Before meeting Lesley Manville, I watch a preview of Citadel, the new Amazon spy thriller in which she stars alongside Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra and Stanley Tucci. It’s glossy, supercharged, high-body-count, fights-to-the-death-in-speeding-train-lavatories TV. Punches have squelch sound effects. Hitmen are covered in blood splatter. Chopra is tossed about like a rag doll. Manville’s scenes are sedate by comparison. She plays an “incredibly bad” UK ambassador to the US – bowing to the boilerplate that the UK government is upper class, sadistic, speaking only in clipped Anglo-Saxon. All well and good. Until I ask Manville her view of the violence. She frowns. “Oh,” she says. “I can’t watch violence. I don’t watch any.”
“It’s a big topic, really,” she says. Possibly “too big” to cover here. She hesitates, perhaps sensing a conflict between principles and practice. She offers a disclaimer – she hasn’t seen the final edit of Citadel, isn’t certain of the full extent of the violence. Then: “I hate it, basically. I get offended by it. I really think it’s bad news. People talk about Game of Thrones. I’ve never been able to watch it. Also, it’s pretty violent towards women. I really don’t want to see that.” She shudders when I mention Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She watched it in Los Angeles with Paul Thomas Anderson, director of Phantom Thread, for which she was nominated for an Oscar in 2018. Upsetting? “Yes. Yes.” Her position is not merely squeamish, it’s political. “I’m a woman, for a start. Being a woman is a political position,” she argues. “You need to understand what’s going on, the risks, what you’re up against.”
