The beauty and glamour of the Cote d’azur – with intrigue and murder
Julia Stiles talks about the pleasure of playing scheming Georgina Clios in the new season of Riviera
In Riviera, Julia Stiles, 38, returns to her role of American art dealer Georgina Clios, who clashes with new family the Elthams as they arrive at the playground of the super rich. The actress talks ahead of the return of the turbulent
drama.
There’s a lot of anticipation around the new series. How much were you looking forward to getting started? I was really excited. I felt like we ended season one in a place where season two would be really exciting. Now we’re dealing with ‘how does this girl get away with murder?’ and it’s a lovely place to film and the cast is wonderful, so I was really looking forward to it. Will this season see the Clios family pitted against the Elthams? I think it’s all a very tangled web that has lots of Venn diagrams and crosses and alliances and betrayals. To break it down roughly – where do I begin, oh my goodness? It’s Shakespeare meets the Greeks.
They were great as actors, but the addition of the new family is really interesting because the Elthams mirror the Clios family – they’re old money, but the Clios family are new money – and all of them serve to remind us that the grapevine is very thick in the Riviera. Does Georgina really get away with murder? If Georgina thinks she can get away with secrets, it’s going to be really tricky because everybody knows everybody’s business and everybody is watching.
For a second, Georgina thinks she might have gotten away with it because nobody is quite alarmed yet, and then you introduce the Elthams and Daphne (Poppy Delevingne) already has dirt on Georgina, and Nico (Jack Fox) is certainly not somebody to be trusted.
It’s just everybody’s watching. It’s not a world where you can get away with murder – even though your character says that they can. Mystery and suspicion are two big themes in the series – do you dig deeper into your character’s past? I thought it was important to see another side to Georgina. It’s hard for me to talk about her as a character because I’m often at a loss – because she surprises me so much.
She’ll say one thing and then do another and is reckless, and I can’t really explain logically her actions, but I know that I’m compelled watching them and playing her as a character.
Everyone has the way they present themselves and Georgina is very aware of that. We need more of a window into what makes her tick, and where she comes from, just to understand who she is. I thought that seeing her go through the journey of realising that she comes from a world of lies was very helpful in understanding her. Season one ended with a huge cliffhanger, does the second series keep viewers just as gripped? I think it’s like dominoes. Because these characters are so interwoven, one person thinks that they’re in control, and so they do something, it affects the other person, who then is in control–- we’re all linked in this f ***** up way.
The surprises happen because not any one character is steering it, if that makes sense. The setting is very glamorous. Were there some moments during filming that were less than glamorous? My most glamorous and least glamorous moments were at the Eltham estate, which was this gorgeous villa that made you feel like you were in the Great Gatsby.
It was on the water – there’s a cliff going down to the water – so whenever we filmed there and whenever we wrapped at the end of the day and I was allowed to get my hair wet, I would go down and go swimming.
The crew would do that too, but they would do it at lunchtime. I would go down and go swimming but some days I was so desperate to swim I would not take my make-up off and I’d end up looking like a drowned rat.
● Season two of Riviera starts on Sky Atlantic on Thursday