The jewel in the Crown: Vanessa Kirby on Margaret, Mission Impossible and #MeToo
The actress stars in the June 2018 issue of Harper's Bazaar
Attending the launch dinner for Tate Modern’s spectacular Picasso exhibition, I am delighted but slightly daunted to find myself seated next to the artist’s urbane grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso. Fortunately, he is more interested in discussing Vanessa Kirby, whom I am meeting the following day, than the finer points of his relative’s technique. ‘I love The Crown!’ he declares enthusiastically. ‘And Princess Margaret – she is the heart of the story. She brings it to life!’
I meet Kirby in a café at the National Theatre, where she is shortly to start rehearsing a new play. She spots me first – I’m half-expecting a tiny, imperious brunette, not this tall, willowy blonde in a ripped jumper and black jeans with an unintentional hole in the knee. Kirby enfolds me in an enthusiastic hug, then rushes off to order my cappuccino, in most un-Margaret fashion. She laughs and blushes when I tell her my Picasso story; but it’s clear this sort of praise is nothing new. Admiration for The Crown, the lavish Netflix drama series following the Queen throughout her reign, appears to be practically universal – and to go all the way to the top. ‘A friend of mine was at a party and didn’t know anyone, so he sidled up to this group who were talking about The Crown,’ Kirby confides. ‘One girl said, “Well, my granny watches it and really likes it.” It slowly dawned on him that the girl was Eugenie and her granny was the Queen...’ She bursts into laughter. ‘We’ve heard that Philip doesn’t watch it – he can’t be bothered.’
But of course, the Duke of Edinburgh has given up his official duties. For the rest of the nation, however, watching The Crown has been almost a conscious act of patriotism. Revelling in the splendour of its locations, the dignity of its purpose-driven protagonist and the notion of Britain at the centre of world politics, one can almost forget the current national identity crisis.
Most timely of all, the drama is centred on the relationship between two women: dutiful, self-controlled Elizabeth, and impulsive, selfish Margaret, around both of whom the men revolve like satellite planets. (This didn’t prevent producers paying Matt Smith more for playing the Duke of Edinburgh than Claire Foy received as the Queen, but explains the subsequent outcry when this disparity was revealed...) The Crown sails triumphantly through the Bechdel Test, that unofficial marker of a work’s feminist credentials requiring at least two named women to talk to each other about something other than a man. (Depressingly, it is said that around 50 per cent of films fail to meet this very basic minimum.)
‘I never realised how empowering it was to play someone on screen that the men are seen in relation to – Peter Townsend is the fiancé, Tony Armstrong-Jones is the boyfriend of Margaret – as opposed to the other way round,’ Kirby marvels. ‘Margaret has set a foundation for me. I feel such a responsibility to find those roles and also to make them. I want to see a messy, real, weird, brilliant, idiosyncratic woman...’ Veering between kittenish coquetry, chilly grandeur and temper tantrums, Kirby’s Margaret is unquestionably monstrous; yet her sensitive interpretation means that we never lose sight of the damaged, disappointed young woman beneath. ‘Something internal hasn’t been resolved; she’s angry inside,’ Kirby muses.
‘Peter [Morgan, the series creator] said to us on the first day, “I want you to imagine that you’ve always got a piece of grit in your shoe.” Nothing is easy; privilege, money, power, these things don’t equal contentedness.’
When Kirby first won the role, she knew Margaret only as a strange, heavy-drinking old battleaxe. Worried that her portrayal was going to be a pastiche, she set herself to reading scores of biographies (sadly, Craig Brown’s eye-popping Ma’am Darling came out too late, she says, so she’s saving it for the summer holidays), and listened to playlists she made from the Princess’ appearance on Desert Island Discs (among her choices, ‘Rule Britannia’, and ‘Scotland the Brave’ played by the pipes and drums of ‘my regiment’, the Royal Highland Fusiliers...). And she stuck photographs of her all over her Tooting flat for added inspiration. ‘I’ve still got her picture on my wall and one in my loo! I just look at it and think, “Come on, Marg, tell me how to be you!”’ she says, laughing. ‘I’d go on for ever with Margaret. It was amazing to grow up with a character.’
The part has changed her in several ways, she says: firstly, it’s made her recognise the power of clothes. ‘I’m not sure I can ever get onboard with fashion, myself – I just don’t have it naturally,’ she says, waving her ripped sleeve at me by way of illustration. ‘But we spent so many hours doing fittings, because it was such an important part of building Margaret as a character. I had to get into the psychology of playing someone who, every morning, spends an hour or two thinking about what she’s going to wear. Margaret’s given me an appreciation of designers and the work they do.’ Performing the role also gave Kirby an intimate insight into the Princess’ complex psychology. Recently, she was doing a project for the charity War Child alongside Richard Curtis, who asked her if she found that the characters she played affected her in everyday life. Only then, Kirby says, did she realise that throughout her two years on The Crown, she struggled with a sense of inferiority towards Claire Foy. ‘Sometimes in the middle of scenes with her, I’d think, “My God, you’re so astonishing, I can’t stop staring at how brilliant you are. I’m hopeless compared to you.” I had to risk a pantomime-dame kind of performance, while Claire is the master of subtlety and internalising everything. I thought maybe I’d judged it horribly wrong,’ she confesses. Now, she wonders whether she was experiencing something of Princess Margaret’s feelings at always playing second fiddle. (Clearly, Kirby’s worries were misplaced, as in April she received her second television Bafta nomination, for the role.)
Nevertheless, she was devastated to leave the part behind, sobbed when the cameras stopped rolling for the final time and says she’s deeply jealous of the actress who is set to take over playing the Princess as her marriage to Lord Snowdon unravels. ‘She’s going to have so much fun smashing all the plates and having all the rows!’ At the time we meet, Kirby isn’t supposed to confirm who that actress is – although the fact that she recently posted an Instagram picture of herself with Helena Bonham Carter, with the comment ‘Honoured’, is a fairly obvious pointer. ‘I’m desperately in love with Margaret, so it’s lovely to share her with someone who’s beginning to be,’ she says discreetly.
Meanwhile she has other fish to fry. The day after our talk, she flies out to Ukraine, where she is making Gareth Jones, a film about the Holodomor, the genocide through famine engineered by Stalin in the 1930s. Kirby plays an investigative journalist who helps uncover the truth, alongside James Norton in the title role. And later this summer, she will be seen in her first Hollywood blockbuster, the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission: Impossible – Fallout, as a con artist and street fighter, acting so against type that we can only conclude that she took it because it was such a contrast to the petulant Princess. ‘I had to really try not to stab Tom Cruise in the eye, because I’m incredibly uncoordinated,’ she confesses. ‘Will I be a massive action girl? I doubt it.’
Kirby has clearly been taken aback by finding herself the subject of fervid tabloid gossip about her relationship with Cruise, after one scene, filmed on the banks of the Seine in Paris, required them to kiss.
‘People actually asked me, “When’s the wedding?” I mean, are you serious? They were texting my boyfriend, saying “Are you OK, shall I come round?”’ (As a result, although she has hitherto kept a veil over her private life, she has started to admit to her relationship with the actor Callum Turner, with whom she appeared in Queen & Country in 2014.) And on her return from Ukraine, she begins a run at the National Theatre, as the eponymous character in Julie, Polly Stenham’s reworking of Strindberg’s famous play Miss Julie. Set in the present day, it is an examination of status and power. ‘These two people are stuck within parameters that we have in society but we think we don’t, which is dangerous in itself,’ says Kirby. ‘I hope that’s the next thing that’s going to be uncovered.’
Has she had her own #MeToo moment, I wonder? She tells me about an audition in which she was asked to passionately kiss an older actor who had already been cast. ‘I remember sweating massively, and I left thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve just snogged this person for an hour and I feel really weird about it,” you know? And also the expectation with certain roles, it’s almost written in that [the character I play] uses her sexuality in some way to get something. It feels like you have to exploit that for the job.’
Nine out of 10 scripts that she receives, she says, will describe her role in terms of her appearance: ‘The character will be defined by the colour of her hair, by how she looks, usually some reference to how sexy she is, all through the male gaze. But I’ve always felt like I don’t want to be the girl in hot pants feeling self-conscious and slightly out of my body, and trying to be something for somebody else – I won’t be me.’
Indeed, although Kirby has built her career playing capricious, man-eating beauties – from Estella in the BBC’s Great Expectations to the exquisite, and exquisitely bored, Elena in the Almeida’s Uncle Vanya, with Princess Margaret as the apogee of the trend – in real life she is a woman’s woman, with a tight-knit group of female friends including her fellow actress Jessica Brown Findlay, the journalist and author Dolly Alderton, and Kirby’s younger sister Juliet, with whom she shares her flat. Such friendships are ‘the great romances of your life – they’re the ones that stay through thick and thin,’ she says.
All the same, as she’s turning 30, she has decided that it’s time to get a place of her own. ‘I just want my own space! Silence is so important.’ She has come round to the concept of children too. ‘I like the idea – not any time soon – but the idea of maybe being able to infuse a little person with a sense of self-worth and the freedom to do what they want,’ she says. ‘But my dad says, “Oh you always mess up your kids, no matter what.”’
Kirby’s own childhood, in Wimbledon, was secure and well-off; she describes it as ‘very free and liberal’. Her father is a distinguished cancer surgeon, her mother was the founding editor of Bazaar’s magazine stablemate Country Living. On the other hand, Kirby was badly bullied for years at school, and in addition, suffered from undiagnosed giardia, which caused her intestinal problems. ‘It took two years of me being very sick to eventually go on lots of medication. Those things can make you understand what it’s like not to be accepted, and to try to work out where your worth is.’ Deciding that she wanted to act, after studying English at Exeter University, she turned down a place at Lamda to go straight into rep. It was a risk that paid off: her rise to fame, if not meteoric, was swift and steady. Roles on television and in films including Richard Curtis’ charming rom-com About Time followed, and she was cast as Stella to Gillian Anderson’s Blanche in the Young Vic’s acclaimed 2014 production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
In February, Kirby was among 190 women in the film industry – including Carey Mulligan, Emma Watson and Lily James – who signed an open letter in support of the Time’s Up campaign. ‘We believe we need to use our power as communicators and connectors to shift the way society sees and treats us,’ it declared. ‘We need to examine the kind of womanhood our industry promotes and sells to the world.’
There is no doubting Kirby’s personal commitment to this laudable ambition. ‘This time is just so exciting, don’t you think?’ she enthuses. ‘Every day I wake up more passionate... We have a responsibility to portray women on screen that we identify with. There are so many women’s stories that haven’t been told yet, and we have an opportunity to go and find them.’ Princess Margaret, it is clear, is only the start.
I'm more obsessed with her than Claire Foy.
