On the set of His Dark Materials, the BBC’s arresting adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novels, the word is that Ruth Wilson, as Mrs Coulter, was genuinely frightening – when she dropped out of character to start chatting, the relief was palpable. Pullman’s villain starts this third season in a characteristically dark place: she has found a way to keep her daughter close, but only by drugging her.
“The relationship is so damaged,” Wilson says. “That is her only possibility of being able to act as a mother. And there’s some desire to keep Lyra young and innocent. Mrs Coulter’s desire, really throughout the whole series, is to prevent people from becoming adults.”
His Dark Materials is a fantasy franchise that, theoretically at least, was written for children, although as Wilson says: “Philip’s books are so adult in their themes. And the journey those kids take is into adulthood.”
She talks about her character with a marked serious-mindedness and complete lack of judgment that make me think she would make an excellent psychoanalyst – but that would be the screen’s loss, because she’s an incredible bad guy, among other things.
“It’s so much more than just villainy,” she says about Mrs Coulter. “It’s so much deeper than that. It’s not just a psychopath. There’s narcissism, there’s stuff about parenting, about the mother instinct. It’s about the idea of sexuality and sin. It’s about freedom of voice, freedom of creativity, freedom of imagination. So, yeah, I played two quite iconic psychopath villains” – the other was Alice Morgan, in Luther, opposite Idris Elba – “but they’re not one note, you know?”
Wilson is speaking by Zoom from Belfast, where she’s filming a six-parter about the Magdalene laundries, where so-called “fallen women” were confined and enslaved. As she paces about her neutrally furnished rental accommodation, looking for better wifi, it’s like being given a virtual tour by an estate agent – though the only thing that’s conventional about her is the symmetry of her features. When she speaks, she has this charismatic, restless energy; she always has an original take, and puts it in an unusual way. I bet her own flat – she lives in Bermondsey, in south-east London – has no trace of beige in it. I bet it’s full of peacock feathers and artefacts made of bone. Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much His Dark Materials.
If you haven’t read the books, well, you should. But if you’re not going to, a primer: everyone has a spirit animal, a “dæmon”, that travels alongside them. This creature does a lot of heavy lifting, in metaphorical terms, indicating self-acceptance, maturation, alienation, loss, all sorts. Coulter’s dæmon, a golden monkey, never speaks, and is animated in post-production, but there is a puppeteer in the role, Brian Fisher, even if you never hear or see him.
“We had our little rules,” Wilson says, “so in public we were the perfect team, but at home we can’t even bear to be in the same room together. Yet she deflates when she’s apart from him – it was almost like depression. None of this was explained and it wasn’t in the writing, it was just how we chose to perform in those moments, and then we’d pass that on to Russell [Dodgson, in charge of visual effects] so he could draw it. It’s a joyous way of working. Now I want a collaborator wherever I go. I want my monkey with me.”
Ruth Wilson, 40, grew up in Shepperton, in Surrey, with her father, an investment banker, and her mother, a parole officer – “politically really divided”, she says approvingly. “My mum’s a lefty; my dad always voted Tory. Which was great, because you have two sides of the story.” It was a “very privileged, easy upbringing”, with three older brothers, which is why she didn’t especially love her all-girl’s private school, and moved to a regular sixth-form college. “I missed the company of boys. I wanted to have more experiences and be among more mixed people.”
She went on to study history at the University of Nottingham, and then to Lamda, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Going into the arts was no foregone conclusion – her parents were supportive but quite surprised. Her grandfather was a writer, spy and polygamist, immortalised in the 2018 historical drama Mrs Wilson, in which Ruth plays her own grandmother, who only discovered Alexander Wilson’s other lives after his death, and even then not all of them. We pause for a second to laugh about the time a journalist suggested that maybe her own resistance to marriage was rooted in her polygamous antecedent. “Yeah, it’s genetics. You know, my grandfather died before I was even born, and my parents have a great marriage. It must have skipped a generation.”
It’s not that she doesn’t believe in relationships, she says. “I believe in connections; I’ve got a very strong relationship, and have had for a number of years. [She’s seeing an American writer, but never names him.] I believe the value of having someone in your life who understands you and sees you is enormous. And I’m so glad I have it. But I don’t believe in institutions. I feel slightly restricted by having to conform to someone else’s idea of what a relationship is, or where you should be at this time in your life. It feels dogmatic to me.”
Straight out of Lamda (pretty much), Wilson landed the title role in Jane Eyre, the 2006 BBC reboot. That adaptation was critically acclaimed for its subtlety and intelligence. She took a character who is such a landmark in the canon – jittery, a bit needy, trampled – and turned Jane Eyre into someone much more substantial and self-possessed. She was nominated for a Bafta and a Golden Globe.
Some of her most celebrated roles during the 00s were on stage – Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar, Tanya in Gorky’s Philistines at the National – and theatre remains her preference, albeit only just. “It’s your responsibility to tell that story every night, you have that immediate relationship with the audience – there’s nothing like it. For me it’s more exhilarating and collaborative and realistic than a film or TV experience.”
Allied to that interest in collaboration, Wilson likes to see things through from start to finish. “As an actor, you don’t often get that opportunity. You’re just coming in and doing your bit and then going again.” This has spurred her towards production – she was an executive producer on Mrs Wilson, and has a production company, Lady Lazarus – and she’s definitely a finisher/completer, as the management books put it. More than a decade ago, she was in Anna Christie (also at the Donmar) with Jude Law (they went out for a bit afterwards). Law gave her the novel True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies, to see if she thought it would make an interesting screenplay. They optioned it jointly (his company is called Riff Raff), and it hit the screens this year as True Things, starring Wilson.
People, especially actors, often say: “This story doesn’t get told,” but I have genuinely never seen this story in a film – a romance through the most unromantic lens conceivable, that of: “What if these overwhelming feelings aren’t real? What if I’m projecting? What if there’s nothing underneath it all?”
Wilson plays Kate, who works in a benefits office in the Kent town of Ramsgate and falls for a guy she calls Blond. “Both Harry [Wootliff, the director] and I were really interested in those early infatuation moments. You fall for people who clearly aren’t right for you. It’s intoxicating, it feels like a drug. You obsess over it, you project so much on to someone you barely know.”
I loved this film, despite what they do to Ramsgate, which is the most charming place, making it look like a dump. “Other films would shoot me wandering down the beach, listlessly looking out at the sea. But she’s so encased in her own need, so locked in her own head, that she can’t even see out.” The perspective is so subtle: Blond can’t be what she wants, not because he’s a commitment-phobe, or using her, but because she’s in that weird state, Wilson says, “where you want it so badly that you’re willing to adjust and change yourself for them. You’re offering yourself, you’re giving them what you think they want of you, constantly shape-shifting, so as not to disappoint them. But they’re in your imagination. He’s called Blond; she doesn’t even care about his name. He’s so far from what she’s trying to put him in to.”
It feels like a radical statement, from a deceptively quiet film: not everything that goes wrong is because of some bad man. “A lot of people talk about it as a gaslighting toxic relationship. It wasn’t really – she’s the driving force. She’s the one that essentially chooses, decides to pursue him. She’s gonna get what she wants. And when she does get it, she’s, like: ‘Nah, I don’t want it.’ It’s not romantic at all,” Wilson concedes, “but it felt quite honest.”
Nor is it full of nude scenes, maybe contrary to the expectations set up by the fact that it had the same intimacy co-ordinator – Ita O’Brien – as Normal People. Wilson recalls that the director said: “I don’t really care about nudity. To me, that’s not where intimacy is. Yes, nudity is beautiful and wonderful and can be really ugly, and can be all the things you want it to be, but we’re exploring the dynamic between two people – they don’t have to be naked.”
The whole culture around sex scenes has changed a lot, even in the past couple of years. It was as recently as 2018 that Wilson left The Affair – the show, also starring Dominic West, for which she won a Golden Globe – and she’s reticent about it (citing, in the past, a non-disclosure agreement), but there were some allegations at the time of inappropriate behaviour.
Wilson says intimacy coaches have completely changed the game, too, though. “We have proper discussions: what the director is hoping to achieve, what the actors feel comfortable doing and not doing, and how do we really get that anyway? What is the scene actually trying to make happen between the two people in that moment? Because it should be as conversational as any other scene. Sex is so interesting, and so detailed, and so specific to the relationship you’re having with that person and yourself at the time within your life. It really should be as nuanced as that.”
It makes total sense, and yet, at the same time, no sense at all, what this process used to be like: “Before we had #MeToo, and before we had intimacy coaches on set, there was no real conversation around sexual scenes. There wasn’t a discussion, and people felt very uncomfortable having conversations. Directors, actors, everyone, felt uncomfortable, so just inevitably we ended up with uncomfortable scenarios. It felt bizarre to me. I would be trying to have the conversations and yet there would be no answers or no comment. I found it bizarre. I felt I was talking into a void.” It must be a bit bracing, this new world, for directors who didn’t really have a narrative purpose with the sex, just wanted to see it. “It has unmasked something – there was a tendency just to put things in for titillation. That’s when it doesn’t feel genuine, it feels exploitative.”
Wilson never passes over a project without mentioning the people she felt created the atmosphere, made it work – whether that’s Jane Tranter, the executive producer on His Dark Materials (“She was the driving force of the whole thing”) or Wootliff, who, after Covid messed with the schedule, ended up shooting True Things with a six-week-old baby. “Her baby was there, suckling on set. It was quite special, actually. I’d love there to be a creche system for women.” She sees what it will take before women in creative industries can have it all as more than a pragmatic question, though. “I think about having children, and I don’t know how I could do the career I do with a child. I do question how that’s possible. The travel. The amount of mind time it takes me. I’m not sure how I could do it. I think it’s a myth that you can do it all and do it all easily. It’s just not the case – and shouldn’t be, probably. It’s a mad world, a wonderful world, and I love it. But it makes those other choices in life difficult.
“I’m a commitment-phobe generally,” Wilson says, explaining why she originally turned down the part in Luther. “Most actors are, probably.” The truth is that she’s incredibly committed, just to large, unusual things: smashing the patriarchy; remaking theatre “to make it more experiential, appeal to a younger audience”; surviving the omnicrisis through art. “It’s going to be an interesting few years, I think. Quite a tough few years. We’ll have to really reinvent theatre to get people back.”
His Dark Materials is on BBC One from 18 December, with all three seasons available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
