Even actor unsure what connects her characters
Versatile Riseborough disclaims any strategy in choosing roles
“I really do wish sometimes that I could do all of this a different way,” Andrea Riseborough said. “But I suppose I just do it the way that I do it. And there are consequences.”
She paused then, pressing her lips into a thin smile. “That all sounds a bit dramatic.”
This was a March afternoon, and Riseborough,
42, a metamorphic actor with a worrying sense of commitment, was seated at a New York cafe. She is often unrecognizable from one project to the next, a combination of makeup, hairstyle (what Meryl Streep is to accents, Riseborough is to coiffure) and marrow-deep transformation.
In her two decades in the business, goaded by a tireless work ethic that sometimes saw her completing as many as five projects a year, she has amassed credits across stage, film and television. It can be hard to find a through line among those enterprises, mainstream and independent, comedy and tragedy and horror.
In 2022, for example, she starred in the sex-addled queer musical “Please Baby Please,” produced by her production company; the cockeyed interwar drama “Amsterdam”; the boisterous children’s film “Matilda: The Musical”; the bleak Scandinavian thriller “What Remains”; and the wrenching Texasset indie, “To Leslie,” for which Riseborough received her first Academy Award nomination. (That nomination was complicated by perceived campaigning irregularities, although the Academy ultimately concluded that no guidelines had been violated.) Try to connect those dots.
Riseborough can’t. She disclaims any strategy, and if she has an agenda in the roles she chooses, it is hidden very well, maybe even from herself. When I suggested she must have some strong inner core to fling herself so entirely into so many stories, so many lives, she disagreed.
“To say that I have a very stable sense of self would be a sweeping statement,” she said.
She does seem drawn to sad women, troubled women, women in extreme circumstances. That would describe her current projects: the HBO miniseries “The Regime,” in which she plays Agnes, a dictator’s handmaiden, and the PBS romantic drama “Alice & Jack,” in which she stars as Alice, a whiz financier who overcomes past trauma only to face it in the present. Her role in the movie “Lee,” which will be released later this year, may seem like a departure: She plays an editor of British Vogue. But that editor, as it happens, is instrumental in a decision about whether to publish photos of Dachau.
Riseborough didn’t see the pattern. “For the average person, there’s a lot of pain in the human experience,” she said. “It’s not so easy just to live, no matter the privileges you have or don’t. It seems that the human experience for everyone is incredibly challenging. Have I played lots of people in a lot of pain? Or have I just played a lot of people going through things?” Then she relented slightly. An actor, she admitted, could choose not to go to those places, not to take on those roles, to pursue a blither version of her craft. Riseborough has never made those choices.
She grew up in Newcastle, an industrial town in the northeast of England. Her working-class parents were passionate about theater and film, and they passed that passion on to Riseborough and her younger sister. Riseborough was an avid dancer, and in elementary school she became involved with the People’s Theater, a prominent amateur theater company and “a wonderful, joyful thing to be a part of,” she said.
She continued acting all through middle school and high school, dropping out at 17 to work a series of odd jobs. When asked why she left school, she consciously avoided a direct response.
“At the time, it was untenable,” she said. “That’s what I feel comfortable saying.”
That decision removed her from acting for a while. Plays happen at night; so did her restaurant work. But two years later, she auditioned and was accepted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. While much of the training was psychological, the course also emphasized breath work, speech and movement, physical techniques that she still relies on.
She began her professional career before she graduated and, after a few years working in theater, she began to rack up film credits: “Never Let Me
Go,” “Brighton Rock,” “Made in Dagenham.” She played a young Margaret Thatcher in the television movie “The Long Walk to Finchley” and starred as Wallis Simpson in “W.E.,” directed by Madonna.
If American audiences recognize her — and given the wigs this is a considerable “if ” — it is likely for “To Leslie,” in which she starred as an alcoholic single mother. The film, directed by Michael Morris, made just $27,000 during its initial theatrical release, but Riseborough earned a best-actress nomination, aided in part by the many Hollywood A-listers who tweeted in support. Riseborough wouldn’t say precisely whose idea it was to rally these boosters or whether the subsequent investigation tarnished the nomination. She is proud of having made the movie and happy for people to have seen it.
“What was really clear was that it touched so many people who have been touched by alcoholism so deeply,” she said.
This resonated with Marc Maron, her co-star in the film. “When you see her work, you realize that’s all she’s living for,” he said. Other actors, he said, have a practiced interview patter, a facility with the red carpet. Not Riseborough.
“There’s a whole other part of an actor’s job that she really didn’t care about, which is kind of a beautiful thing,” he said. “I don’t know what her life looks like. But the intensity she brings to the work, it feels like life or death, and that’s an amazing way to live in your art, you know?”
That way has its consequences. Riseborough broke her legs in a stunt rehearsal for the Amazon series “Zero Zero Zero.” (The timing went awry.) Other projects have made her physically ill. “It’s just a very odd profession, because it does affect you, of course, on a cellular level,” she said.
Her private life is perhaps less complicated. She and her partner, actor Karim Saleh (they met on the set of “Luxor”), split their time between Los Angeles and Paris, although she isn’t often home for long. In her rare downtime, she likes to read, to write, to wander. She is an inveterate people-watcher. “Sometimes it’s creepy,” she said. “I try not to be creepy.”
She has spent two decades without particular plans for her career. She won’t claim any plan going forward. “I feel very much at the beginning,” she said.