“It was like being in a gig, a football match or a festival,” says Ruth Wilson, recalling the audience reaction to her performance of The Second Woman at the Young Vic in May. In this experimental drama, the 41-year-old star played the same short scene 100 times, with 100 different men, most of them amateurs and all of them without rehearsal, over a 24-hour period.
The audience, many of whom queued for several long stints or did the full 24 hours, grew progressively more raucous as time wore on. The one-off show took theatre out of the arts pages and onto the front pages and became a bona fide London phenomenon. On Sunday it won Wilson one of two special Editor’s Awards at the 67th Evening Standard Theatre Awards: the other went to Sir Elton John for bringing his collaborative musical spirit to theatre.
“To be recognised in this way is wonderful,” says Wilson, over tea in a café near her flat in SE1. “It was a risky piece that felt outside the box of traditional theatre. I didn’t know if people would turn up – I definitely thought there’d be no-one there between 3am and 6am – and I was worried it might be boring. But I wanted to do it because I was missing things like that in this country: the excitement of something new and fresh and unknown. And the interest in it proved other people are hungry for that, too.”
The show, originally created for a festival by Australian writer-directors Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, samples a scene from an obscure John Cassavetes film. In a red frock and blonde wig Wilson sat in a room: a man entered, the two drank whisky, ate noodles, danced and argued, then he left. That was it.
But whether adjusting to a stranger or to a familiar face (Ben Whishaw, writer Jack Thorne, and Wilson’s Luther co-star Idris Elba all did stints) Wilson’s performance gave an extraordinary insight into the nuanced, instinctive art of acting. It was also a feat of endurance.
“My worst moment was from 6am to 11am, when I was moving very slowly, seeing double and slurring my words. Every time I went off for a break people stood on their feet applauding and shouting my name and stomping their feet. The atmosphere from 8am onwards to the end was electric. The room was absolutely on fire. I had never been part of anything like that.”
Wilson jokes that she’d never pulled an all-nighter without chemical assistance before: here her only succour in those short breaks were “complex carbohydrates like sausage rolls”, and coffee and Red Bull in the final straight.
“Offstage I was delirious,” she says. “But on stage, every time I turned to the men, they gave me the energy and I clung on to them for dear life. Anna [Breckon] said to me: there’s always the possibility of human connection in the scene.
“I ended up in a kind of Zen state. When I had to sit and wait [each time the scene restarted] I felt an incredible stillness. The connection with the audience was amazing, and they were integral to the experience. I woke up the next day full of love, overwhelmed with a very profound sense of the potential and the greatness of human connection.”
Throughout her career Wilson has embraced both popular entertainment and the avant garde. The Surrey-born daughter of an investment banker and a probation officer, she starred in a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre soon after graduating from LAMDA. Stage roles at the National, Donmar and Almeida followed before Luther made her a primetime star in 2010 as the sociopathic villain Alice Morgan.
In 2014 the Showtime series The Affair, in which she starred opposite Dominic West, broke her in America, leading to roles in Constellations and King Lear on Broadway and a stab at Hollywood in the ill-fated The Lone Ranger opposite Johnny Depp. She’s inclined towards smaller, artier film roles since then, like True Things with Tom Burke, alongside prestige domestic TV (His Dark Materials, The Woman in the Wall). Her last stage roles before The Second Woman were a non-traditional Hedda Gabler and Cocteau’s bizarre one-sided telephone conversation The Human Voice, both for radical director Ivo van Hove.
Is it just weird shit from now, then, I ask? “No, I will keep doing traditional plays and relationship dramas but I’m always interested in a new angle,” she says. “It would have been easy to do a traditional Hedda but I knew Ivo would put a new lens on it.” She had a blast making the Lone Ranger but in that and her next two films “I played women left behind with a baby. I seem to have played a lot of mothers, which is weird since I’m not one. But unless you're one of the top three actresses – and they change every year – the roles seemed to be fairly limited in [commercial] film. Then The Affair came on offering a much more interesting character.”
The show ran for five seasons, but Wilson was said to have grown increasingly unhappy at the number of graphic sex scenes, and her abrupt departure from it remains shrouded in mystery. There are rumours she had to sign an NDA.
“It was ages ago and that’s such a boring conversation,” she says. “I don’t have regrets about anything I’ve done. Each job you do you learn from it and there's things you take. Of course there's always things you would change but actually I learned from [The Affair] and I wouldn't be the person I was today without that experience.”
As she enters the foothills of her 40s the roles are “better than when I was 29. Generally there's more interest in women being written as humans rather than two-dimensional versions of something.” The rise of streaming services has meant an explosion in content, but also that “things get made really quickly and cancelled really quickly. You used to have linear time, 24 hours to fill, but now there's endless amounts of space.
“Demand is high and the money becomes less because of that. So you feel the quality is being compromised and development is being compromised and it's all become a bit manic and mad.” After we meet it’s announced that she will star as Emily Maitlis in the BBC/Amazon production A Very Royal Scandal, about Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview with the journalist. She says too she hopes to work in New York again soon.
Wilson has for some time been in a transatlantic relationship with a New York writer she prefers not to name. “It’s my second home really and I do love the energy there,” she says. “It feels quite similar to London in some ways but London is calmer. It's less competitive here and nicer. There's less money so there's less ego and wild demands. There's no star system here. People are in the business because they want to be in it rather than making lots of money from it.”
Her American friends are terrified of a second Trump presidency: “People are asking, could he be in jail and still win? Anything is possible with that guy. It’s terrifying.” The gap between rich and poor has visibly widened in both New York and London in recent years, and both feel more dangerous. “I had my phone nicked out of my hand two or three years ago here by some kids on bikes,” she says, gesturing towards Bermondsey Street.
“I made the mistake of chasing them and caught up with him because I'm quite a fast runner. But then I didn't know quite what to do. And I thought, maybe they’d have a knife. So I started to morally lecture them. ‘What are you doing? Why are you doing this?’ And they didn't care. It ended up as this weird anticlimactic moment and I had to let them go.”
She tells this as a joky anecdote against herself rather than an urban scare story: as if it’s the price of living in the centre of a vibrant city with great restaurants (her preferred night out these days is “dinner”), great theatre, and great art. A place where something like The Second Woman can happen.
