‘There was cruelty and unpleasantness’: Emily Watson on school, stardom and sex scenes in her 50s
Emily Watson had big plans to turn up for our interview looking immaculately made up, but then family members started getting sick and her morning fell apart. “When my husband’s ill, chaos descends,” she says, with a sigh. Despite this, she doesn’t seem ruffled. If anything, she is serene and calm, her skin glowing and those expressive blue eyes as piercing and soulful in life as they are on screen.
We meet at the BFI Southbank in London, a regular haunt of hers over the years, to talk about her new film God’s Creatures. Dressed in a short black dress, a black corduroy jacket and a black and white scarf, she has a gentle presence. In the film, she plays Aileen, a devoted mother whose love for her son, Brian (Paul Mescal), is tested when he is accused of rape by an old flame, Sarah (Aisling Franciosi).
Set in a remote Irish fishing village, the gothic drama is a gut punch, its muted sense of dread building to a grim climax. Watson is captivating as a woman torn between doing the right thing and her instinctive desire to protect her family. “She loves her son too much and always has – it’s obsessive,” she says, sipping coffee. “He’s been enabled by that love and has become manipulative.”
It’s the latest in a long line of complex and demanding characters. Watson, 56, has a quiet magnetism that is fascinating to watch, relaying vast oceans with a look. And she can turn emotional turmoil into something white-hot and visceral, whether it’s as the careworn mother in Angela’s Ashes or the determined nuclear physicist in
HBO’s series Chernobyl.
To prepare for her role as Aileen, the manager of a seafood processing plant, Watson learned to gut salmon (“Truly gross”), fillet mackerel and haul oysters. Filming took place while Ireland was still in strict lockdown. The cast had to isolate in separate cottages on the Donegal coast and got to know each other over Zoom before rehearsing in an abandoned hotel for 10 days.
After being cooped up for so long, Watson couldn’t wait to let loose. “We’d been sitting on our backsides for a week and there happened to be a ball in the room [where we rehearsed],” she says. “So I said: ‘Let’s start throwing the ball.’ I didn’t realise Paul’s a GA [Gaelic Athletic] superstar. Then we played hide and seek. We just went around and screamed. It was really fun.”
Watson had no idea who Mescal was when she received the script. “I was like: ‘Who’s this? Oh, he’s in a thing that’s quite popular. I’ll go and watch that.’” After she had binged Normal People, the BBC drama that made him an instant heart-throb, she was converted. The decision to cast him as the darkly enigmatic Brian, she says, was inspired. “Because the entire world is in love with him. They can understand why Aileen is like, he’s perfect and can do no wrong. He is a very, very lovely man. To work with somebody who’s that talented and so eager and inquisitive was a treat.”
She compares the film, which was co-directed by Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, to a Greek tragedy with a timely message about sexual assault. When the allegations come to light, the tight-knit community rallies round Brian, leaving Sarah out in the cold. “We are a society that has allowed that and the woman has no agency in that situation,” Watson says.
She reflects on the #MeToo movement. “The conversation on sexual assault has become louder and clearer over the last few years. You really have to pay due to those women who were the first ones who stood up and went: ‘This happened, join me.’ That was incredibly brave to start that ball rolling. The conversation has been big, but has there been any change?” She brings up Sarah Everard, who was murdered by Wayne Couzens, a Metropolitan police constable, in 2021. “It feels like this is a systemic problem that is baked into the way all our institutions are structured.”
Having acted in several stage productions as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Watson’s first role in film was Breaking the Waves, a harrowing psychological drama by the Danish auteur Lars von Trier. She was sensational; a hurricane of raw emotion as Bess, the deeply religious wife of an oil rig worker who asks her to have sex with other men after he is paralysed in a freak accident. It was a challenging role that required full-frontal nudity. “It was pretty terrifying,” she admits. The role gained Watson her first Oscar nomination.
Offers came flooding in from Hollywood after that. But even then, she could sense that it was not a safe place to linger and decided to remain in London. “My background was in theatre. I was a bit of a snob about the whole spandex universe and wary of Hollywood. I got out there and went: ‘This just doesn’t smell right.’ I think I’ve been proved right. You’re not really quite sure why everything feels a bit off.” She remembers clearly this “sense of not being allowed to be yourself and be free”. It was a familiar feeling that reminded her of her childhood, she says. “So I think my bullshit radar is pretty alert.”
Childhood – is she talking about the School of Economic Science (SES)? “Yes,” she says. Watson’s parents, an architect and an English teacher, were members of SES, a controversial organisation influenced by orthodox Hinduism and alleged to be a cult. It ran St James, the west London school Watson and her older sister, Harriet, attended. In 2005, an inquiry into the partnering boys’ school found evidence of criminal assaults on pupils that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While the inquiry centred on the boys’ school, the judge said that there had been complaints of verbal humiliation and pupils being struck at the girls’ school.
“There was extreme behaviour, cruelty and unpleasantness that was very damaging for some people,” says Watson. “I’m sure it’s a very different place now, but [the SES] was a very young organisation that had no protection built in for the welfare of children.
“There are very beautiful things around it as well that you learn as you’re growing up. I was quite conflicted. I think those organisations keep people close through fear. A lot of religions work in that way. It’s a lot of unravelling to try and see the wood for the trees.”
As a child, Watson was “dutiful, well-behaved and curious”. The family lived in north London and didn’t have