Indira Varma has her pitch for a role in a future White Lotus season ready. The Indian-Swiss actor suggests Goa as a possible location, gesturing – eyebrow raised – at her complexion and quipping: “If you’re looking to cast me and you’re limited with your imagination?” It certainly doesn’t require too great a leap to envisage her haughtily sweeping through a luxury resort and devastating some hospitality underlings.
As much as Varma is raving about Mike White’s award-winning satire, she is also amazed by Jennifer Coolidge’s Golden Globes acceptance speech for it, where Coolidge reflected on how The White Lotus had given her an unlikely career rebound: “She said it all – that whole thing about tinkering along for 20 years. We’re just grafting and then this [great] stuff happens.”
Varma is more than familiar with playing the long game. Brought up in Bath by her graphic designer mother and illustrator father, she graduated from Rada straight into a breakout lead role playing a courtesan in Mira Nair’s sensuous 1996 film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. Since then it seems that she has barely had a week off. In an industry that places ruthless expiration dates on women, the 49-year-old is aware that she has been “really fortunate” in the variety of her work. Indeed, it is the ease with which she slips between prestige TV, celebrated theatre and some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises that marks Varma out. Her CV includes roles in everything from Rome to Luther to This Way Up, while she has a stellar stage reputation thanks to the likes of her Olivia in Twelfth Night, Arkadina in The Seagull and Liz in the Old Vic’s 2019 production of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, for which she won an Olivier award.
Still, Varma is probably best known for her work at the more mainstream end of the scale: as the passionate, plotting Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones and, more recently, the disillusioned double agent Tala Durith in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Both are characters perfectly matched to Varma’s ability to convey conflicting emotions and divided loyalties. “I feel like I’m always managing to be a little on the periphery in terms of the roles I’m playing,” she says of joining such pop culture behemoths (to which, this year, she is adding Dune: The Sisterhood, an HBO spin-off set 10,000 years before Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptations). Key, she says, is retaining the sense of playfulness she loves on smaller jobs, and having her own input: “The more you’ve been around, the more you know what questions need answering. Now I have the courage to ask for little changes … With Obi and Game of Thrones, there were moments where it did not feel like a monster machine. It felt like doing something small and intimate.”
Varma’s latest project may not be part of a franchise but it has epic scope. Extrapolations is an Apple TV+ anthology series from An Inconvenient Truth producer Scott Z Burns, exploring the near-future ripple effects of the climate crisis. To call it star-studded would be an understatement, with Meryl Streep, David Schwimmer, Forest Whitaker, Marion Cotillard and Sienna Miller all on the call sheet. Varma’s episode sees her play Gita Mishra, an ambitious billionaire engineer who takes action that will change humanity for ever, putting her at odds with world leaders and her tech innovator ex-husband (Edward Norton). While filming, Varma says they imagined Gita as “an Elon Musk-type character” although she concedes that interpretation may no longer be apt given Musk’s recent exploits. “This episode tackles that idea of playing God,” she says. “I was thinking about it in relation to Obi-Wan Kenobi: what are the lengths someone will go to to save a life or to save the planet? It always starts from a place of good, but where and why does it get corrupted along the line?”
Varma’s other forthcoming project could not be more different: an adaptation of Josephine Hart’s novel Damage for a three-part Netflix series due later this year. Famously adapted into a steamy film starring Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche and Miranda Richardson at the height of the 90s erotic thriller boom, the series is now titled Obsession and follows a married politician embarking on a lusty affair with his son’s girlfriend. Varma was keen that her character Ingrid, ostensibly the scorned wife, was not a tired trope. “I hope that you see somebody who is – was – a catch in her own right,” she says. “It’s not that cliche of the nubile 20-year-old … They’re equals in this marriage and they’ve got a great relationship. So why does this happen?”
Meanwhile, some of the source material’s sexual politics have been refreshed. “When I read the novel, I thought: ‘Has this really been written by a woman?’ Because it’s so from the male perspective,” says Varma. “The erotic thriller in the 90s was all about the man and objectifying women.” Now, she says, it is more balanced in questioning who is in control of the affair: “In the old days, it used to be that the woman was either this victim or else she was this harlot. This is much subtler than that.”
Obsession has retained the thriller element, though, as well as the “deep, dark pleasure you get from watching these two people embark on an illicit affair … once it starts to unravel, you can’t take your eyes away from the fallout. It’s like a ball that has started down a hill and the momentum, that one little glance that started so innocently, has caused an avalanche.” Even more intriguing, for Varma at least, was the prospect of a husband-and-wife directing duo, Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, venturing into such thorny territory: “The fact that they are looking at that erotic affair was like: ‘Wow, you’re going there? That’s really bold!’”
Conversely, Varma and her partner of more than 25 years, fellow actor Colin Tierney, haven’t worked together since they met doing Othello at the National Theatre in 1997. Years ago, when Tierney played Hamlet, “there was five seconds of ‘Oh, maybe I could play Ophelia … ’ but no,” – although now she “would love to do something fun with him”. The couple live in north London with their 15-year-old daughter, and Varma spends as much of her free time as possible at art exhibitions, walking her cocker spaniel Piper on Hampstead Heath and swimming in its ladies’ pond, where no one pays her any attention because “it’s far too cool for that”. As well as extolling the benefits of immersing oneself in nature – “Sorry, I am a bit of an old hippy” – she also finds herself admiring “these women [swimmers] of a certain age who are living their best life. I wanna be like that.”
Similarly, at work, she looks to actors such as Emma Thompson and Viola Davis as inspirations: “I have had a moment where I’ve thought: ‘My God, is this it?’ In terms of falling off the cliff of age, of [being of] relevance to people. Why is it always about your fecundity or whatever? What happens after that?” When I ask if there are any roles she regrets not playing, she shrieks “JULIET!” in mock anguish and collapses into giggles.
“I do not take myself seriously,” she says. “Like doing the photoshoot [for this article] – you end up dicking about and having such a laugh and then you think: ‘God, I hope they don’t use some of those because I’m gonna look like a twat.’ But it’s much more fun than being serious. Even though you know you look a bit better when you’re serious. That’s not who you are.”
This outlook perhaps explains why dark humour is calling out to Varma, as she cites Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness as a current obsession: “I love that bittersweet sense of the absurd. That is what I live for, because life is absurd … I would die to do shit like that.” Based on scene-stealing past form, you wouldn’t put it past her to nail some expertly crafted silliness. Should Mike White be listening, her White Lotus ideas extend beyond Goa: “I also think there’s potential for the Alps, which of course is a bit more like [Östlund’s film] Force Majeure. I ski, by the way. And I’m half Swiss – I can work there!”
Extrapolations will be available on Apple TV+ from 17 March; Obsession will be on Netflix later this year.
