For many actors, the thought of playing Elizabeth Taylor at the National Theatre would be unnerving enough. But for Tuppence Middleton, who hadn’t done much stage work, it must have felt even more daunting. Not least because the job came up just three months after the birth of her child. But Middleton likes a challenge, and you don’t turn down the chance to be directed by Sam Mendes.
“I wasn’t really thinking about work at that point,” she says, “but I knew my daughter would be eight months by the time we started, so I thought, yes, that feels right. For a long time, before having a baby and before Covid, I’d wanted to do more theatre. But the right thing hadn’t come along, or I hadn’t gone up for much.”
The Motive and the Cue, by Jack Thorne, centres on Richard Burton’s fraught rehearsals for the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet. Johnny Flynn is Burton, and Mark Gatiss is his director, Sir John Gielgud (both brilliant). Middleton’s Taylor is the superstar who is bored and unfulfilled in a luxury hotel room, paparazzi in the street below, while her new husband, Burton, needles and humiliates the other members of the cast. In Mendes’ production, Taylor becomes the diplomatic go-between, smoothing relations – “the voice of reason”, as Middleton puts it. “She was much smarter than people gave her credit for.”
Middleton, 36, has had numerous film and TV roles, including an episode of Black Mirror, the BBC production of War and Peace, the Netflix sci-fi series Sense8 and both Downton Abbey films. Does she share Burton’s belief that theatre acting is somehow “proper”, the pinnacle of the profession?
She always admired stage actors, she says, “because I think it’s such a physical feat. It gives you a sense of discipline and respect for the other actors, and teaches you what it is to work collaboratively.” On a film or TV set, she explains, you don’t tend to get much rehearsal time, if any, and everything is ready to shoot once you turn up to do your lines.
We meet in a restaurant near the National Theatre in London – Middleton will be on stage in a few hours. She is warm – like her character – but, unlike Taylor, completely unstarry. It took a while to become Taylor, she says. “In the rehearsal room, broad daylight, we’re doing quite sexual stuff or dancing, and you just think: ‘I’m steeling myself to be Elizabeth.’ But then you build it up.” A padded bodysuit and corset created Taylor’s curves. “For me, that was important to get into a place where I felt totally comfortable with her body and how she moves and prowls.” She and Burton “move around each other like cats”.
Taylor was so unashamedly sexy, wasn’t she? Middleton points out it wasn’t about her body. “So much of sexiness is about confidence. I thought about what made her sexy – I think it was that self-knowledge, self-assuredness, confidence. I think from a young age [Taylor had been on screen since she was 12, starring in National Velvet], she was very secure. People felt that – it radiates off screen.” It was what Burton lacked, Middleton believes. And Taylor could laugh at herself. “She knows what people think of her, she’s not stupid, and she plays on that – she also just doesn’t give a shit what people think.”
There was so much written about Taylor, “and so much judgment of her”, particularly of her eight marriages (two of them to Burton). “She felt like she just married everyone she fell in love with. Unless you’re with your high-school sweetheart, then if you marry everyone you fall in love with, you might have eight husbands. She was just, I think, at the heart of it a total romantic.” A strange combination, Middleton adds, “of being totally down-to-earth, generous, and in touch with her roots, but at the same time she had that wildly luxurious life and an appetite for everything – sex, jewellery, food at points in her life, drink”.
The sold-out play finishes in a couple of weeks, but will begin another West End run in December. Taylor, Middleton thinks, will be one of those characters that stays with her. “There’s a lot to be learned from her – her sense of self, and her big-heartedness. It coincided with a time in my life where, having a baby, having been through Covid, and re-evaluating what I want for my career, I felt like I’d never really considered myself a grown-up until quite recently.” She laughs. “I felt like Elizabeth was a part of that transition.”
Middleton grew up in Bristol, where school plays, local panto and a period in the Bristol Old Vic youth theatre intensified her desire to become an actor. She applied to Rada but didn’t get in, though it didn’t knock her confidence. “You have that naivety of youth – you just think: ‘Oh, I’ll just go to [another drama school] then.” So she moved to London anyway, and went to ArtsEd for her drama degree.
It was being out of work during the pandemic that really highlighted to Middleton that as an actor, “you’re really at the mercy of a lot of other people. You wait for someone to call you and say there’s this audition, or this job. That made me think: how do you take control of that?” She had always wanted to write and direct, and she wrote a screenplay, an adaptation of Not Before Sundown, a fantasy book by the Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo, which she is now developing and hopes to direct. She is also writing a book, something she’d always wanted to do; it’s a memoir about her experience of living with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). “I thought: what am I waiting for? Whose affirmation am I waiting for? If you do it and it doesn’t work out, then at least you tried it. I felt like I was being creative on my own terms.”
Last year, Middleton made a series for BBC Radio 4 about OCD. She is torn between being a naturally private person and wanting to talk about it and raise awareness – it would have helped her, she says, when she was younger. OCD, she points out, is one of the few mental health conditions that is “made light of. I think that’s because it’s quite hard to define because it’s such a broad spectrum of different behaviours and obsessions.” On film and TV, it tends to be someone who likes cleaning, or tidying, “so they’re easy to make fun of, I suppose. But when it causes people that amount of stress, it’s really unfair. I think that’s because it still feels like unknown territory, whereas most people have an idea of what they think depression or anxiety is.” With her book, she says: “Obviously, I only have my experience of it, and that’s definitely not going to be everyone’s experience, but I would have been really interested to hear one experience of it when I was growing up.”
The condition is characterised by obsessive thoughts and repetitive behaviours. For some people with OCD, the thoughts can be incredibly distressing, and both thoughts and compulsions can be disruptive to the point where people can’t work or maintain relationships. For Middleton, her OCD usually manifests in performing routines, mental counting, and also emetophobia, or a fear of vomiting.
It started as a child; she remembers going to bed one evening, and her mother coming up to see why she wasn’t asleep and discovering her at the doorway to her bedroom looking at anything with a corner for a count of eight. She was diagnosed with OCD by a doctor (who suggested medication, though Middleton didn’t want to take it), “and kind of just coped” throughout her teens and early 20s. She performed “structured routines”, she says, which involved mental counting, usually to eight, and tapping on objects such as light switches and the knobs on the oven. “You make bargains with yourself – if I don’t do this, something bad is going to happen to someone I love – which I think is quite a common thing.”
When Middleton made the Radio 4 series, she says, she was overwhelmed by the messages she got “because you always think that you’re the only person to have specific elements of OCD”. Finding that emetophobia was common was comforting, because it’s something she still struggles with. She heard about people who didn’t get pregnant because of their fear, and although she didn’t suffer with morning sickness – “I got lucky” – it was something she was nervous of. Hearing other experiences “were a total revelation. Maybe if we just talked about them, they’d be a bit more manageable.”
Middleton is at a point in her career where she feels more comfortable talking about the condition. “I don’t want people to feel that I’m a liability, or that anyone with OCD is a liability, because you can live alongside it and it’s fine,” she says. For her, it tends to be focused around her home life, not work, and she wouldn’t mention it to a director “unless there’s something specifically that I’m concerned about. I don’t want them to go in with an idea that it’s going to affect anything, because it never has.”
There have been periods in her life where it has been less manageable, usually when she was feeling stressed. She would have a “constant running monologue at night, worrying about illness and germs, and not being able to switch that off. And I was getting frustrated with the routines that I was doing – to watch other people just walk out of the house and shut the door was like magic to me.” She has taken medication (antidepressants are often prescribed for OCD), but she found the most helpful treatment was talking therapy. Her friends and family are supportive, she says, and it helps to have people you can talk to. “There are so many good charities, and there’s also a community online too that really works for some people.”
A good day for her, she says, is to be able to leave the house with a minimal routine, just checking doors and mentally counting on her way out. “I’d say there are more good days than bad days, definitely. But I think you always have that internal commentary.” She looks around the restaurant. “If I felt that someone looked like they were sick here, I would be watching what they were touching – which door handles? – and whether I have to wash my hands. You’re monitoring, observing all the time.” It must be tiring. “You get used to it,” she says, “but yes, sometimes you think: ‘I just want to be able to relax and switch off like other people seem to be able to do.’”
Ultimately, though she acknowledges it may not be everyone’s experience, OCD has never stopped her doing anything – from having a baby (with the Swedish film director Måns Mårlind) to taking on potentially stressful work. Or “the business of living”, as Elizabeth Taylor would put it.
“I try to push myself,” says Middleton. “I think, OK, that makes you feel a bit scared, so you should do it. I used to be much more of a procrastinator, and I’ve become better at being more fearless about trying things. Before, I was always going, ‘I can’t do it – I’ll fail and it’ll be awful.’ Now I feel more like, ‘Well, if it fails, it’s not the end of the world.’”
• The Motive and the Cue is at the National Theatre, London, until 15 July. It transfers to the Noël Coward Theatre, London, from 9 December. Tickets are on sale from 30 June.
