A Very British Break: Why star took a year off
A Very British Scandal
BBC1, Boxing Day, 9pm
The season of goodwill will hopefully last until Boxing Day. That’s when things are due to get a bit nasty.
A Very British Scandal, with Claire Foy and Paul Bettany, will explore the divorce of the Duke and Duchess Of Argyll. Once things went awry between the pair it’s fair to say they weren’t top of each other’s Christmas card list.
Golden Globe Award-winning actress Foy thinks the real Margaret Campbell, a Glasgow socialite who became an aristocrat via her troubled marriage to Ian Campbell, wouldn’t appreciate who was portraying her.
“She would have hated me, she would have been appalled,” she said. “I can almost hear her, scathing, deeply, deeply disappointed that it’s me. She had a fear of being dull, of being uninteresting. I think that the outcome of this programme should not be that people like her, I hope.”
A Very British Scandal will also explore the social and political climate of post-war Britain and look at attitudes towards women to ask whether institutional misogyny was widespread at the time.
The show has been made by the team behind the BBC’S A Very English Scandal, which starred Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw as politician Jeremy Thorpe and his lover Norman Scott.
Foy, 37, who previously played the young Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of Netflix series The Crown, and Wandavision star Bettany will be joined by Gavin & Stacey actress Julia Davis, who will portray Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava.
Foy revealed she took a “self-indulgent” break from showbusiness in 2019 in order to spend more time with Ivy Rose, her six-year-old daughter.
“It can get to a point where your body gives up,” she said. “I couldn’t keep doing job after job. It was going to get boring. At some point, somebody will say, ‘We don’t care about you any more.’
“And boring for me too – I was quite jaded. I turned down work and it’s not like I had loads of money.
“I was exhausted, at the end of my rope with lots of stuff and just went, ‘Goodbye! I can’t do this any more.’”
Returning to filming was only difficult for Wolf Hall star Foy when it came to watching herself on screen.
She said: “It’s OK looking in a mirror because it’s incremental, but if you haven’t shot anything for years, you go, ‘Woah!’”