Fiona Shaw: ‘People were being shot out of cannons by the British – why aren’t we telling that story?’

‘That is really a tribute to the bonkers world we live in, where we turn millions of hours of people’s energy into an hour and a half of celluloid’ - (Supplied)

Just give me a moment.” Fiona Shaw pauses, and takes a deep, calming breath… before being plunged straight back into the topic she’s come to dread. The C-word.

“It’s hard to talk about Christmas so much, isn’t it?” she asks plaintively, in that subtle Irish brogue of hers. Many wrongly assume that the 66-year-old powerhouse actor is British, thanks to her penchant for playing characters with cut-glass English accents – stiff-upper-lip types in various guises, from chronically repressed Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter franchise to frosty and unknowable MI5 agent Carolyn Martens in Killing Eve. Today, in the London hotel room where she’s set up camp for the day, the mere mention of Christmas has her smiling – albeit with a slightly manic, desperate air.