As much as Claire Foy may have wished for a different ending, the Duchess of Argyll was always going to lose.
Instead, “A Very British Scandal,” which premiered last week on Amazon Prime Video, hurtles toward an inevitable conclusion, with Margaret Campbell left a ruined woman after a brutal divorce that played out in the public eye. The duke and duchess’ 1963 split was a tabloid legend, filled with sordid details of adultery, forgery and an infamous photo of Margaret on her knees performing oral sex, with the man’s face just off camera.
“It’s less slut-shaming and more the weaponizing of a woman’s sexuality, which is the oldest trick in the book of bringing a woman down or criticizing her,” Foy, who plays Margaret, told the Daily News.
“It’s so easy, as a shortcut, to demonize a woman, to say her sexuality was wrong, to say the way she expressed herself was wrong. Her husband was also having affairs and so were everybody in the aristocracy. He used her sexuality as a way of making her seem like he was the wronged party, when in reality she wasn’t doing anything particularly wrong.”
Neither Foy nor “A Very British Scandal” know whether Margaret and Ian (Paul Bettany) were really in love. It was a whirlwind romance and a quick wedding, her second, his third. She loved his house, Inveraray Castle. He loved her father’s money. Maybe they loved each other.
“She’d been proposed to so many times, she’d been engaged so many times, she’d been married once before,” Foy said. “That was part of her character: to be desired and adored and loved by men was something that she just lived for.”
As quickly as they came together, they fell apart. Her money dries up. He got drunk, angry and violent. They both look for comfort in others where they can’t get it at home.
“They’re not both going into this marriage going, ‘We’re going to be faithful to one another, fidelity is really important.’ Who is to decide whether that’s something that should be a part of everyone’s marriage? It’s up to you to write the rules of what your relationship or marriage is going to be,” Foy said.
“But when it comes out in the public domain and he pretends that was what he was in it for, that’s the biggest lie, because she knows full well that he doesn’t care who she sleeps with and when she sleeps with them.”
The Argylls’ divorce would not be traditional either. But in the ‘60s, in the aristocracy of London, their game was a scandal. Ian controlled the narrative and, knowing exactly how the game was played, painted himself as the wronged party and Margaret as the temptress bedding men up and down High Street instead of coming home at night.
The tabloids ate the story up, like Ian knew they would. Margaret’s friends shunned her, even as they were guilty of thesame proclivities. This was always how their story was going to end, and they both knew it.
“I ultimately, probably naively because of who I am, believe that in the story that we told there was a love there. It’s not conventional, but I do think they fundamentally saw something in each other that they saw something in themselves. They saw another human being in the world who saw things like them,” Foy told The News.
“When he takes it really, really nasty, it’s a realization for her that he’s not like her, and so she has to play him at his own game. She realizes how nasty she’s got to get and she doesn’t want to get that, which is why eventually she ends it and she admits to being the woman in the photograph, because she hasn’t got the desire to keep this charade up or whatever this twisted game they’re playing.”
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