Rebecca Ferguson, sweary Swede and fervid mother to the Lisan al-Gaib, has kicked off her boots and sent them flying. “F***ing fantastic,” she beams. She throws herself onto a hotel-suite sofa, crosses her legs, and takes a big gulp of iced water. Now the publicist must go. “Can you close the door enough that we can gossip, but keep it open enough so we don’t get locked in?” Ferguson asks. The publicist dutifully obliges. Ferguson has such force of command that I practically do it for her myself. If she were to ask me to kill a man on her behalf, I’d honestly consider it.
In A House of Dynamite, an apocalyptic real-time thriller from filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, Ferguson plays the senior officer running the White House Situation Room when a single nuclear missile is launched at the United States. She’s a classic Bigelow character, in the mould of Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty or Angela Bassett in Strange Days: a woman of sturdy, no-nonsense authority, but with a soul. Ferguson is tremendous at it. I haven’t stopped thinking about a moment early on, when she scolds a White House neophyte for holding up the lunch queue by ordering an omelette. The silliest thing about A House of Dynamite is that this underling character just keeps on appearing in the film, rather than – as any actual human would be doing if they were read to filth by Rebecca Ferguson – simply cowering in a hole, never to be seen again.
