‘What a ball-buster!’ Juno Temple on sass, Ted Lasso and taking on the mafia
It is five in the afternoon and Juno Temple is giving off slumber-party vibes. Curled up close to her webcam, blond hair cascading everywhere, she is on a bed surrounded by cushions, some leopard-print, others fluffy and candyfloss-pink, in a friend’s west London flat. This is home for the 32-year-old actor whenever she is in town from Los Angeles to shoot Ted Lasso, the cocklewarming smash-hit sitcom about an ebullient US coach (Jason Sudeikis) managing an English football team. Temple plays Keeley, a smarter-thanshe-looks Wag who runs her own PR company. First seen tottering into a packed changing room to whisk her boyfriend off for a chest-wax, she is prone to philosophical posers such as: “What would you rather be – a lion or a panda?”
The show is midway through shooting its third season. Temple hasn’t been filming today – “I’ve been doing fittings and taking lots of deliveries of very nice, beautiful things,” she says in her chirpy-posh voice, right before the doorbell chimes again – though she did just receive last-minute rewrites for the next episode. “Sometimes they arrive the morning you’re filming,” she says brightly. “Keeps the brain ticking!”
What is on her mind right now, however, is her new television series, which dramatises the making of The Godfather. She squeals the show’s title back at me when I mention it – “The Offer!” – then kneels up for a moment as she starts discussing it, which has the unfortunate effect of cutting off her image at the neck. This happens whenever she gets animated; I would say something except one doesn’t want to interrupt her flow and poop the party. Better to wait for her to tire herself out and return to the horizontal again.
Temple has good reason to be excited. The Offer is a prestigious 10-part drama for Paramount+, its title a reference to the threat made by the mafia boss Don Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) in the 1972 gangster masterpiece: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The series is full of juicy stories and background colour, mostly involving the Paramount producer Robert Evans (a show-stealing Matthew Goode), who was vehemently opposed to casting the newcomer Al Pacino, as well as an assortment of mobsters determined to prevent their good name being besmirched by Hollywood.
Among the highlights is Temple’s performance as Bettye McCartt, assistant to the producer Albert S Ruddy (Miles Teller) and a largely unsung figure who was instrumental in shepherding the movie to the screen. Brandishing a pile of Godfather books taken from my own shelves, I ask Temple why McCartt isn’t mentioned in any of them. “But don’t you think that’s kind of magical?” she says,misinterpreting my question as criticism and leaping rather winningly to her character’s defence. “She’s not really a Google-able person. She is still such a mystery. I have huge respect for that because it’s so alien to us these days.”
McCartt, who died in 2013, was a former publicist who worked for Ruddy pulling strings, massaging egos and clinching deals. She went on to be an agent and manager for the likes of Tom Selleck and George Clooney, and yet her name is unfamiliar to us. Has she been written out of the picture by a male-dominated industry? Again, Temple goes on the defensive. “Whether that has or hasn’t happened in the past, the show makes clear her contribution now,” she says. “In one scene, she actually goes to see the mob boss in his club – she walks into his space, with all these mafia guys there, which is incredible. And she knows she might never walk out again. What a ball-buster she is!”
When we first meet McCartt, she is posing as a studio employee in order to elbow aside one of her rivals for the post of Ruddy’s assistant. Has Temple ever done anything sneaky to land a job? “I don’t think I’m that sneaky a person,” she says. “I remember in London trying to get into some club when I was underage, and I lied that I was in the band that was about to perform. The bouncer looked at me and said: ‘Sorry, you so aren’t of age.’” When it comes to work, she’s a straight-shooter. “Though I did once pretendto be American for a casting. I got through three stages of auditions before they realised I was English.”
Indeed she is: she grew up in a 14th-century house in Taunton, Somerset, the daughter of Julien Temple, who directed the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle and the infamous musical flop Absolute Beginners. Richard Ayoade recently played a flamboyant filmmaker based on him in Joanna Hogg’s two Souvenir movies. No, says Temple, she hasn’t watched them. Her distracted tone suggests they aren’t high on her must-see list.
She made her screen debut at the age of 10 in Pandaemonium, her father’s 2000 film about Coleridge and Wordsworth, but began her own acting career in earnest when she was cast as Cate Blanchett’s daughter six years later in Notes on a Scandal. When she announced she wanted to act, her father showed her – wouldn’t you just know it? – The Godfather. “He said: ‘You want to be an actress? OK, we’re going to watch one of the greatest films of all time.’” Her reaction? “I was catatonic afterwards.” With emotion, presumably, rather than boredom.
The early years of her career are littered with dubious comedies (St Trinian’s, Wild Child, Year One) as well as memorable turns in high-calibre movies. In Atonement, she wears a mop of frizzy ginger curls as the dazed, damaged girl who marries her childhood rapist, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. She and Brie Larson are the free-spirited teens at the end of Noah Baumbach’s comedy Greenberg, who almost persuade Ben Stiller to fly to Australia with them on a whim. Early signs of her comic pizzazz were apparent in the apocalyptic 2010 indie comedy Kaboom, in which Temple exuded screwball sassiness and killer timing, and made the wearing of a fez grounds for comparison with Judy Holliday.
As she describes it, she didn’t have her act together in the early days. “I was very grungy,” she says. “I wore ducttaped shoes, duct-taped trousers, dirty T-shirts, nose piercings, smudgy eyeliner, listened to a lot of Nirvana. I was actually very clean – I’m an epic bather – but super-grungy-looking. I remember going into a big audition for the lead in a studio movie. My agents called quite quickly afterwards and said: ‘Hey, so, um, they loved your audition but they’re not going to send it to the heads of the studio because they asked if you’d slept in your car last night.’ I was like: ‘What?’” She’s up on her knees again, face temporarily hidden from view. “My first reaction was: ‘I don’t have a driver’s licence! I don’t own a fucking car!’”
She learned a lesson that day. “I realised you had to go in already emulating what you think the character would look and smell like, even how they would shake somebody’s hand. My agents were very patient with me. I’ve got this mane of matty hair, and normally I do look like I’ve slept in my clothes. I don’t know how I manage it. As glamorous as I try to be, I always look a bit windswept.”
Put her in front of the camera in character, she says, and she’s fine. It’s just being herself that presents a problem. “I get a lot of feedback from photographers who ask: ‘Could you look a little less … frightened?’” She grimaces at the thought. “Urgh … It’s about privacy and being captured in those moments that are yours, and which you really don’t want everyone to know about.”
Perhaps her determination to guard her private life helps explain how she can be so convincingly raw and exposed on screen, as she has been in her finest performances: Afternoon Delight, say, where she plays a sex worker befriended by a married woman (Kathryn Hahn), or Killer Joe, the sleazy, sweaty trailer-park psycho-drama that teamed her with Matthew McConaughey. That picture gets her vote for the film that would most benefit from The Offer-style making-of treatment. “It marked a change in my career,” she says. “People saw a side of me they hadn’t seen before, so it did shift things for me. And I won a Bafta rising star award for it.” She collapses in cackling laughter, and raises a triumphant fist: “Still rising, still rising!”
Roles don’t come much more intense than Afternoon Delight and Killer Joe, which makes Keeley in Ted Lasso even more of a tonic. If watching the show was a balm for audiences cooped up in the pandemic, making it served the same purpose for her. “I can be a pretty dark human,” she admits. “And Keeley has such an extraordinary amount of light in her. She was so vitally important to me being kind to myself when most people couldn’t leave their houses. She taught me to be kinder to myself.”
It was only once she was back out in the world again that she comprehended the effect Ted Lasso had on the public. “It’s a show that has brought a lot of positivity to everyone,” she says. Fans discuss plot points and character motivation with her while she is grocery shopping in LA. Some refer to her instinctively by her character name. “I keep hearing: ‘Keeley! I mean Juno!’ I’m going to get T-shirts made saying: ‘You Can Call Me Keeley.’ People tell me they want to be friends with her. I’m like: ‘Me too, man!’”