‘We’re both yappers,” says Peter Mullan, the Glaswegian actor and firebrand. “So we yapped a lot. Actors we admire. Art we admire. Politics, life, love, death, all the usual stuff.” Mullan is telling me how he and Robyn Malcolm, the New Zealand actor and firebrand, first got together. “So we did a lot of yap,” he goes on. “And we’re nice enough to give the other one time to yap.” Malcolm, seated by his side, sweetly interjects: “And we still do.”
We’re here to talk about After the Party, which Malcolm co-wrote with screenwriter Dianne Taylor. Malcolm co-stars with Mullan – although absolutely not in a “lovey-dovey way”. They play exes whose mutual distrust is fathomless. They actually have some previous in this. “We met during Top of the Lake,” says Malcolm, referring to the 2013 mystery drama. “His character was an arsehole to mine. You can do smoochy scenes with an actor you just abhor. And you can do brutal stuff with an actor you adore. We had a ball.”
Malcolm plays Penny in the six-parter, a straight-talking, unabashed, funny, morally robust schoolteacher, the sort of person who’s good at telling people how to get their acts together. Mullan is Phil, her ex-husband, with whom some appalling falling out has occurred. It unfolds pretty fast that something happened between him and a drunk minor at a party, and that’s why he’s spent five years exiled from the tightknit community in Wellington, New Zealand. Except, did it? And why do people tread so delicately around the question of Penny’s credibility? If this were any ordinary drama, Penny would be the clear heroine, risking ostracism because her courage won’t have it any other way. But it’s not ordinary at all.
Malcolm embarked on After the Party after an experience with a film Taylor had written. “It was meant for a couple in their mid 50s,” says Malcolm, who is 59. “I’d been pegged to be the wife. Then the director cast a woman 20 years my junior and Di was furious. So she said, ‘I want to write something only you can play.’”
Malcolm talks about “aspirational casting”, the idea that audiences are happy to watch characters in their 50s and 60s, but only if they’re played by actors in their 40s. Mullan’s indignation is a joy to watch. “Most definitely I look middle-aged,” says the 65-year-old. “I had a tougher paper round than a lot of American actors my age. Trying to find anyone who looks credibly of this vintage has become an issue. So many people are falling back on cosmetic surgery and facial augmentation, shall we say.
“If you’ve got people who don’t want to own up to their age in the fucking first place, how can you have a story about two people who have history? When both the main characters are going ‘What history?’ I think cosmetic surgery is screwing up the whole industry. I’ve worked with actors who are being asked to be credible and naturalistic – and they’re clearly wearing a fucking toupee.”
“Middle-aged people have history,” says Malcolm. “They’ve already fucked up two-thirds of their life. And this story is so much about the past, how people rewrite history, how they see truth.”
They had, she says, a head start making the drama in New Zealand. “While I would never go as far as to say there’s no sexism here, we’re less concerned with how women look. We’re less concerned with femininity. When I see how women are often presented on screen in New Zealand compared with Europe and America, even Australia, the difference is quite distinct.”
Later, while reading a piece about After the Party on the US film website Deadline, I’m told the show is “tapping into the zeitgeist around middle-aged women on screen sparked by Kate Winslet’s Mare of Easttown”. The two shows are nothing alike. This “zeitgeist” goes no deeper than “middle-aged women exist”.
Malcolm tells me a story about a party she was at in Cannes. “I was in jeans and a T-shirt and I had my leg up, drinking beer, probably from a can. A Frenchwoman, beautifully turned out, leaned across and said, ‘How is it that you can be so lovely and so gross all at once?’ And I took that as a compliment!”
Malcolm and Taylor wrote two-thirds of After the Party without looking for development money, because they didn’t want to have to make compromises too early. “Peter was very much part of it,” says Malcolm, turning to him. “You were my major sounding board, whether you liked it or not. I was feeding everything through him. He’s a genius writer and a genius film-maker, why wouldn’t I? Hello! Award-winning. Multi-award-winning.”
Mullan has certainly won prestigious awards as a director (Golden Lion at Venice for The Magdalene Sisters, for which he was also Bafta-nominated) and an actor (at Cannes for My Name Is Joe). When she asked if he’d play Phil, though, he initially knocked it back. “He said, ‘It’s not good enough yet. Make it better, and if you do, it’ll be an award-winner.’ So we went away and we made it better and you said yes.”
Although they debate ideas constantly, Malcolm and Mullan rarely talk shop. “Mostly,” says Malcolm, “if we’re talking about a job – and most of the time we’re doing different jobs on opposite sides of the world – it’ll be gossip or if there’s an arsehole on set. Any two people who work in the same profession, if they then went home and talked about it, they’d want to shoot each other. We want to talk about something else, usually politics.”
When they got together during the Top of the Lake shoot in 2012, Malcolm was at the vanguard of the dispute with the producers of The Hobbit, who had the New Zealand actors on contracts that weren’t up to the same standard as the US actors’ ones. She’s still outraged. “It blew up into this massive thing, where the government changed the labour laws to stop actors being able to collectively bargain. I am probably still quite burnt by that.”
Mullan, meanwhile, has a history of protest and direct action, occupying the Glasgow offices of the UK immigration service in 2006, protesting about the BBC’s approach to Gaza in 2009, a fierce supporter of Scottish independence in 2014, which he’s still fuming about. “It was a very particular form of Westminster blackmail that dates right back to the earliest days of the British empire, ‘If you leave us, we will bankrupt you. There will be a hard border.’ And most insultingly of all, ‘If you leave us, you’ll have to leave Europe.’ To be a Scottish republican, and to have your fellow citizens who you love and adore fall for that kind of shit, and then two years later fucking Brexit comes along …”
Mullan’s anti-racism and his Marxist politics seem to have been priced in. They’re all part of being a maverick and he rarely gets flak for them. But Malcolm’s outspokenness has, she thinks, damaged her standing in the past. “I shoot my mouth off a fair bit,” she says. “In New Zealand, if you’re a performer and you make the decision to stay there, you become part of the furniture quite quickly. People would prefer that they only know you as the characters you play. If you stick your neck out as a human being, and have a political voice too, it’s easy for people to be cynical.”
Between them, they have six children from previous relationships: Malcolm’s two sons are 18 and 20, Mullan has three grown-up kids with actor Ann Swan and a 16-year-old daughter with human rights activist Robina Qureshi. They also have a rather good and decidedly middle-aged explanation for why they lead such highly peripatetic actor lives. “Because we met old,” says Malcolm, “we didn’t immediately have to go, ‘Oh, shall we buy a house?’”
• After the Party is on Channel 4 and is available online, and is streaming on ABC iView in Australia
