Is Olivia Colman Britain’s most versatile actress?

Olivia+Colman+Iron+Lady+European+Premiere+3Zl_cwwqIFPlart

Olivia Colman has the fear – the one actors get when they don’t have another job lined up. “Maybe I’ve had a good run of it and now it’s all going to stop,” she says. Right now such a dismal outcome is highly unlikely, as Colman seems to be everywhere – as Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) visiting Bill Murray’s Franklin D Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, as a foul-mouthed marriage counsellor in the British rom-com I Give It a Year, and as Nick Frost’s sister in the eagerly anticipated dance comedy Cuban Fury.

Also in the wings are a guest turn in the wonderful Sky Atlantic comedy This Is Jinsy and a new series of BBC2’s dog-collar sitcom Rev, while for the next eight weeks she is going to be sharing top-billing with David Tennant in the ITV whodunit Broadchurch – a sort of British The Killing about the murder of a boy from a close-knit Dorset seaside town.

“The Killing was so brilliant that it seems a bit up yourself to say this is ‘the British Killing’,” says Colman, characteristically averse to hyperbole. She plays a local police detective miffed when an abrasive outsider (David Tennant, giving good stubble) is parachuted in to lead the investigation, while an all-star cast of suspects (Andrew Buchan, Jodie Whittaker, Vicky McClure and Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvill) slowly reveal theirf secrets. Colman’s is a very personable breed of copper (Scott & Bailey are a pair of Dirty Harriets in comparison), which is hardly surprising since she’s modelled on herself. “I wanted it to be me in the police force,” she says. “I thought I could damage that by doing too much research, which is my lazy way of saying ‘I couldn’t be bothered’.”

Take that with enough salt to grit Heathrow airport, for the rise and rise of Olivia Colman is about unassuming hard work as well as talent, intelligence and (never a quality to be underestimated in her profession) likeability. Her success is certainly nothing to do with being brazen or pushy – she positively blushed with self-consciousness on our two, albeit brief, prior meetings (on the sets of Broadchurch and This Is Jinsy). Today however she’s more relaxed, perhaps because it’s her 39th birthday, and also maybe because the ice had been broken with a discussion about the attractions of her native north Norfolk.

There’s no East Anglian accent; in fact her voice reminded me of a softer version of Rising Damp’s Frances de la Tour – Miss Jones’s gentler, more diffident younger sister perhaps. And like another shy comedy actress, Hunderby’s Julia Davis, she has a dazzling smile that seems designed to deflect the inane intrusions of journalists and other idiots. “Perish the thought,” she says when I ask whether she has a Hollywood agent, and she describes herself as “not terribly thick-skinned”, when explaining why she doesn’t tweet and why she keeps “my head down” in public. What do people say when they do recognise her? “They shout Peep Show,” she says, mimicking a drunken cockney. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say in response.”

In a way these boors are right – it was Peep Show that first made Colman. In Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s brilliant (and brilliantly sustained) Channel 4 sitcom, she played Sophie, the endlessly forgiving girlfriend of the appalling Mark (David Mitchell). “I couldn’t do the latest series because I was doing Broadchurch,” says Colman. “But also from a story point of view I don’t think Sophie was as interesting for people to watch any more. And Dobby (played by Isy Suttie) is such a brilliant character and it’s more fun to watch Mark fuck it up with other people.”

Also, she might add, in recent years she has had to make the conscious decision to distance herself from her co-stars, David Mitchell and Robert Webb, whom she first met in Cambridge. “That was the discussion I had with my agent,” says Colman. “She said, ‘I know you love them and I know you’re probably going to cry but you need to decide what you’re going to do’. And Rob and David were heavenly about it. I’m so grateful for them – they were my first job and without them, well, I could be one of my many mates who doesn’t get much work. But it’s their show – it’s Mitchell and Webb, not Mitchell and Webb and Colman. So Lindy [King – her agent] was right and it’s all worked out.”

It has indeed, starting with Tyrannosaur, the directorial debut of actor (and Colman’s friend) Paddy Considine, with whom she had starred in Shane Meadows’ mock documentary Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, and with whom she has just finished filming an upcoming episode of the ITV period crime drama, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Colman’s performance in Tyrannosaur, as a charity shop worker enduring hidden domestic violence and further challenged by Peter Mullan’s raging alcoholic, was a revelation, and won several awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

“It changed everything, really,” she says. “It’s funny… I’ve always done bits of drama, but clearly nothing anyone had ever seen.” Next came her Carol Thatcher in Abi Morgan’s misjudged Margaret Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, being singled out in Meryl Streep’s Bafta acceptance speech for being “divinely gifted”. Colman’s research involved watching tapes of Carol in the 2005 series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. “It was such a godsend being able to watch the person you’re trying to emulate in that situation,” she says. “It was her being herself. Anyway, I thought she was amazing; if I was stuck in a forest I’d want her with me.”

Colman was born in north Norfolk in 1974, the year before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. She had an “absolutely heavenly” childhood moving around the county as her father, a surveyor, and mother, a nurse, renovated houses. “I had a lovely, feral, free childhood – out and then come back when you’re hungry or it gets too dark,” she says. “I feel slightly cruel that I’m not offering my children the same.” The children are her two sons, Finn, aged seven, and Hal, five, with her husband, writer Ed Sinclair – but more of them later.

Colman didn’t discover acting until she went as a sixth-former to the independent girls’ school Gresham’s in Holt, but the idea that you could make a living from this new-found passion never crossed her mind. “I’m the only weirdo in the family who’s gone into it,” she says. f “My older brother, who was in the Army, now owns his own building company. My half-sister was a nurse and is now a psychotherapist.”

Instead she went to teacher-training college in Cambridge, but left after a year (“I was rubbish… a generation of children have had a very lucky break”), but not before that fateful meeting with Mitchell and Webb when she attended an audition for the Cambridge University Footlights under the mistaken impression that it was a straight drama society. “I’d never heard of Footlights,” she says. “I think Rob and David probably thought I was quite game because they said, ‘Find something in here and try and sell it to us’, and I picked up a cigarette butt and was trying to sell it to them as nutritious and then ate it. Instead of laughing they just looked slightly shocked.”

Another long-standing relationship that began at Footlights was with her future husband, Ed. “We did a play together,” she recalls. “He did a play because he fancied the director and I did it because she was a friend of mine, and then I turned up and said (in a breathy voice now very much like Miss Jones in Rising Damp), ‘Oh, he’s amaaazing…’. And luckily the director… she wasn’t that interested in him… thankfully… so, erm, then he got into drama school [the Bristol Old Vic] when he graduated and I was heart-broken that it would all end there. So I said I’d come along and I could support him.”

A determined suitor, I suggest. “Yuh,” agrees Colman, who thought that drama school looked like so much fun that she herself applied. She and Ed got married seven years later (“He’s a steady chap… he likes to be sure”), although Ed has given up acting for writing. “I’ve got so many friends who just aren’t working, it’s puzzling; I’ve no idea why,” says Colman. “And for Ed the work just stopped. But actually for him I think he was quite relieved because he always wanted to write and he’s brilliant at it. I was lucky enough to pay the rent for both of us. It’s not fair if I’m living the dream and he’s not.”

Wow. Would she consider marrying me? “Ha. Well, I’m hoping the novel will sell for a lot of money,” she says. “I’ve only read the first four chapters. It would be awful if it came out and it was shit.”

I ask whether her sons have seen her in anything, desperately racking my brain for any child-friendly fare that Colman might have appeared in. “I did Doctor Who, thinking there’s something they can watch,” she says. “I turned it on to be horrified and tried to turn it off again because there was mummy with a big scary mouth [in the episode, The Eleventh Hour, Colman’s character sports piranha-like fangs]. I didn’t really think it through.”

But back to drama school in Bristol. After graduating, Colman set about looking for straight roles, but always seemed to gravitate towards comedy. It’s at this point, with faultless comic timing, that her mobile phone goes off, her ringtone a honking clown’s horn. Her screen-saver is a picture of her dog, a ‘Jackapoo’ (a Jack Russell/poodle cross) called Alf. “They’re not supposed to moult,” she says. “But I keep finding hairs.”

There’s something canine about Colman’s nickname, Colly – she had to change her birth name, Sarah, to Olivia, because of an Equity clash with another Sarah Colman. “One of my best friends at university was called Olivia and I always loved her name,” she says. “I was never Sarah; I was always called by my nickname, Colly, so it didn’t seem so awful not to be called Sarah.”

Colman’s knack for comedy saw her progress through such shows as People Like Us, The Office, Black Books, Green Wing, as well as the aforementioned Mitchell and Webb collaborations. But it’s only with her two most recent sitcoms, Rev, in which plays the wife of Tom Hollander’s inner-city vicar, and Twenty Twelve, the Olympics comedy in which her PA shyly won the heart of boss Hugh Bonneville, that she has parts large enough to equal Peep Show’s magnificence. And Rev has won her a whole new fan-base.

“We went to try and do some filming at Greenbelt Christian rock festival,” she says, “but we couldn’t use the footage because everybody went ‘Aaah!’… It was like being in the Stones. There was a vicar shaking Tom’s hand and saying, ‘Thank you so much… I’m proud of my dog collar – you’ve shown us as fallible and human and trying our best’.”

Rev returns at the end of the year, although Bad Sugar, the telenovela pastiche co-starring Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan, surprisingly won’t be progressing beyond the pilot stage that was shown on Channel 4 last year. “It’s been decommissioned,” she says. ” I think there might be some new blood and it’s not their baby… I don’t know… politics.”

And then our time is up and it’s off to have her photograph taken – and I notice that this seemingly self-effacing actor, casually attired in black leggings and Ugg boots, is carrying a plastic bag with a pair of ultra-high heels, in the fashionable dominatrix style, and a birthday present to herself. It leaves me with a nagging feeling that there might be another Olivia Colman that I haven’t yet begun to meet.

Source: independent.co.uk – Is Olivia Colman Britian’s most versatile actress?

Olivia Colman: Scenes with dead child’s parents left me in tears

Olivia+Colman+Iron+Lady+European+Premiere+3Zl_cwwqIFPlart Filming heart-wrenching scenes for upcoming ITV drama Broadchurch left the actress, who is better known for her comedy roles, in floods.

The compelling eight-parter, in which Olivia plays DS Ellie Miller, opens with the grim discovery of schoolboy Danny Latimer’s body at the foot of a cliff.

She was moved to tears during the scenes when DS Miller quizzes the dead boy’s grief-stricken parents.

Olivia said: “I found it really hard to do the emotional scenes with Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan who play Danny’s parents.

“Because they are such beautiful actors, I had a hard time keeping it together.

“My character wasn’t supposed to cry half as much as she ended up doing but I couldn’t stop myself. It was so sad.”

Olivia is best known for appearing in TV comedies including Peep Show, Rev, Twenty Twelve and Green Wing. But it wasn’t just the serious subject matter of Broadchurch that wiped the smile off her face.

The mum-of-two found it hard being away from her family while filming on location in Dorset. She wasn’t the only one. Co-star David Tennant, who plays DI Alec Hardy, also found it tough going.

They battled their homesickness together by watching videos of their kids.

Olivia said: “The worst thing was being away from home and my family for so long. I don’t think I will ever be away for that long again.

“Stupidly, when I took the job, I didn’t realise it was all going to be filmed away from London. I thought we’d pop off and do the cliff scenes in the West Country but do all the internal stuff in London.

“So it came as a bit of a shock. But David and I got on really well and he feels the same as me. So on Friday nights, after filming finished, we’d leg it to get into the car and head home to our families.

“He totally understands and we’d be looking at videos of our kids on our phones to keep ourselves buoyant.”

Under the glare of the media spotlight, the grim case is investigated by local copper DS Miller and newcomer DI Hardy.

Yet Broadchurch, which begins on March 4, is far more than just a whodunit. It looks at how 11-year-old Danny’s death affects the small, close-knit seaside community.

Former Doctor Who star David revealed how the role also gave him an agonising insight into the lives of grieving parents.

He said: “As actors, our job is to always empathise and think oneself into the emotional situation, whatever that may be.

“This script has great humanity and the writer, Chris Chibnall, shows immense understanding of the human condition in all the different characters and the way the death impacts on the community.

“I think it will have emotional empathy, which is what pulls the audience in whatever it is — whether it’s a murder mystery or something set in the future on Mars. It’s the range of characters and their responses to this horribly heightened situation that make Broadchurch so compelling.”

The drama, which also stars Birds Of A Feather’s Pauline Quirke, has plenty of twists and turns — for both viewers and the cast who were kept in the dark as to the outcome.

David explained: “I had two scripts to look at and knew that other scripts would be appearing throughout the process. But we wouldn’t get final scripts until months into the shoot. It was a gamble.

“But the fact that I read it from cover to cover in one pass and was left at the end of the first episode desperately wanting to know what happens next was telling.

“That initial response is always worth noting. If it grabs you and you want to know more, and if you’re intrigued by the characters in that first moment, that’s always something to be pursued.”

He added: “When you’re playing those initial interviews with characters and you genuinely don’t know what the truth is, you can’t load those scenes with ‘actorly’ tricks.

“You have to play it for what it is, which can only make it more real. You can be as exasperated about the mystery of the characters as the audience will be.

“It’s great to be part of something where all the characters have powerful stories to tell. There’s the whodunit aspect but there are other stories going on and such wonderful people portraying those parts.

“It’s great to be able to see those characters and worlds develop.”

Source: thesun.co.uk – Olivia Colman scenes with dead childs parents left me in tears

Colman: Broadchurch so emotional

142384248GALL Olivia Colman has confessed she had to stop herself bursting into tears on the set of new crime drama Broadchurch, because the story is so sad.

The Peep Show star plays Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller in the ITV drama, who is investigating the murder of a boy found on a beach, and the actress confessed she found Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan’s performances as the bereaved parents overpowering.

Olivia said: “They were amazing, but I couldn’t look at them without sobbing.”

She added: “It’s quite upsetting. But it was lovely. I worked with David Tennant, who is the nicest man in the world, so that was a joy working with somebody so lovely.”

The drama was filmed on the Dorset coast, and Olivia revealed she had been hoping to treat her family to a seaside holiday on her days off, but the terrible British weather got in the way.

She said: “I was going to book a caravan for my kids to come and everything and then it p***ed it down, so we didn’t.”

Source: tv.uk.msn.com – Colman: Boardchurch so emotional

Olivia joins the cast of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

capt.029db440212d45cfb37f19a6b9cb5c2d-cd39c7e78721475f863db38316589abd-0sm Olivia Colman joins the cast of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II starring Paddy Considine as Jack Whicher

BAFTA Award nominated actress Olivia Colman (Tyrannosaur, Twenty Twelve, Rev) will co-star in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II : The Murder In Angel Lane alongside Paddy Considine (The Bourne Ultimatum, Submarine, Red Riding), who returns to the role of Jack Whicher following the success of film drama The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which aired on ITV in April 2011.

Produced by Hat Trick Productions, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II is based on the life and times of Inspector Jonathan ‘Jack’ Whicher, the real-life pioneering detective who worked in the newly established Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police during the 19th Century.

In the new film Olivia plays Susan Spencer, who employs Mr Whicher as a private inquiry agent to investigate the savage murder of her niece, 16 year old Mary.

Also starring in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II is William Beck (Casualty, The Agent, Hustle), who reprises his role as Chief Inspector Dolly Williamson, and Tim Pigott-Smith (Downton Abbey, Strike Back, The Hour) returning as Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne. Shaun Dingwall (Above Suspicion, Summer in February, Rock & Chips) stars as Inspector George Lock and William Postlethwaite as Mary’s lover Stephen Gann.

They are joined by Mark Bazeley (The Body Farm, Accused, Mistresses), Sean Baker (Call the Midwife, Sparks and Embers, Silent Witness) and Alistair Petrie (Whitechapel, Ashes, Cranford).

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II films over the next four weeks in Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire and central London. The two-hour film is written by BAFTA award-winning Neil McKay (Appropriate Adult, Mo, See No Evil: The Moors Murders).

The fictional story draws upon historical research into the detective career of Jack Whicher, medical, legal and policing practices of the day and both the criminal world and the apparently respectable Victorian society into which his work led him.

The original film was based on the best-selling book by Kate Summerscale, which brought to light Inspector Whicher’s ground-breaking career as one of the world’s first detectives. Kate has given her blessing to the new film.

Hat Trick’s Head of Drama Mark Redhead (The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, Bloody Sunday, Bodies) will executive produce the film, Rob Bullock (Case Sensitive, Mutual Friends, Wild at Heart) will produce and Christopher Menaul (Prime Suspect, See No Evil: The Moors Murders, Zen) will direct.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II was commissioned by ITV’s Drama Commissioning team, Laura Mackie and Sally Haynes.

Laura comments: “We’re delighted Paddy Considine has agreed to reprise his role as Jack Whicher, the most celebrated detective of his day. Neil McKay has taken the character and produced a gripping and compelling story”.

Mark Redhead adds: “After Jack Whicher left the Met, he continued with his vocation as a detective as one of the first so-called “private inquiry agents”. This story launches him into that career, and he becomes involved in a disturbing and puzzling murder case which brings him into conflict with powerful figures including his former colleagues in the Metropolitan Police.”

“When it’s murder, you want, more than anything else, to bring some kind of peace to those left bereaved by it. There can be no peace without the truth…” Inspector Jonathan ‘Jack’ Whicher

Source: itv.com – Olivia Colman joins the cast of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Broadchurch will air in the US

158033275gallIf you live in the UK you already knew you’d get the chance to see Broadchurch, a miniseries about “the events and investigation that unfold in a small coastal town after the murder of a young boy,” a bit later this year. And now we’ve found out that it’s been picked up by BBC America to air in the States as well. Why is that news relevant to our American readers? Only because Doctor Who‘s David Tennant and Arthur Darvill are both in it. We thought you’d like to know.

Tennant will play one of the detectives investigating the case of the murdered boy, while Darvill will play the town priest. The second detective is to be played by Olivia Colman, whom I best know as PC Doris Thatcher from Hot Fuzz, though she’s appeared in a ton of stuff before and since. Interestingly, IMDB notes that Colman played someone’s mother in the first Matt Smith (and, by extension, Arthur Darvill) episode of Doctor Who, though I don’t remember her character.

The eight-part miniseries, written by Doctor Who scribe Chris Chibnall, will air on ITV sometime this year and, to take a wild guess, on BBC America a month or so later at the most? I’ve been unable to find any confirmed information on the British release date, and the American one’s not been set yet, but BBC America tends to not lag behind quite so much as, say, PBS does (looking at you, Downton Abbey). Regardless, you can be sure we’ll be keeping track of this Doctor Who sort of-reunion.

Source: themarysue.com – Broadchurch picked up by BBC America