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You’ve never done a TV series before. So why now did you decide this is the time, this is the show?
To me, it felt very familiar in a lot of ways, but I really wasn’t looking to get involved in television. In some ways I was saying to the people who represent me, “I’d love to do a television show in Brooklyn, so I can have a life with my kids.” This is not that. This is a show in London and Morocco, and it was very disruptive. Not the kind of steady job I was hoping would fall in my lap. It was something very different.
What I mean is like, probably three quarters of the way through most movies, your protagonist and your antagonist will meet or your heroine will show you her heart finally and cry a little bit or whatever — those things we can rely on, that we count on, that make us feel comfortable inside the rhythm of the movie. In this place, because we were shooting it all at once, there was no way to hold onto that rhythm. I just couldn’t keep it in my head, which I think then lead to this much wilder, unconscious and maybe more human kind of rhythm because I couldn’t organize it. I guess maybe I could have. I don’t know. If I had sticky notes all over my trailer or like a white dry erase board thing, but that didn’t sound like any fun. So instead when I watch it, the rhythm is really unusual emotionally, even just in general, the rhythm of the piece. And I really like that.
So it wasn’t just this kind of fantasy version of like, “Powerful woman. Oh, thank God. Now we’ve got parts for women that are powerful.” I’m not so interested in that, to be honest. I’m more interested in someone who feels like she can embody the whole spectrum of things, a whole spectrum of feelings and I did think that that was obvious from when I read it. I also feel like it’s always more interesting to watch someone actually learning something, to watch someone pretend to learn something, and I could tell, even though I wasn’t sure really exactly what I was going to have to learn, that in order to play her I would have to grow up a little. And so I was drawn to it for those reasons I think.
Your director Hugo Blick told me you actually pulled off the British accent better than any native could. How scary was it to take that on, and what did you do to prepare?
So, I don’t want to be bleak about this, but — look, I’m making this because I want people to think and feel about the things that the show is about. I’m not making it by myself in my living room. And so it makes a huge difference to me that there’s a possibility that many people will see it and then that they can keep seeing it when Netflix picks it up and they can watch when they like in their house and there’s an accessibility to it that means that the subject matter doesn’t have to be so incredibly accessible. It can be more complicated. It can be more difficult to swallow because it’s easier to find and take in.
“The Honorable Woman” premieres Thursday, July 31st at 10pm on SundanceTV.
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