Ruth Wilson hitches the skin by her ears to demonstrate how she’d look if she had “those little wires” sewn into her face, by which she means a thread lift. “Just that would make the world of difference,” she says. She is 41 and “everyone” around her talks about Botox “and what to fill their face with”. This is not in response to any question of mine. This is Ruth Wilson freewheeling on how confusing she finds the notion of “female empowerment” in 2023. “As an actress, everyone does it. Very few resist. I haven’t done anything – yet. But it’s in my head as like, ‘Well, do you decide not to and therefore potentially look older than your peers? Or do you just give in?’” Yesterday she read in the New York Times that people should get Botox in their 20s to stop wrinkles forming. “I mean, are they joking? I find it so … ” she emits a plosive exhale of despair. “It’s mad! It’s massive violence.” Why can’t a woman age on screen? Or age, full stop?
But this is nothing new, she says. She sits back against the banquette of the cafe in the photographic studio where we’ve met. Women don’t help ourselves; never have. She plucks examples – Tudor fashion, she says, pretending to cinch her waist with a corset. “Like, humpf.” Or Elizabethans painting their faces with lead-based ceruse that ate their skin and made their hair fall out. “We’re like, ‘Wow’, today. But in 200 years, they’ll be looking back at images of women now going, ‘What were they doing?’ ‘What is that? You’re blowing your face and lips up.’ Yet it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. And women are part of that industry, perpetuating this ‘empowerment’.” Later, she will apply the same charm and forthright common sense to torpedo Hollywood.
