uth Wilson takes a sip of
wine, looks sideways at her
companion, a glamorous gol-
den monkey, and delivers a
line pregnant with menace.
Although she is surrounded by more than 30 camera crew, the
silence is total, the atmosphere ominous.
We are on the set of the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of His
Dark Materials, Philip Pullman’s acclaimed fantasy trilogy, in which
Wilson ta kes on the role of the sinister Ma risa Coulter. For t unately
(for me at least), she is no method actress, and a couple of hours
later has stepped out of both her Forties-inspired tailoring and her
maleficent character.
Now dressed in jeans, face scrubbed clean of Mrs Coulter’s severe
make-up, she is ordering a (real) glass of wine and telling me about
her passion for Pullman’s novels, set in a reimagined Oxford, which
have sold 18 million copies around the world. Wilson came to them
late, but fell for Mrs Coulter immediately and leapt at the chance to
play her. ‘Well, I couldn’t say no – she’s described as the mother of all
evil and a cesspit of moral filth...!’ she says, laughing. ‘And, of course,
the stories are so philosophical – they raise questions about power
and control, about good and evil, and the relationship between
them. The way Philip wrote the books was very clever: he gives
a lot, but then lets you create many of your own answers.’ Mean-
while the author seems equally delighted that his glacial villain
is being portrayed by Wilson. ‘Ruth has an extraordinary power
of focusing the intensity of her gaze in a way that’s both fascin-
ating and terrifying,’ he says, when I catch up with him later. ‘She
brings to Mrs Coulter an echo of other parts she’s played, all of
which are compellingly attractive and intoxicatingly dangerous.
It’s a wonderful piece of casting.’
The director Steve McQueen once told Wilson: ‘When every-
one turns left, turn right.’ You can tell she listened. Her character
choices speak of a determination not to be typecast: she has
taken on roles ranging from a grieving mother in The Affair to
a seductive psychopathic murderer in Luther and a repressed
eccentric in the film adaptation of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.
She has an extraordinary faculty for flickering from aggression
to affection, earthiness to elegance, in a blink, which is perhapswhat allows her to bring such a breadth of parts to life – and makes
her so captivating to watch.
Wilson also has an uncanny ability to defy age. In His Dark
Materials, she carries off Mrs Coulter’s eternal youth, while in her
other recent televisual triumph, Mrs Wilson, she played her own
grandmother, Alison, from her teens to early forties. The three-
part BBC drama, on which Wilson was also a producer and
assisted with the script, told the remarkable tale of her grand-
father, Alexander Wilson, a former MI6 agent and successful spy
novelist who secretly maintained four wives simultaneously, and
had children by them all. What courage it must take to play your
own relative, whom you knew until you were 22, in the knowledge
that the eyes of all your family – not to mention nine million TV
viewers – would be upon you. ‘It was terrifying,’ she says. ‘Exhausting- and that pressure!’ But in its stiff-upper-lip stoicism, her magnifi-
cent performance brought poignancy and credibility to a true story
that is stranger than fiction. ‘It was an out-of-body experience. It felt
like a dream,’ she says. ‘I’ll probably look back in two years and say,
“Woah, what was that?” It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,
hands down. But I’m really proud of it.’
Challenging herself seems to be a constant pursuit: earlier this
year, Wilson went to Broadway to play both the Fool and Cordelia
opposite Glenda Jackson’s seminal King Lear, in what was her first
time performing Shakespeare (and, indeed, singing on stage). Next
year will see her make her debut as a film producer on Tr ue Things
About Me; its female director Harry Wootliff is also adapting a novel
to which Wilson and Jude Law have obtained the rights. She is try-
ing to carve out time to direct more herself, and also has a podcast
in the pipeline for 2020. There is no masterplan, she says; she would
rather her career develop organically, ‘so that it is more like... a tree,
growing upwards but also shooting off sideways’.
Her preference for taking an alternative route would explain why
she is itching to play ‘a proper female villain’ in a future Bond film.
Is it fair to say that she chooses roles with extreme personalities? ‘I
seem to switch between characters who are massive extroverts, like
Mrs Coulter and the Fool, or are very introverted with vast internal
emotional landscapes, like Jane Eyre or my granny,’ she acknowl-
edges. ‘My mum and dad are always saying, “Ruth, just play someone
normal!” But no one’s normal, are they? ’ Least of all the dazzling,
continually surprising Ruth Wilson...
The first episode of ‘His Dark Materials’ will air on BBC One on 3 Nov-
ember and on HBO on 4 November.
R