Juliet Stevenson
On her new role in BBC thriller One Of Us
Juliet Stevenson has been contemplating murder.
“We were talking about this the other day and saying, ‘Would you ever kill anybody?’ I said ‘I couldn’t possibly kill anybody.’ The only exception — and it is a cliché but it’s absolutely true — is if anybody was harming my children. Then I probably would.”
It’s not the sort of discussion that comes up in the checkout queue. To be clear, Stevenson, sitting in the back row of an Edinburgh lecture theatre that’s doubling as a green room, is talking about her role in the BBC’s new thriller
One of Us. Written by Jack and Harry Williams — the brothers whose crime drama The Missing had the entire nation checking on the whereabouts of their children in the playground last year — One of Us is set in Edinburgh and the Highlands.
Stevenson stars as Louise, a single mother of three. As the series begins, her youngest son Adam has just been murdered along with his pregnant wife Grace. Grace was the daughter of the Douglases, played by Julie Graham and John Lynch, who live nearby in isolated rural Scotland.
“You’ve got one family who are working Scottish farmers,” says Stevenson. “Quite prosperous, probably owned that land for several generations. And then, we’re the English arrivistes who have taken longer to be accepted, if they’re ever really accepted at all. There has been some unease between the two families, and the only strong link they’ve had between them is this friendship and attraction between their two children Grace and Adam, who have from their earliest days adored each other. They’ve grown up together and then fallen in love and then just got married before the story starts — and then they are murdered.”
The tale bears the Williams brothers’ hallmarks of fractured families, fractured timelines, corrosive secrets and a steady, drip-fed descent into a very relatable hell. When the two families believe they have caught the murderer themselves they then have to decide what to do and, as Stevenson puts it, “they start to create their own morality. There’s something wild in these landscapes that somehow makes them think they can get away with anything”.
At 59, Stevenson’s stage and screen career contains hardly a bum note. Six years out of Rada, she was nominated for an Olivier award for her Isabella in
Measure for Measure at the RSC. Seven years after that, she won it for her Paulina in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and
the Maiden at the Royal Court. Her screen breakthrough was Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply opposite Alan Rickman in 1990, and since then she’s been Bafta-nominated for A Doll’s House, The Politician’s Wife and Accused. She is, then, an actress that anyone in her business would do well to listen to, and it is typical of her to have accepted a script from the hottest scribes of the moment and then quickly suggested how they might make it better.
“Louise is ferocious, as most women are, about her children. At the very beginning, I talked to the writers and said, I think you know we have to make her a little bit more active, because she was extremely passive in the first draft. Most women who have single-parented three children can’t really afford to be that passive.”
One of Us sees her at the head of an ensemble cast full of young talent, from Joe Dempsie to Joanna Vanderham, Laura Fraser to Georgina Campbell (winner of the award for best actress at the 2015 television Baftas). Stevenson says that the onscreen relationships can bleed in to the real-life ones, so she feels “quite maternal about all of them”. And, like any good mother, she will offer advice when she feels the need.
“What I loved about working with them,” she says, “was we all would talk collectively about a scene. So much of the way we’re expected to work in film and television is just about yourself and the camera. And kids often believe that is the right relationship: it’s just between them and the camera. No; the greatest work happens when people are working together. The most alive and electric work happens when we’re connected.”
When you think of Stevenson’s greatest work you think of Truly, Madly, Deeply or Paula Milne’s The Politician’s Wife. In both, she delivers an anthology of suffering, although her response — in the former to a lover’s death, in the latter to a husband’s betrayal — was vastly different. Although there is much more to her career than playing the wronged and the sorrowful, One of Us is another portrait of a woman in extremis. After all, it starts with a triple murder, and then things take a turn for the worse.
“The big, big challenge of this job is that since it’s so bad right from page two, where do you go? I was worried about that when I took it. I thought the world has seen enough of me crying. It’s not long since I did Accused, the Jimmy McGovern in which I lost my son and went on a grief-propelled rampage. I was laughing when I spoke to my agent. ‘God,’ I said, ‘do I really need any more grief in my career?’ People will say, ‘Oh, there she is weeping again…’ ”
But then, Stevenson is able to tap in to that stoic anger that most people recognise as grief like few others. She has two children, aged 22 and 16, with her long-term partner Hugh Brody, an anthropologist. Being a mother helps, she says. “I don’t think you have to be a mother to play a mother — I played lots of mothers before I had my own kids. But there are things that you discover when you are a mother that you just simply could not have imagined. There are several things that are very hard to imagine before you’ve actually experienced them: sex, childbirth, death and perhaps parenthood. So I think having children helps enormously in all sorts of ways, because it puts you in touch with such atavistic impulses.” Although she is probably best known for her television work Stevenson is ambivalent about the medium. “You know,” she says haltingly, knowing it doesn’t play well, “I don’t watch it.” She would prefer, she says, to read a book than a script. Yet she appreciates, not least via the scripts she does read and the roles she accepts, how much of the best writing has transferred to the small screen in shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad, as medium-sized indie films have almost ceased to exist in the face of studio consolidation and blockbuster franchises.
“American television has produced this really brilliant, complex, gamechanging level of script-writing which I don’t think we in Europe have quite got to yet.”
The potential subject matter, she thinks, is all around us. A privately educated north-London liberal, who earlier this year bought a doubledecker bus in order to help children at a Calais refugee camp, Stevenson has always been political, and she remembers the time when television could be more political too.
“I was brought up on Play for Today,” she says, of the pioneering Sixties series of working-class, hard-hitting dramas. “David Merson, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, David Hare and Trevor Griffiths were incredible writers, writing about tough stuff, edgy stuff to do with the times we were living in.
“I’m always looking for pieces that speak to our times. I mean, look at the world now: these are extraordinary times. How do you tell those stories that need to be told? That’s my mission statement.” ‘One of Us’ begins at 9pm on August 23 on BBC One