection of all of the nicety.
“You don’t like her? Ask yourself why you feel the need to condemn this woman. What was interesting was a lot of it came from women. That I found really hard. The way we’ve been conditioned to judge each other. I just find it so heartbreaking and sad.”
It made her realise, says Christie, how much that behaviour has become ingrained in us. “Boys are allowed to fight with each other and learn to challenge things. Girls are taught to ‘be as nice as that girl’ and ‘be as pretty as that girl’ and to constantly compare ourselves.
“I’m only realising it now, but this process has absolutely liberated me because it has enriched every single relationship in my life,” she says. “You suddenly notice: ‘Maybe I do sometimes compare myself to that friend …’ But when I don’t, I get to say: ‘Aren’t you a f****** badass!’
“I have watched my female friendships and work relationships blossom. I had great friendships before – it’s not like I wasn’t already quite a strident feminist – but it’s the subtleties.”
IT is fascinating to hear Christie talk about this butterfly from the chrysalis metamorphosis. She has become prolific in confronting misogyny and standing up for women. Many people are afraid to put their head above the parapet. Not Christie. She will valiantly call out unjust behaviour.
“I feel very passionate about it,” she asserts. “That’s what has changed. It’s not that those thoughts weren’t there before; it’s that now I won’t hold them in.
“It is important that we speak up and speak up for others too. This is something you see in actors all the time, people who have got their own back but not anybody else’s and it just infuriates me.
“I detest injustice. I’m done thinking: ‘It’s best not to say anything.’ Anybody who thinks less of me for that? Knock yourself out. There are fights that are worth having.
“When you stop caring so much about what people think of you, it crystallises things. You can start seeing what is right and what is wrong.”
Christie is warming to her theme now as we lament the negativity within some quarters of social media. She took a break from Twitter earlier this year. “Nobody knew who the f*** I was or cared and then suddenly [after The A Word] there was this weight of opinion.
“Whether it is positive or negative, I don’t want to be that engaged with people’s opinions of me. I don’t want to know if you think I’m wonderful or if you think I’m terrible. Either way it affects the way that I walk around the world.”
The constant white noise? She nods. “It just started to feel like I had given my phone number to 10,000 strangers in a pub. I don’t want to talk to 10,000 strangers by text.
“There is something about the reductiveness of 140 characters. It polarises everything. It removes nuance and context in conversation, the subtleties of thought. It makes people brash and crude. I felt it was starting to have an effect on journalism, news and politics. That is why I came off it.”
Christie reluctantly reactivated her account after a three-month hiatus. “I went back on it because someone opened up an account in my name and the only way to not have that happen was to have my own blue tick [verified] account,” she says.
“I guess now I don’t engage in things in quite the same way, but when I do, I don’t feel any sense of having to apologise for myself.”
The younger of two children, Christie was born in Helensburgh and grew up in Glasgow. Her father was a drama teacher and later a lighting designer, while her mother worked in a bank then retrained as an occupational therapist.
Childhood weekends and family holidays were spent in Aviemore. “Climbing hills and skiing,” she says. “I still love it up there.”
It perhaps isn’t a surprise that her first job was as a ski instructor. “I left school as early as I possibly could,” she says. “I had been truant so much that as soon as I hit my 16th birthday they were like: ‘Go if you want …’ and I said: ‘See you!’”
Academic life might not have been her thing, but make no mistake: Christie is a remarkably well-read and clever woman. Or as she puts it: “As much as I left school early I’m not without a brain that needs to be used.”
After trying her hand at different jobs in her late teens and early twenties (“I did a bunch of stuff: taught skiing, worked in shops, waitressed and travelled a bit …”) Christie began a communications course at Telford College in Edinburgh.
She soon clicked that her vocation lay elsewhere. “I got into the college, looked around and thought: ‘Oh, there’s actors here …’”
Christie went on to study at the Drama Centre London, although that seed had arguably been planted many years before. Her parents had met in youth theatre. Perhaps it was in her DNA?
“When I told my dad I wanted to do acting, he said: ‘I wondered how long it would take you.’ I had brought it up over the years and do remember him regularly telling me that ‘95 per cent of the profession are out of work’ and all of that.
“I would go up into the loft when I was younger. I found boxes of stuff belonging to my dad from drama school filled with plays and stage makeup, that old greasepaint which has a really particular smell to it. I was like: ‘Ah, I love this!’”
Boys are allowed to fight with each other and learn to challenge things. Girls are taught to constantly compare ourselves