Glorious 39 - Romola Garai interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
BRITISH actress Romola Garai talks to us about the joy of working with Stephen Poliakoff on pre-World War II thriller Glorious 39 and being described as the next Kate Winslet.
She also reveals how she got to grips with her character, why she never reads her reviews and the weird truth behind those Spider-Man 4 rumours!
Q. How did you become involved with Glorious 39?
Romola Garai: I was sent the script and I auditioned for Stephen [Poliakoff] three times. Obviously, when you get a covering letter and it says this is Stephen Poliakoff’s new film you just rip off the paper and read it very quickly! I was desperate to work with him. His work has really cast a very long shadow over the cultural life of Britain in the past 50 years. Shooting The Past was probably one of the first TV dramas that I remember watching as an adult and really engaging with. So, I was very excited to get the opportunity to audition for him.
Q. And was the reality of working with him as good as you’d hoped?
Romola Garai: Yeah, he’s a brilliant, brilliant man. He could be an academic. His understanding of social history in Britain is unparalleled in terms of people I’ve worked with. He’s fascinating and he’s also incredibly creatively inspiring and, more than that, he’s incredibly creatively encouraging. He’s an enabler. He’s very supportive of his actors, he likes actors… it was just such a lovely experience. He’s a kind person as well and that’s not often the case with directors. But he wants you to do well and wants the experience to be good.
Q. And he gives you six weeks of rehearsal too?
Romola Garai: Not quite six! I think it was more like three, which is still way more than I’ve ever had for a film or television… a lot more! I think because Stephen’s written plays he really understands how you can avoid any kind of confrontation on set if you’ve basically made all your creative decisions beforehand. Also, people’s performances tend to be much more bedded in. They’ve had the opportunity to work with each other. It’s not infrequent in films to be working with someone who is effectively a total stranger to you. And I think you can tell that. But people are generally quite unwilling to pay for rehearsal time on film because the money is always so tight in this country but I really feel that it makes a difference.
Q. Did you do much research?
Romola Garai: I did history A-level 10 years ago and appeasement is a footnote. It’s Munich, it’s nothing… World War II starts when Britain comes into it. So, I was relatively ignorant. I’d read the Anthony Beaver book about the Spanish Civil War and I was really, really shocked when I did how the British establishment and the government quite openly aided and abetted the fascists throughout. Really, I think there is some truth to the argument that the Spanish Civil War might have gone the other way had not Britain provided so much help for Franco. So, that was a real shock to me. But I did have that background to it, although I had to do a lot more reading to get up to speed with Stephen’s level of expertise on the period.
Q. What happened to the appeaers when Dunkirk happened?
Romola Garai: They switched sides. What’s amazing about that period of history is that, of course, there were people who felt very passionately for and against the war. There were people who were fascist sympathisers and there were people who were Churchill’s cohorts. They weren’t war-mongers necessarily but they were people who really believed that Britain had to go into this conflict, that it had no option and that if it just did a deal with Hitler, Hitler would invade anyway and things would be worse. But the vast majority of MPs, from what I could see of that time, were just stuck in the middle.
They were probably men who had fought in the First World War, had a really deep and justifiable fear of conflict and felt like they could kind of edge their way out of it and do a deal that would protect the country. They were all good motivations and their willingness to sacrifice the Jews of Europe was born out of anti-Semitism, which, although despicable, was so prevalent. So although it was a shameful thing that they weren’t willing to save Europe earlier… and had Britain gone into the war a year earlier things would have been very different, you can understand why there were so many people caught in the middle.
Q. How was reuniting with Bill Nighy, who played your father in I Capture The Castle?
Romola Garai: It was lovely and really odd. Although there’s been eight years between those two films, I Capture The Castle is also set in the ’30s and it’s also about a father who betrays a daughter’s ideals. Obviously, they are very, very different films but it was quite strange as well. We did kind of talk about how… in a way I Capture the Castle was like the best possible rehearsal period you can have for this film because we’d spent eight weeks, albeit a long time ago, establishing a father-daughter relationship for that film and it was interesting to try and put a different spin on it.
Q. Stephen has described you as the next Kate Winslet. Does that bring any kind of pressure?
Romola Garai: It’s really weird as well because I’ve been told that if he says that agree with them. I was like: “How could you possibly… how do you expect me to sit there and agree with a statement like that?” [Laughs] I mean, obviously, it’s a very flattering thing to say. But I try not to absorb too much of that stuff because if you believe that you have to believe everybody that says: “You’re really shit and shouldn’t do this!” So, you take it all with a pinch of salt.
Q. Do you read your reviews?
Romola Garai: I have done but I have got a lot better at not doing that because I think it took a long time for me to realise that as much as I respect reviews and do engage with reviewers as a viewer of the theatre, television and film it’s really unhelpful. Even if people make perceptive and interesting comments about your performance, it is so subjective and you will come in and change what you do, you can’t help it. Your desire to please… actors are people pleasers and if somebody says your vocal choice in this was ridiculous or whatever you will come back and do it differently. So, to avoid getting into a situation where you’re altering your performance way down the line you have to just not do it at all. It’s hard and I have done it in the past to disastrous consequences!
Q. Career-wise, I’ve read that you want to go into writing and do a lot with the theatre. You’ve also auditioned for Spider-Man 4…
Romola Garai: Oh God! That was the weirdest, weirdest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. The Observer has this piece called My Week where they usually get novelists to write about what they did that week… and artists and occasionally actors. I think somebody dropped out because they asked me to do it on a Saturday. It was 1,000 words and I’ve never had to do any kind of journalism like that before… it was quite a lot. So, it was sort of a half-arsed joke.
I wrote: “At the beginning of the week I went into town to put myself on tape for Spider-Man 4…” The kind of purpose of the joke was that I’m not going to get Spider-Man 4 but it’s what we have to do… and hundreds of actresses all over the world will be doing it. You get a sheet of paper, you have no idea what the script is and you just put yourself on tape and never hear anything again. But because I obviously have total innocence and naivety about the Internet, I had no idea that people would pick up on that and say: “Right, I heard that Rachel McAdams and Romola Garai are both up for Spider-Man 4!” I was like: “I think Rachel McAdams might be slightly further along that process than me!”
Q. How about writing and theatre?
Romola Garai: I do work in the theatre a lot and I’m hoping to go back to working there at the beginning of next year. It’s not my first love. I love them both but I’d say that as an audience member I prefer film. I love the theatre and I love working in the theatre but I’m a big cinefile and I love the movies. I also do scribble but to limited success! I think I find being in a room on my own quite hard, which I think a lot of actors do because what we do is so inter-active. It’s a very supportive profession… despite its reputation for being highly competitive it’s actually one of the most collaborative professions you can do in the arts because you’re always working in a team.
I think that’s why a lot of actors are attracted to it as opposed to becoming writers. I find that very, very difficult and I think if I was ever really going to be more serious about writing I’d have to try and find some way to do it with other people. I do find the silence kind of eerie.
Read our review of Glorious 39