Fair success

Rising star Tom Bateman talks to Janet Christie about the contemporary feel to his new ITV costume drama Vanity Fair, learning from the likes of Kenneth Branagh and why he keeps his private life private Portrait

Tom Bateman tells Janet Christie about Vanity Fair, his big budget costume drama for ITV

AA-listers, D-listers, the fashionable, the wealthy, the wannabes at the must be seen in places. Sound familiar? Today’s websites and glossies are awash with papped pics of the posh and promising, but the scene is actually London’s Vauxhall Gardens in the 1840s, a pleasure park with teeming bars and booths. The writer William Thackeray captured it all in his classic novel Vanity Fair and now it’s brought back to life with ITV’S adaptation for the big Sunday night drama slot starring Tom Bateman as Captain Rawdon Crawley. Adapted by screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes and directed by James (Liar and Broadchurch) Strong, the seven part series from ITV and Amazon Studios has Michael Palin, Suranne Jones, Frances de la Tour and Martin Clunes along with rising stars Bateman and Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharp, the social climber who fast forward to today, would have social media atwitter.

“It’s not the sort of period drama you watch and go ‘oooh, back then people did this stuff,’” says Bateman down the line from London. “It’s completely relevant to today. The storytelling alone is very fresh: I don’t think we’ve ever seen a costume drama that talks to the audience so immediately, literally looking down the camera lens at the audience. Thackeray did it too when he was writing, talking directly to the reader, and people hadn’t read anything like it. It’s a classic now, but when he wrote it, it was modern, he was a bit of a rockstar, I think we’ve captured that modern spirit and energy.

“You see Twitter and Instagram and you see the vanity and narcissism of people today, and the extent to which people pretend to have this Hollywood life, it was exactly the same then. Rawdon and Becky don’t have any money, but they have all the trappings, look the part, go to the parties. It’s like those ‘Guilty Pleasures’ columns, so and so went to this party and got drunk and kissed that person, it’s timeless.”

So there’s nothing new about titillation, gossip, excess and display in the struggle to be someone and Vanity Fair has it all. There are nobodies on the make, alliances made and lost, glamour, success and failure, the powerful and the powerless. Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke, last seen in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One) is a penniless but pretty nobody determined to use her guile to make her way and from the moment she watches Rawdon Crawley, riding in uniform on his black horse towards his family’s mansion, she has him in her sights. As no doubt will everyone watching at home on the sofa. He’s a bit dashing isn’t he, Rawdon Crawley?

Bateman laughs, embarrassed. “He is a bit, yeah. I was watching with my girlfriend and the bit in Vauxhall Gardens where the fortune teller says Becky Sharp will meet “a tall, dark, handsome stranger,” she goes, ‘is that you?’ I said ‘I think it is, I think I’m being described as a dark, handsome stranger, yeah.’” He laughs.

There’s nothing like your nearest and dearest to keep your feet on the ground, is there, and is the girlfriend he was watching it with Daisy Ridley, of Star Wars fame, who he met on the set of The Orient Express?

“Aw, you see, I don’t answer questions like that,” he says, politely. “I’m very sorry. It’s going to be an asked question I know, but I’m a bit of an old-fashioned person who keeps things private, I’m afraid. With this job people want so much from you and of course I understand, but if you