Scotsman Interview
Interview: Romola Garai, actress
Published Date: 23 November 2009
By Aidan Smith
Climbing the narrow stairs of the private members’ club where I’m meeting Romola Garai, I have to ease my way past one air-kissing couple and, on the next landing, another engaged in an even more extreme bout of mwah-mwahing. Maybe they’re here for serious business but I doubt it.
• Portrait by Debra Hurford Brown
Then a few minutes into our conversation when the words “hole in the wall” waft across from a nearby table, I convince myself this is a gathering of the most frivolous people in the world – that “hole in the wall” is, in fact Hole in the Wall, the sub-prime TV game show where D-list celebs dressed in highly unflattering luge-wear contort themselves into weird shapes to avoid being pushed into a swimming pool. This is what an hour in the company of such a serious-minded actress does to you.
It’s a perfectly pleasant hour, don’t get me wrong. You could not fail to be impressed by someone so committed to their work, and so passionate about it. You would find it difficult to be frustrated by her effortless thrust and parry of your feebler questions when she offers up the wonky but devastating smile that is becoming more and more a screen fixture. As well as being serious, the 27-year-old Garai is seriously beautiful.
She’ll hate that, by the way: mention of her looks before her acting. So let’s deal with them quickly: distinguished nose; chin, equally regal; straw-blonde hair which today in London’s Soho is tied back; brilliant blue eyes. I’m assuming she’s wearing a miniskirt, although under our table I can only see long legs clad in black tights. Her black polo-neck emphasises her peaches and cream complexion, makeup-free today, and there’s a pimple on her cheek, which I immediately attribute to sunlight deprivation on account of all the swotting.
They’re looks you’ll know best from period drama. Right now, she gets to wear the biggest hats, the most precision-engineered corsets, and stockings with the most unerringly straight seams. In her multiplex breakout film Atonement she was Briony Tallis, guilty sister of the heroine, played by Keira Knightley. Last month on TV she was austentatious: as Emma in the BBC’s latest revival of Jane Austen. Now comes Glorious 39, a quality Stephen Poliakoff thriller which will make you think differently about the Second World War and Britain’s role in it.
When she was younger Garai used to fret about typecasting. “I can’t spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet,” she said in 2004, a remark which in hindsight seemed to contain something of the impatience of Austen’s obsessive-compulsive matchmaker Emma. “Oh yes I can!” says Garai now between sips of latte.
“The other day I was discussing Emma with a friend. I think I may have tried to persuade her that in my production I wore sunhats. Quite rightly she said, ‘Oh yeah? They look like bonnets to me.’ The truth is, I get historical roles; but I’m incredibly lucky that right now they all seem to be great historical roles.
“When you’re younger people are constantly worrying for you and that feeds in. You think, ‘Costume dramas are so limiting, I’m going to have such limited career.’ But in the last few years I’ve come to accept this is something I cannot change.
“Look at the last London Film Festival. All the strong parts for women were period pieces: An Education, 1960s; Bright Star, 1820s. And the contemporary films such as Prophet and 44 Inch Chest were almost exclusively male affairs. I could complain that when women are allowed to play contemporary, it’s as a romantic plot device or your body is your only stock-in-trade – and in the past I have complained. But it’s historical dramas that get financed for female audiences and I don’t really care any more. When I look at the roles I get compared to other actresses, I can’t. I’ve been doing this job for ten years and it’s been all I could possibly have hoped for.”
In that decade, Garai has been likened to Helena Bonham-Carter, dubbed the next Kate Winslet and dragged into a rivalry with Keira Knightley. There have also been comparisons with Cameron Diaz and “the sleepy-eyed pouting beauty of a young Meg Ryan”. But Glorious 39 could be the film where she starts getting exclusive star-billing – and the one to make us forget Dirty Dancing 2, a straight-to-video stinker (of which more later).
The title refers to the glorious summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of war, and a diabolical plot to keep us out of the conflict. “The aristocracy didn’t want to go to war again,” she says. “Sitting on top of the heap, it wouldn’t have been in their interests for the world to be shaken up. A lot of them were in denial about the war, and of course some of them had links with the Nazis.”
They were so in denial that the parties and balls continued, in ever more lavish style, so the film contains all the classic Poliakoff hallmarks: history, class, family secrets and a very big house in the country. “Stephen’s family were Russian Jews, so the period is of profound interest to him,” she adds. “Mine were Hungarian Jews and I love all history; I’m a history geek.” With her previous credits including the biopic Amazing Grace, about anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce, she claims a particular fascination for “shameful episodes” from our past: “I seem to be naturally attracted to anything that smacks of dirt.”
Garai’s great-grandfather left Budapest for New York in the 1920s, then moved to London where he founded the Keystone Press Agency. Her mother was a journalist before the family came along and she admits to once harbouring romantic notions of becoming a writer. “I’ve always scribbled and I still do it. I’ve written numerous scripts for films for which I think I’d be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine.” A dramatic pause. “Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I’m not a writer.”
She’s had no formal training as an actress and, in her youth, claims she didn’t even think acting was a proper job. “But that’s odd,” she says, “because I used to love theatre outings with my parents. I saw The Cherry Orchard when I was as young as 12. Even if I didn’t always understand the plays, I loved it when dark family secrets were revealed, loved the whole communal experience of theatre.” At this point Garai orders another latte and I push Dirty Dancing 2 even further down my list of questions.
She’s much less keen on revealing anything about her own family. She’s the third of four children – there’s Ralph, Rosie and Roxy as well as Romola – and the two elder siblings, are adopted. Although she’s been uncomfortable with familial matters in previous interviews, I try bringing up adoption in the context of Glorious 39 – crucially, her character, Anne Keyes, is adopted. “I’m not going to discuss personal matters,” she says, firmly.
Garai was born in Hong Kong. Her banker-father moved the family to Singapore and in the past, she’s provided good colour on the Singapore years: the servants, the swimming pool, the tennis, “always at four”, and “the Empire hangover and the sense that nothing was as good as it was in 1936″. But not today: “Let’s just say my home life was happy and leave it at that.”
We return to the current film, and the central family’s determination to maintain life (that is, privilege) at 1939 levels, and the upper class’s willingness to use spying, blackmail and even murder to achieve this. Garai says she was shocked by Poliakoff’s script, but adds: “The previous summer I’d read a history of the Spanish Civil War by Anthony Beavor so I knew about the extent to which the British government had assisted Franco and the fascists.”
Now we’re discussing military strategy. Germany’s might was exaggerated by the appeasement movement in Britain, she tells me. But although the aristos didn’t want war for reasons of self-preservation, there was a view, widely held, that we would lose. “There’s something in the British character that’s quite defeatist. What about the spirit of the Blitz? Maybe that was quite anomalous, for what is Wimbledon if not a theatre of despair?”
Garai could have learned all of this during her prodigious research, or maybe it was her bedtime reading anyway. She loves losing herself in thick books and cerebral radio programmes and the soon-to-be-everywhere smile turns to a frown when I dare to ask about the possible existence of a significant other. “I love my home, spend as much time in London as I can, and try wherever possible to avoid travelling for work. Sometimes I think I’m really badly equipped to be an actress.”
In some ways, perhaps, but not in natural ability. Her parents brought her to Britain, and Wiltshire, when she was eight. Talent-spotted in an all-female production of Measure for Measure at her boarding school, she won the part of the younger version of a character played by Dame Judi Dench in a small-screen drama. She was on the books of a modelling agency for a while, and gave up university when she landed the lead in I Capture the Castle, the film of the cherished Dodie Smith book about 1930s girls on the cusp of womanhood. It says something about her, though, that she returned to her studies when a fully fledged actress, completing her degree.
“Lazy, salacious nonsense”: Garai said that once about journalists; specifically, all those in the tabloids who suggested she and Knightley were limbering up for some kind of Bonneted Thesps’ Deathmatch after the latter had beaten Garai to a couple of prestigious roles. Eventually they were cast together in Atonement. Did they have a laugh about the rivalry between takes? “I was going to mention it but then I thought, ‘What if she hasn’t seen the stories? I’ll come across as obsessed.’ And of course I wasn’t.”
You can understand Garai’s dislike of the interview process when she reveals that a journalist – broadsheet, this time – recently misquoted her as saying she’d turned down the chance to play Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun because of her Jewish ancestry. “What I said was I’d have to talk it over with my family. But as a result of what was printed the producers said I couldn’t do the film.” So what does she think of critics, and especially those who didn’t like her Emma, describing her as “not icy enough” in the role and even “too bovine”?
“They’re for audiences and not helpful to actors, so I never read them,” she says.
Have I been lazy, salacious or nonsensical today? Have I been inaccurate? Swallowing hard, I choose this moment to ask Garai about Havana Nights, the Dirty Dancing sequel. In the past she’s seemed embarrassed by it, and for believing it might be the start of a beautiful Hollywood career, and I fear she’ll have already uttered her last word on the dancing farrago. Nothing like.
“I was told that if you wanted all those great jobs then you’d have to pay your dues to the industry. What I wasn’t told was that if the film didn’t work out, you’d be f****d. I’ve changed my view of Hollywood: I don’t want to be there. But I’ve also changed my view of Havana Nights: I’m proud of it. Have I seen it recently? No – my complimentary DVD went straight to the charity shop. Do all my friends have copies and do they quote the dialogue at me? Yes – all the time!
“Worse than that, though, it’s been featured on This American Life, my all-time favourite radio show, and an oppressively intellectual treat for culture vultures. After a clip was played the presenter, this incredible Satre-esque figure, burst into hysterics and I just wanted to die.”
Romola Garai is more relaxed than at any time today but not because she wants to continue the chat – in the spirit of the movie, at a salsa bar – but because my time is up. I predict she’ll never appear on Hole in the Wall, though if she did the outline of a question mark, elegantly formed, would suit her perfectly.
Glorious 39 is released in Scotland this Friday.
This article first appeared in The Scotsman Magazine on 21 November 2009.