14 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer
INTERVIEW
BY KATHRYN BROMWICH
PORTRAIT BY SUKI DHANDA
I
f the acting thing hadn’t worked
out for Natalie Dormer , she might
have wanted to consider a career
coaching politicians in media and
people skills. From the moment
we meet, at a plush hotel in central
London , she is charm itself: warm,
welcoming, creating an eff ortless sense
of camaraderie. My name is peppered
liberally throughout. She asks me
questions about myself (rare for an
interview) and does a convincing job
of appearing interested in the answers.
She’s persuasive and eloquent about
whatever she’s addressing.
Today, she’s focusing her attention
on Venus in Fur , David Ives’s dark
comedy about sadomasochism,
which will premiere in the West End
later this month with her in the lead
role. She makes a hell of a case for
it. “You’ll either go home and have
incredible sex, or you might break up
with your partner... It has this wacky,
dark surrealism, but at the same time
manages to be incredibly sexy and
funny... It has the Freudian, erudite
arguments, so if you get turned on by
having your brain tickled, you’re going
to get turned on. But if you get turned
on in the more rudimentary, physical
way, that’s there too.”
After more than a decade in the
public eye – 12 years on from her
fi lm debut in Casanova and 10 from
her breakout role as Anne Boleyn in
The Tudors – she is one of the most
recognisable faces on screen, with
roles in both Game of Thrones and
The Hunger Games. She is known for
portraying imperious, dangerously
glamorous roles, and I half expect her
to turn up in pearls and a power blow-
dry; instead she’s in a grey top and
high-waisted trousers, her blond waves
in an artful messy bun. She has just
been for a swim at the hotel pool and is
about to head off to rehearsals.
“Obviously the intellectual and the
physical are not mutually exclusive:
we are both things, as human beings,”
she continues, over eggs benedict and
coff ee. “We want to be thoughtful,
diligent, creative individuals with
empirical minds, but then we also wantto all throw our clothes off , drink some
wine, jump in some water with friends
and have a fucking great time as well.
And that the two coexist is the joy of
being human, right?”
To give some context: Venus in
Fur is a play-within-a-play about sex,
power and role reversal, based on the
1870 novella Venus in Furs by Austrian
author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch ,
whose surname inspired the word
masochism. It’s an intense two-hander:
Dormer stars as a mysterious actor
who shows up late to an audition with a
writer -director played by David Oakes.
Patrick Marber – or just “Marber” , as
Dormer refers to him – directs; they last
worked together in the Young Vic’s 2012
production of his play After Miss Julie
(“ If anyone can handle sexual power
play and gender politics, it would be the
writer of Closer ,” she says).How does she think British
audiences will react to the more
risqu e elements? “Oh, they love it!”
she laughs, with no hesitation. “We
pretend we’re all buttoned-up and
strait laced, but you only need to look
at the Victorians to know the British
get very kinky under the collar.”
There are also elements of an Agatha
Christie whodunnit, she says, mixed
with Derren Brown’s live shows: little
clues and triggers leading up to a
grand fi nale. “The last 20 minutes are
bonkers. It gets very physical. If we do
it right, it’ll be seat-of-the-pants stuff .”
Did she do much research into the
world of S&M for the role? She throws
her head back and cackles. “None!”
she exclaims, feigning shock. “Well,
walking through Soho for the last 15
years of my life.”
I meant (obviously), reading about it...“We all read the Von Sacher-Masoch
book, and it did make me uncomfortable
in certain places. In the modern world,
we often like to think we’ve come up
with certain ideas, but they were talking
about a lot of these things two or three
hundred years ago – human nature
hasn’t really changed.”
Sexism, for instance: with the
book’s 19th-century gender politics
transposed to a modern-day setting,
Dormer’s character pulls up the
director on the book’s view of women.
“And so she bloody should, because
he doesn’t see it, and that’s where it is
probably incredibly relevant” – here
she adds a lengthy not-all-men caveat,
stressing that it’s just this particular
individual – “the young, liberal New
York playwright is subconsciously
pretty sexist. Full-on sexist, insultingly
so, without realising.”
Similarly, in the past few years
actors have become much more vocal
about prejudice in the fi lm industry,
from Geena Davis’s campaign for
women in media to #OscarsSoWhite
to fi lms about the trans community.
“We’re right in the middle of a wave,
a revolution,” Dormer says, “of
acknowledging our shortcomings and
vocalising the wrongs of the past.”
She points to Ed Skrein , her co-star in
the forthcoming thriller In Darkness,
who back in August made headlines
by turning down a role in a reboot of
Hellboy after learning of his character’s
whitewashing.
She links this back to the time Venus
in Furs was written. “In the late 1800s,
Europe was in turmoil. All the diff erent
countries were having industrial
revolutions – all that stuff that you and
I” (she uses the phrase “you and I” a
number of times, rather charmingly
implying that she, world famous actor
and former queen of Westeros , and I,
a journalist, have loads in common)
“learn ed in history at school. The old
world felt like it was dripping through
their fi ngers: the new world of steam
trains and quicker printing presses
and electricity – it was terrifying, and I
think it made them self-analyse.”
The modern parallels are clear, she‘Th e British
get very kinky
under the collar’:
Natalie Dormer
photographed in
London last month
for the Observer
New Review and,
far right, alongside
Jack Gleeson in
Game of Th rones.Natalie Dormer, known for her roles in Game of Thrones and
The Hunger Games, is starring in S&M comedy Venus in Fur
in the West End. She lets loose on Britain’s inner kinkiness,
the battles of feminism and society’s search for a panacea
‘WE’RE RIGHT IN THE
‘You need to defend
gender politics,
you need to defend
democracy. It’s not
a fait accompli’