Ruth Wilson – Nigel Farndale

The future dame of British theatre on fluffing lines, being a nomad, and those mesmerising eyebrows

On the mantelpiece in Ruth Wilson’s south London flat, alongside an empty bottle of champagne and a black-and-white photograph of her brother in British Army uniform, there is an arrangement of model figures, miniature ones. They appear to be a press scrum, some holding out microphones, others taking photographs, and they are forming a semicircle around an empty space. As if the subject of their attention has simply vanished.

I mean to ask her about them, but she has disappeared herself. That seems to be her way. Not vague exactly − she is known for the intelligence of her theatrical performances − but a little distracted. She talks quickly and describes herself as a bit messy.

“It’s how you prioritise in life. Cleaning isn’t all that interesting to me. I’m disorganised. I do things on a whim.”

She sure does. The 29-year-old star of stage and (small) screen is about to head off to the United States. “Yeahyeahyeah, off there for a few months, well, for a month definitely. I’m going to Minnesota to do a bit of research for Anna Christie. I’ve got four months to fill before we start rehearsing.”

Anna Christie is a little known play written in 1921 by Eugene O’Neill about a former prostitute. Wilson will be playing the title role, opposite Jude Law, when it opens in the summer at the Donmar Warehouse. “Anna is from Minnesota and then moved to the East Coast. So I’m going to try and absorb the accent as it is today and work out what it might have been like in the Twenties.”

She hasn’t met Law yet, but they have spoken on the phone. Indeed he sounded her out about the role before she had been offered it. “He rang to ask me what the director Rob Ashford is like, because I’d worked with him, and I waxed lyrical and he said that there was a play at the Donmar he was thinking of doing with him, he didn’t mention which one.

“A week later I was asked if I’d like to do Anna Christie. I thought it must be the one Rob is directing. So I rang Jude and we both said: ‘I’m in if you’re in’.”

She is certainly conscientious in preparing for her stage roles. For her first, in Gorky’s Philistines at the National in 2007, she learnt the piano. And for her Olivier Award-winning role in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (in which she starred opposite Rachel Weisz) she did a road trip around the Deep South.

“Well, it was New Orleans I wanted to see really because the town is a character in that piece. So it was important for me to soak up that atmosphere. I never go method though because that would be too exhausting and restrictive.”

Before we go further, I think we should address the eyebrow question. Wilson’s eyebrows. Her questioning, dramatic, exquisite eyebrows. They look highly sculpted and teased but apparently they aren’t. “No, they naturally grow at right angles,” says Wilson good-naturedly, “I think they come from my grandma. It’s a distinctive Wilson look.”

There is also the mouth. It is wide and from some angles her top lip is a puffy curve, from others a jutting prow. “Another distinctive feature,” she agrees.

Needless to say, neither of these features are as dramatic in person as they are on screen. But boy, on screen are they mesmerising. (Her own view is that hers is an unusual face, weird and distorted one moment, serene and beautiful the next. But whichever it is, casting directors love it.)

Although she is now being talked about as a future Dame of the theatre, her first role after leaving Lamda in 2005, was in television. A brief stint on a Channel Five sitcom led to her landing the title role of the BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre opposite Toby Stephens. Bafta and Golden Globe nominations followed.

Her old drama college friends must have loved her for that, as they followed the more conventional route into acting – signing on. “Actually, I think they were happy for me. At drama school you have great hopes but not everyone gets work. Not everyone even gets an agent because there isn’t enough work to go around.”

Jane Eyre led in turn to another television drama, Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary. Her co-star was Maggie Smith. “Dame Maggie was quite intimidating. Because I was so in awe I didn’t have the guts to ask her advice about acting. But watching the rushes, I was gobsmacked by how on it she was. So professional.”

In that role Wilson had to perform a 45-minute monologue with the camera barely leaving her face. That must have been a doddle. “Yeahyeah,” she says with a laugh. “One of the scariest things I’ve ever done.”

Well, she sure looked confident in that role. “Actually, at one moment during rehearsals I panicked and phoned Stephen and said can you cut some of this and he said: ‘No way, you never ask a writer to cut his work’.”

It was quite a theatrical performance, I note. More about theatre than television, in a funny sort of way.

“Yes, theatre is my first love, I am constantly drawn back to it. I love the medium and I think it has improved me as an actor. I think it gives you more confidence. You learn to be more expressive. Film is more superficial in that it often seems to depend upon your look more than your ability. And they are always looking for, as it were, the next look.”

It must be quite depressing for an actor who thinks they might only have landed a role because of the way they look. “Yes. I was lucky because Jane Eyre was nothing about looks, the opposite in fact.” She certainly inhabited the role, giving a nervy, self-possessed performance.

After it was screened, Wilson was inundated with offers of work, most of which she turned down. And she hasn’t exactly played safe in the roles she has accepted, mostly preferring psychopaths to femme fatales, although she manged to combine the two to great acclaim in the detective drama Luther, alongside The Wire’s Idris Elba.

But her evident abilities aside, she does have presence on screen, that hard to define quality. “Yeah, it’s an odd thing, presence. I think it is biological in some ways, to do with the structure of your face and how you use your eyes.

“I think it’s also to do with an intensity of purpose, something about having the focus of a camera on you. You cannot move too much because you will be out of shot, so it’s quite unreal as a form of performance. More static than on stage where you are using your whole body.”

When she’s on stage, does she find herself able to become the characters she plays completely, or does she become self-conscious and slip out of them? “There are moments when you lose concentration, or are distracted, you can feel as if you are having an out-of-body experience, that is where muscle memory has to kick in.”

Ever blanked? “I learn my lines quite easily but sometimes when you know you have a line coming up you can’t think what it is. My very first line on Through A Glass Darkly I fluffed.

“And it was press night! But after that line it was fine. You get into the moment and you enjoy having an audience watching you. A lot of actors are extroverts.” Is she? “In some ways, yes. I’m quite outgoing and brash and loud. Not shy. I like spending time with a company. All the banter.”

Yet she goes off travelling on her own. “That’s different. I’m not afraid of my own company. I haven’t got a mortgage or kids, so now is the time to explore.” But why alone? There was mention of a boyfriend not long ago, but she doesn’t seen to have any emotional ties now. “I usually travel alone because most of my friends aren’t in the industry and they can’t take chunks of time off in the way I can. I am a bit of a nomad. On your own you have to say yes to things, engage a lot more.”

She certainly seems driven. While she was reading history at Nottingham University she met Carrie Cracknell, who now runs the Gate Theatre in London. They formed a company together and brought a play, The Hush, to the Edinburgh Fringe that ended up being taken to New York and London.

Wilson grew up in Middlesex, with a probation officer mother and a fund manager father. She attributes her confidence to being the younger sister to three brothers. “I must have been a really annoying little sister. Always trying to outdo them. Bit of a tomboy.” Any insecurities at all? “Some, because I’m late twenties and I don’t know what the rest of my life holds. I don’t really plan. I just see what happens.”

And her emotional landscape? “My emotions are contained. I emote in my work but don’t cry much otherwise. I’m level headed, I guess. Someone said last night ‘I can never really work you out. You’re a bit guarded’, but I don’t think I am.”

In Small Island she had to do a sex scene, but made sure it was written into her contract that there would be no nipples in shot. “You have to be careful because those images are on the internet forever. There’s a time and a place for sex scenes, you have to decide whether they are justified.”

Speaking of nudity, she believes you are encouraged to believe that success is associated with fame, wealth and beauty, but it shouldn’t be. “Surveys of schoolgirls show that the person they most want to be is Jordan, but what has her career got to do with creativity or achievement? It’s empty.”

And that, perhaps, explains the arrangement of paparazzi figures on her mantelpiece.

James Blunt

30 March 2021 5:06 pm8 February 2022By Nigel FarndaleIn Interview0 Comments

It could be the homes around the world; his military bearing; or that he’s our biggest musical export since Elton. For whatever reason, being called annoying, a philanderer or – worse – middle class doesn’t exactly keep James Hillier Blount awake at night. Nigel Farndale met him

It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.

The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.

A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.

But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.

Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.

His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.

As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.

‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’

He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’

His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’

He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’

Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’

His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.

Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.

Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’

As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.

Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’

They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’

As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’

He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’

On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’

I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?

‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.

As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.

He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’

Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’

Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’

He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’

He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’

He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.

It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.

On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.

‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.

Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’

I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’

He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’

Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’

Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’

He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’

Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’

In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.

Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.

‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’

Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.

When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?

‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’

We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.