Kathryn Hunter
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)So Hollywood has finally woken up to something the international theatre community has known about for over three decades: the shapeshifting brilliance of Kathryn Hunter. At 64, the actor and director, a favourite of Peter Brook and a leading player for Complicité, the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe, is basking in American adulation and a New York Film Critics’ Best Supporting Actor award for her role as all three witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. See it on the big screen rather than on Apple TV if you can: she nearly steals the show from Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.
The attention is “very humbling,” Hunter says, a voice that’s half gravel, half molasses emerging from her tiny 5’1” frame. “My niece wrote me an email saying ‘congratulations on your best supported actress award’, which I thought was a telling slip as it was all done with the support of Joel and Fran: the collaborative aspect of working with them was fantastic and I feel we created the witches together. They’re big theatre fans and saw me in The Bee by Hideki Noda [which toured internationally in 2012] where I played a Japanese businessman who cut children’s fingers off.”
When Coen approached her about the Tragedy, as they all call it, back before the first lockdown, Hunter asked if the witches were real or in Macbeth’s mind and he said “both”. They kicked around ideas for the visual look of the hags: crows, monoliths, outcast battleground scavengers. Hunter’s Italian husband Marcello Magni would film her flapping her arms or “being a standing stone” on their kitchen table, and send the results to Coen. The result is unnerving: she pivots from great stillness to seemingly dislocated movement, her voice a sinister purr. “I was weirded out that some people called me a contortionist,” she grumps. “I thought I was just being a bird.”
The first tranche of shooting took place in summer 2020. Washington greeted her on set with a big hug. “It was lovely and we shared lots and he was not starry at all,” she says. “I think on film he’s kind of new minted a way of speaking the verse, keeping the thought going in those long speeches without over-colouring.” The film was finished under stricter lockdown conditions: Hunter and the two other British actors were flown back to LA on a private plane, the crew were in full PPE and the actors wore masks till the last minute. But she shows me how, after their last scene together, Washington darted across the set to give her a playful farewell pinch on the arm.
The role is a huge step up, screen-wise. She’s worked with excellent directors (Mike Leigh, Sally Potter, Peter Greenaway) and on prestige projects (a Harry Potter movie, the BBC Les Miserables and Black Earth Rising), but mostly in small parts. “I said to my agent once, I’ve GOT to do more film, but she said, well, you’re never available, you’re always doing theatre.” Typically, rather than capitalise on the buzz around Macbeth, she will appear alongside her husband this month in Eugene Ionesco’s challenging absurdist 1952 drama The Chairs, at the Almeida.
“It’s about this outrageously old couple, 93 and 95, alone on a post-apocalyptic island that has been flooded, who imagine hundreds and hundreds of guests arriving to hear the husband’s message to humanity,” she says. At the end, a character called the Emperor appears. Director Omar Elerian asked Ionesco’s daughter if this was Napoleon or Caesar, “and she said, no, it’s God”.
She and Magni invoke the guests for the audience and have to remember who’s where in the proliferating chairs that fill the theatre. “It staves off Alzheimer’s,” she smiles. It’s meta, too, with a stage manager (Toby Sedgwick) berating the actors for getting things wrong or trying to run away. Hunter, Magni and Sedgwick all met in the late 80s in what was then Theatre de Complicité, creating shows that followed Jacques Lecoq’s principle that the body tells the story. Elerian, who is of Italian-Palestinian heritage and helped Arinzé Kene create his award-winning show Misty at the Bush Theatre in 2018, is also Leqoq trained. “There is a shared physical language,” Hunter says.
The play, she continues, is “not about nihilism and things being meaningless, but supremely about the imagination. The theme of what’s real and what is imagined is pursued in a playful, joyous way.” It’s timely, too: “In lockdown, you thought, I love my partner and my family: how wonderful to have quality time with them. But after a while you think, I’m desperate to see other people, do other things, go other places. Then, once you’re released into the world of social gatherings, maybe a tiny part of your brain goes, if only I could be back in lockdown and have that peace and quiet. That said, personally, coming back to the theatre and working in a group is where I live most happily, however much I love my husband.” Their frequent collaborations are the best of both worlds, then.
The depth and variety of Hunter’s theatre work is extraordinary, given she suffered a broken arm, back and pelvis, a deflated lung, and lost part of her right foot in a car crash while at RADA and was told she would never walk again. Hunter recently told the Independent: “Maybe I should once and for all say it wasn’t an accident. It was a suicide attempt”, the last and most serious of many attempts while suffering from depression.
Beyond urging anyone with suicidal thoughts to “get help, get help, get help” she won’t elaborate further on her mental state back then, but resuming her training after the horrific crash may have marked a turning point. “It was summer and I was in a wheelchair, watching all these cyclists going by and thought, within two months I’ll be on two wheels, not four,” she recalls. Having played a Kitkat girl opposite Mark Rylance’s Emcee in Cabaret during her first year at RADA, she joined a completely new tranche of student actors on her return, descending a staircase on crutches in Lady Be Good in front of an exceedingly nervous Kenneth Branagh and John Sessions.
After first encountering Complicité at their 1988 Almeida residency she played the son, mother and wife of the company’s guiding genius Simon McBurney, as well as his crippled, vengeful, heiress lover in The Visit in 1989, which won her an Olivier award. She’s played a talking monkey, “four or five roles” for Peter Brook in France and several for Hideki Noda in Tokyo, the titular spirit in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker at the National and Puck in New York (celebrated director Julie Taymor refused to do the show until Hunter accepted).
Born Aikaterini Hadjipateras in New York to Greek parents who worked in shipping, Hunter was mostly raised in London and regards the “English language as an extraordinary gift that gave me a doorway into Shakespeare. I got to perform Prometheus Bound in Greek at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, but it didn’t match up. Once, Peter Brook asked me to read ‘To be or not to be’ in French which was like having a bitter, strange drink, and didn’t feel right at all.”
In English, she’s played Cleopatra and Timon of Athens for the RSC and Richard III at the Globe. The first English-speaking woman to play King Lear, in Leicester and at the Young Vic in 1997, she will reprise the role with the same director, Helena Kaut-Howson, at the Globe this summer. Magni, her Fool first time round, will now play Kent. McBurney asked her why she was revisiting a part she’d done before: “I said, are you joking? Nobody has ever ‘done’ Lear!
“It was such an outrage when we did it 25 years ago: I could feel the opprobrium,” she says. “Now it’s de rigeur to do gender bending, but I still feel as I did 25 years ago – that of course we need more equity in terms of representation of women and ethnic diversity on stage, but women playing men and men playing women is to do with a connection to the part, not just in order to tick boxes.”
Back to her late-flowering film career. “I’ve just worked with Yorgos Lanthimos [Greek arthouse director of The Favourite and The Killing of a Sacred Deer] but that was quite hurried: he’s an extraordinary director but there wasn’t really enough time to play there,” she says. “There are a few [American] things happening that I can’t tell you about. Oh, and I did the new Star Wars show, Pilgrim. The director’s very pleased and we’re making a second series.” Blimey. Pilgrim is the alternate title for Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi spin off, set in a galaxy far, far away. That really is a quantum leap.
