“I find all of it very embarrassing,” says Olivia Colman, sitting in the back room of a pub in Shoreditch at twilight on a Monday.
“We’ve been trying to pin you down for years,” I reply of the long pursuit to have her on the cover of British Vogue.
“I think I’ve always said no. Sorry!”
Even at the notional mention of “fame”, one of the foremost actors of her generation – a performer whose list of awards is so wildly long it has its own dedicated Wikipedia page – wrinkles her nose in that renowned way; a display of diffidence and confidence that somehow manages to be warm, acerbic, dismissive and matey all at once. God, she’s good, I think.
It’s a look that speaks to a particular sort of everyday Britishness – the “don’t be daft, have a cup of tea, sort yourself out, Love” kind. That’s why she is here today. The Norfolk-born Hollywood star will turn 50 in January as one of the most in-demand British stars working today, while having spent the majority of her career as a not-mega-famous person. As such, she has carved out a unique space for herself in the public’s affection. How would she summarise the Colman worldview, I ask? “Just be kind, and try not to be a twat,” she replies with that winning hint of a lisp. “You’re not better than anyone.”
Heaven. She really is everything one would hope: cuppa, black rollneck, jeans, big hug. Nice Bottega, I say of her chocolate-brown Intrecciato-woven leather handbag. “Is it Bottega?” she asks, surprised and pleased with this information.
For some reason, we get to talking about Judi Dench, who she adores and who I assume she is regularly likened to a younger version of. “What!” she squeals in response. “I’ve never heard that. Oh, I love that! Well, I’ve got short hair.” You could do Bond, I say. “Oh, my God!” More squeals. “The amount of time I have wanted to be M. I’m not sure who I need to call…” Bond producer Barbara Broccoli? “I know, I met her once. I wanted to go, ‘Can I be M?’ I must try to be cooler about it. Maybe she reads Vogue? Put that bit in.”
Colman’s been trying various pub foods this afternoon for a Vogue video challenge, so we find a room away from the crew for us to talk as the autumn gloaming descends. She just wrapped filming Paddington in Peru, and will star opposite Timothée Chalamet in Wonka this Christmas. She can’t discuss the latter (Sag-Aftra), but Colman is also on big screens this coming February in Wicked Little Letters, a dark comedy so British it should be sent straight to the dentist for emergency attention.
Based on a hundred-year-ago scandal that shocked the polite seaside town of Littlehampton into fear and mirth, Colman plays devout Christian Edith Swan, who begins to receive outrageous anonymous letters, presumably penned by her foul-mouthed neighbour, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). Though largely forgotten now, the police investigation and court case became national news. “At the time, it genuinely was discussed in Parliament,” says Colman, “and it was all over the broadsheets. It feels sort of current because, you know, trolling, and the horribleness of the internet, where you can write anything anonymously and put something vicious out there. It was happening then.”
But if the potential for community nastiness remains ever present, so does the joy of a curse-laden tirade. What was Colman’s favourite slur-a-thon from the letters? Naturally, she is thrilled by this question. “Oh, it was something like, ‘You pasty old crusty, old bearded piss c**t,’” she says merrily and chuckles.
One senses that, left to her own devices, merriness is Colman’s preferred setting. Her face is so deliciously animated when she’s teasing or being silly. She had a “proper laugh” on the Vogue shoot with Tim Walker, and adores the camaraderie on a film set. But while, for instance, she might have a great time meeting Adele at Madonna’s Oscars party, being the sort of famous that comes with winning an Academy Award in 2019 (for The Favourite) or playing Queen Elizabeth II to a global audience (series three and four of Netflix’s The Crown) doesn’t make her feel great.
“Yeah, we’ve moved to the countryside and it’s lovely,” she says, of her husband Ed and their three children’s decampment from Peckham to her home county, prompted by lockdown. “It’s where I’m from. We never fell out of love with London,” she wants to make clear. “I love London, but it became difficult.” How? “Just arseholes standing outside your front door, following you on the school run,” she says darkly if reasonably. Paps? “Yeah. I was scared. At one point, there were two cars chasing us and I was having a sort of meltdown, terrified. I was crying and they were laughing.”
Still, she was sad to go. “Neighbours were lovely. Well, there was one that wasn’t great,” she adds with perfect comic timing. “But there were seven women on our road and on a Wednesday night we would go dancing. We found this lovely teacher called Fiona. We’d turn up and she’d go: ‘Who do you want to be this week?’ We’d go: ‘Beyoncé!’ And she would teach us ‘Single Ladies’, and then we’d undo all of our work by going to each other’s houses after and drinking wine. I miss those girls.”
The countryside has been good for the family – including her two teens and an eight-year-old – she thinks. “I love being at home. I rarely take jobs away.” You’re never not working! She smiles. “Well, I’m trying to say no more often to have a bigger gap between jobs.” So if someone asked you to move to LA for eight months…? “No, absolutely no. I couldn’t be away for that long.” What if Martin Scorsese said can you come and lead my next film. “Oh,” she cries, throwing her hands up in the air, “can’t he come and do it in Norfolk?”
There must be something in this darkening evening in east London that keeps bringing her thoughts back to the fame “thing”. Perhaps she was never destined to be OK with it. Born in Ranworth to a nurse mother and chartered surveyor father, it was playing the titular role in a school production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at 16 that awakened the actor in her. Later, she went to teacher training college in Cambridge (not the university as is sometimes reported, and she dropped out after the first term anyway) where she used her student card to blag her way into the main uni’s acting troupe, not fully aware that it was actually the famous Footlights. But none of it was especially straightforward. Sure, she met David Mitchell and Robert Webb there, and would later go on to play Sophie in their hit sitcom Peep Show. But the year after finishing drama school at the Old Vic in Bristol her agent, Lindy King, “Put me up for a hundred auditions and I didn’t get a single one. So I’m very appreciative of work.”
“I’ve said it before,” she continues, “I’m also very grateful for the years I didn’t work. You know, it’s not a quick thing [success]. I’d have a theatre job and then go back into temping, or whatever I could do to earn money and then a little theatre job.” Was there one, big sea-change moment? She nods. “Broadchurch – everybody really watched that. That was weird. I ended up staying at home. I’m not good, turns out, at all that.”
At what exactly? “People taking what they think is a sneaky photograph. It’s always obvious, you always know, and it’s awful. Don’t do it. It happened the other day at my kids’ school, a mum took one. You can’t even go: ‘Sorry, don’t do that,’ as then they say, ‘I wasn’t! I didn’t!’ And then you look like a dick. It’s a shame,” she sighs. “I wish I was braver but I’m not.”
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Instead, she says a little sadly: “I tend to not go out.” Catching sight of me looking shocked she pats my knee. “I’ve got my lovely friends and I know [the area] very well so I can go to places where there aren’t other people. We go to each other’s houses for food and chat.” But you wouldn’t meet at a restaurant? “I don’t tend to do that. Unless you can have a little quiet place. Because you know… people.”
The annoying thing is, she actually likes people. “Well, so long as they’re not dicks,” she says, laughing. Mostly, she loves her husband, Ed Sinclair, now a screenwriter. “I know I’m very, very lucky,” she says of their 30 years together. “But also, I knew. I saw his right-hand profile and went, ‘Ah, that’s him.’ Delicious.” That was back when he was at Cambridge, studying law. She still fancies him like mad. “He’s my best friend. I couldn’t have done any of it without Ed going, ‘Do it, we’ll be OK.’ ” A few decades in, it must be a bit of work though, surely. Aren’t all long relationships? “What, work on the marriage?” she asks, looking puzzled. “Um…” You are very bloody lucky! “I’ll say,” she says and pulls a faux smug expression.
Oh, the expressions. The sensitivity. The resolve. The humour. An hour in Colman’s company is like a romp through Britain’s emotional alphabet. Will she ever go back on stage? Her last play was Mosquitoes at the National in ’17. “Maybe when our youngest is a bit older.” She pauses. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more scared. I used to just love it. It was like my heroin, you know. But it’s quite scary now. I’ve left big gaps between doing plays. Probably left too much of a gap…” In the meantime: “I have always wanted to walk in slow motion with an explosion behind me looking cool,” she beams. Seriously, someone get Barbara Broccoli on the phone.
Wicked Little Letters will be in cinemas on 23 February 2024
The December 2023 issue of British Vogue is on newsstands from Tuesday 21 November
