As I am walking down Dean Street to meet Ben Whishaw at the Soho Hotel, an awkward thought occurs to me.
We are supposed to be discussing Women Talking, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, Women Talking, which is about, yes, women talking. Specifically, it’s about women working out how to respond to an epidemic of horrifying male sexual violence in an ultra-orthodox religious community. It’s up for two Academy Awards: Best #MeToo Allegory and Best Adapted Deconstruction of the Patriarchy. Whishaw is the only adult male in a starry female ensemble (Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand…) and his character’s function is basically to shut up and take notes.
So we will be men talking about women talking. Go us! But Whishaw being the Crown Prince of Awkwardness; naturally this awkwardness has already occurred to him.
‘It’s a bit of a difficult one, isn’t it?’ he says, shifting awkwardly in his chair. He’s dressed in all black, with heavy glasses and copious gemstones on his fingers, and his voice is the voice that my two-year-old son squeezes out of a talking teddy bear most nights (‘It’s nice being a bear. Especially a bear called Paddington’). And my goodness, if you thought this man was compelling in Hamlet, or A Very English Scandal, or This is Going to Hurt, or that sketch where Paddington has tea with the Queen — well, you should see him shifting awkwardly in a chair.
His green eyes dart from side to side with reptilian speed. His fingers perform a baroque ballet that would take others years of training. In the novel Women Talking, his character, August, admits: ‘I don’t have a catchy method of conversing and yet unfortunately suffer on a minute-to-minute basis the agony of the unexpressed thought’ — and well, you can see why they cast Whishaw. He has a gift for bringing an inner life squirming into the light. The phrase he leans on most is ‘I think’: 39 times during our conversation, to be precise.
Whishaw is also very much a necessary energy in the film — which is not only about women talking, but men listening. August represents a faltering, vulnerable, hopeful and ultimately resolute masculinity that I can imagine few actors being able to pull off (he also harbours a childhood romance with Mara’s character, Ona, which I promise will break your heart into a million pieces). ‘I felt like it was a role that was asking you to just be there in a very simple way,’ Whishaw says. ‘I felt very connected to him, actually. I felt personally like it could be me. Some roles feel really, really close like that.’ And besides, the more we talk, the more clear it becomes that his thoughts go rather beyond simple categories of male and female.
The movie, adapted by Canadian director Sarah Polley, was inspired by the true story of the ‘ghost rapes’ that plagued the women of the Manitoba Colony, a remote community of Mennonite Christians in Bolivia. The females of the colony had long complained of disturbing dreams from which they woke up bruised and bleeding, often with rope burns around their wrists and ankles. Various explanations were offered: it was demons; it was God punishing them; it was ‘wild female imagination’. Ultimately, it emerged that a group of men were drugging whole households with animal tranquiliser spray and assaulting women and girls in their sleep. Eight men were arrested in 2009 and eventually convicted of more than 100 counts of rape.
I love the energy, the people, the filth of London. I find it endlessly beautiful
Polley’s script, which sticks closely to the events of the book, imagines the conversations the women of the colony might have had among themselves while the men were away posting bail for the rapists. Should they forgive? Should they fight? Should they leave? ‘I sat down and I thought, oh my God, this is just so intelligent and complex and deep, and patient and respectful to all the characters — and very moving,’ says Whishaw of his first encounter with the story. ‘It’s an unusual film, to put a discussion at the centre.’
It is down to August, a schoolteacher, to take the minutes of the meeting, since none of the women has been taught to read or write. August has been brought up outside the colony by a freethinking mother and he is not a ‘man’, in the rigidly defined terms of the Mennonites, all of whom must wear dungarees, plaid shirts and baseball caps, and till the land. But nor is he one of the women. ‘He’s not one thing or another. More and more as I get older, I realise how hard it is not to, by your nature, fit in any way at all — not to be able to conform to the world that you find yourself in.’
This fluidity is something that Whishaw, now 42, has clearly thought about a lot and has, it seems, come to a sort of peace with. He has been reading Sylvia Townsend Warner, a queer, communist mid-20th-century writer (‘she really makes me giggle’) and he is persuaded by her idea that each of us is ‘bisexual’ (as she calls it), containing both male and female. ‘I really believe that. I believe that we have the qualities that are commonly ascribed to one or the other gender, we all have them in us, and we’re all more fluid than is really discussed or acknowledged.’
When pushed, he thinks this outlook might have something to do with growing up in a female-led household: Whishaw’s parents separated when he and his twin brother, James, were seven, so he was mostly brought up by his mother. Childhood was a ‘pretty happy time’, he says. He grew up in ‘a little village in Bedfordshire’ and ‘there’s not anything very dramatic I can report’.
His little world opened up via the discovery of theatre — a production of David Hare’s Skylight was a revelation — and this prompted a move to London. ‘I have lots of friends who are falling out of love with London, but I adore it. I just love the way it looks, the energy, the people, the filth. I find it endlessly beautiful.’ He is currently living in Dalston and has been in a civil partnership since 2012, with the Australian composer Mark Bradshaw, whom he met while filming Jane Campion’s Keats biopic, Bright Star, in 2008, but: ‘I probably won’t want to talk about that, Richard, if you don’t mind.’ It was reported that the couple had split last year. He has said in previous interviews that he only came out to his friends and family in his mid-20s, and that questions of sexuality were ‘unresolved’ before then.
He now has at least one LGBTQ+ landmark to his name: in the recent James Bond film, No Time to Die, it was revealed that his recurring character, Q, was awaiting a date with a man. This was a big deal in 007-land, apparently. And he is hopeful that our ingrained ideas of gender and sexuality are, finally, beginning to melt away. ‘Something interesting is happening at the moment with fluidity and resisting boxes and categorisations and I’m really into that,’ he says. ‘I think it’s a much saner and healthier way to relate to yourself and to the world. Anything that keeps you constrained by some notion or concept of what you ought to be is going to be really damaging, I think, because you have to fight against it, or you feel a failure, because you can’t reach it, or whatever. I think if only we could let those things go, it would be really good.’
He’s back to fidgeting and honestly, I could watch that for hours. It was one of the things that the critics picked up on when Whishaw became the youngest-ever actor to play Hamlet at the Old Vic in 2004 — he was 23 — prompting some of the ravest reviews that I can remember reading: ‘This is the kind of evening of which legends are made’ (The Telegraph); ‘No Hamlet has made a more powerful or emotional impact’ (Evening Standard).
I wonder if he felt the pressure at the time? But no. ‘That was another role where I was like, this is just me, I just know this person,’ he says of the tortured prince. ‘Every line of it, I understood it. It was a joy, actually. I don’t remember it being stressful or frightening.’
And in the intervening years, you’d have to say he has fulfilled that early promise. Scanning down the Whishaw CV — Nathan Barley (2005); I’m Not There (2007); The Hollow Crown (2012); London Spy (2015) — I realise I’ve seen almost everything he’s been in, not because I’m some weird fanboy or anything (honest), but because just about everything he’s been in has been really good, up to and including Paddington 2, which everybody knows is the greatest film of all time.
And, somehow, without ever becoming a household name, Whishaw has come to occupy a particular niche in national consciousness. His signature roles — Richard II, Keats, Sebastian Flyte, Q, Norman Scott, the villain-victim of A Very English Scandal — are all concerned with Englishness in one way or another. And, via Paddington, he was part of the national psychodrama that followed the death of Her Majesty. No, he didn’t get to meet the late Queen — he received a secret email from the palace, and they recorded their bits separately. ‘I thought that she did that so brilliantly,’ he says of the Queen’s performance.
When I mention another British institution at risk of dying, the NHS, he becomes much more fiery. He came to appreciate the near-impossible duties required of those who work within it while filming the BBC adaptation of Adam Kay’s memoir, This is Going to Hurt, at the height of the Covid pandemic. ‘Literally everyone I speak to has someone who can’t be seen, someone whose parent has been sat on a bed in a corridor for days, or waiting hours or days for ambulances to come. I mean, I don’t understand how we’re all not on the streets, basically.’ Such is the toxic side of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ spirit: ‘Put up with it and don’t say anything.’
The people who govern us don’t believe in the NHS. They’re destroying it, deliberately
What does he think it would take to improve the situation? He caveats his response with the observation that he is not the Health Secretary — ‘I mean, we just did a drama about it’ — but really, he thinks it’s a question of belief. ‘It can’t be that hard to support it and fund it properly — but they don’t believe in the NHS as an idea, do they, basically? I guess they have to pay lip service to it because it’s popular with people. But I think ideologically, the people who are governing, ruling us, don’t believe in it. I think they’re slowly destroying it, deliberately. Lots of people think that.’
And once Whishaw finds his resolve, there is no holding him back. ‘I think it is a really, really horribly callous, cold kind of culture that they’ve created. I think we all have to resist that, in big and small ways. That’s what I think — I really do. It’s like people don’t matter, or people are expendable or superfluous, and that’s a horrifying way to think about people.’
But, he says, you can’t simply wait for politicians to fix things. ‘ We a re agents of change in ourselves, we can’t always look outside. That’s what Women Talking is about: people taking their lives into their own hands and having difficult conversations about what the right action is.’ Do not, he seems to be saying, mistake meekness for weakness.
I wonder if he thinks men will go and see the film? And not only those who are dragged along by wives and girlfriends. ‘God. I wouldn’t know,’ he says. ‘I hope men will go and see it.’ He thinks they will appreciate it, too. ‘There are lots of August-like men in the world. I meet them all the time. I mean, masculinity is as varied as anything else. Do you know what I mean?’
Yes. I think I do.
