Olivia Colman has quite the most expressive face I’ve ever seen. In the space of a minute she goes from gurning and grimacing to Carry On-style saucy. And that’s just when she’s telling me about her summer holiday.
On camera she’s brilliant at weeping or looking tetchy. Sitting opposite me today she’s bright and bubbly, if a little nervy.
It’s only when she’s talking about a role that she comes into her own: she’s passionate and confident and looks you straight in the eye as she speaks. She’s also naturally funny and giggles easily, without affectation.
No wonder she’s regarded as one of the sweetest and most down-to-earth people in the business.
It’s easy to see why she made her name in comedy. But serious drama discovered her. This time last year you may have recognised her face but you’d probably have had no idea of her name. Then came the acclaimed film Tyrannosaur in which she played a charity worker who strikes up a doomed relationship with a self-destructive widower.
That was followed by two BAFTA-winning roles – as doe-eyed secretary Sally Owen in Twenty Twelve and then bereaved mother Sue in Jimmy McGovern’s series of gritty crime dramas Accused – which had her peers hailing her as the new Judi Dench.
And then came parts as Carol Thatcher in The Iron Lady and tragic DS Ellie Miller in the most talked-about TV show of last year, Broadchurch.
She’s a bona fide star now, and it’s fair to say that if 2013 was the year she broke through, just wait till you see what Olivia’s got coming up in 2014.
But she’s also a mother to two boys, aged six and eight, with actor and writer husband Ed Sinclair. How does she fit it all in? ‘I know it looks like I’m busy but I’ve just had four months off,’ she giggles, covering her mouth as if she’s just said something naughty.
‘Yes, I did, really. I wondered what to do with myself but it turns out I’m brilliant at doing very little. Things went a bit quiet around the school summer holidays so I asked my agent to keep it free. Everything slotted in nicely and I had a proper summer with my children. My priority is my family and if that’s all OK, only then can I branch out.’
She’s certainly making up for lost time. Just after being on screen in the spooky thriller The Thirteenth Tale opposite Vanessa Redgrave last week, she’s back playing a cuckolded wife in another TV drama, The 7.39, this week.
Even while doing interviews to promote that she was dashing off to the set of the third series of runaway hit Rev, in which she plays vicar’s wife Alex Smallbone.
This month she’ll start filming Mr Sloane, a bittersweet romantic comedy series in which she’s cast as the estranged wife of Nick Frost’s ‘buttoned-down 1960s man in crisis’. And in March she’ll be making The Lobster, a film by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos with the interesting premise that single people are ordered to find love or face being turned into animals. ‘It’s a bonkers script,’ she says giggling. ‘But I’m very excited about working on it as it’s completely different to anything I’ve done before.’
Then, all being well, will come Broadchurch 2. Olivia, 40, was clearly not happy when the Fox network announced last month that it was keeping her co-star David Tennant on board for its US remake of the show, but had cast Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn in the Ellie Miller role.
‘I never got the call, I don’t know why,’ she said at the time. ‘I don’t fit in there really.’ No one knows quite how the new series here will pan out; the first ended with Olivia’s endearing and all too real policewoman discovering that her beloved husband was the child murderer in a crime that had the nation – both on the show and in real life – in a complete tizzy. ‘I am doing it, though,’ says Olivia. ‘I think I’m allowed to tell you that.’
The work’s coming so thick and fast that for the first time in her career she’s having to say no to things. ‘There’s no great theory going on with my career,’ she shrugs. ‘I go on whether I like the story and if I think I could do it well. After Tyrannosaur I got quite a lot of scripts on the trot about women suffering from domestic violence at home; I had to turn a few down because I thought four in a row might be a bit much. I’m still up for crying on screen, though.’
Olivia’s forte is sobbing. It looks so real every time she does it, and that’s because it isn’t acting – she really is crying. ‘I don’t think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it’s as simple as that. It’s just like if you’re watching something moving and you feel yourself welling up. It’s the same thing.
‘You’re just being carried along with the story. There’s nothing magical about it. I think I’m in touch with my emotions and I can’t help it. If it touches me I cry. I cry a lot.’
There’s rather a lot of crying in The 7.39, but Olivia says she could totally sympathise with her character who – like her – has been with her husband since university. She plays Maggie, an occupational therapist and mother whose life may not be perfect but is ticking along nicely.
Then her husband Carl (David Morrissey) gets into an argument with a young woman called Sally (Sheridan Smith) on a train. That argument leads to friendship and on to an affair. And then Maggie finds out.
‘Maggie’s an innocent, she doesn’t know what’s unfolding and she’s trying to make sense of it,’ says Olivia. ‘She can see her husband changing and I found that interesting. What happens once the person you love leaves the house? She’s the family’s rock. She’s someone who gets hurt and she doesn’t deserve it. So it wasn’t hard to imagine myself pretty cross and upset. I’m married to him; he’s gone off and slept with someone else. I can imagine quite easily how angry I would be.’
In reality Norfolk-born Olivia appears to have her home life sorted. She met Ed when they were both studying at Cambridge; he was reading law while she was training to be a teacher, and both joined the university’s famous drama club Footlights.
Olivia had always loved stories, but it was with Footlights that she found she was really rather good at acting them out. ‘My mum was a nurse and her passion was geriatric care. I used to love listening to the old people’s stories in her nursing home and picturing myself in their place,’ she says. ‘They’d say, “I went to school in a horse and cart”, and I’d just think “Wow!” I’d picture myself in their place – acting was a natural progression.’
She changed her mind about teaching and went to study at the Old Vic Theatre School, but that was followed by many years of struggle, taking temping jobs to keep her head above water. Salvation came in the shape of David Mitchell and Robert Webb, the comic duo she’d also met at Cambridge and who arguably put her on the map.
She starred as Sophie Chapman, long-suffering girlfriend of Mitchell’s hapless, nerdy Mark in the huge Channel 4 hit Peep Show, then popped up as various characters in their sketch show That Mitchell And Webb Look.
She says she adores the pair of them, but felt she was becoming too closely associated with them. ‘My agent suggested I should be open to different things. There were tears when that decision was taken.’
Slowly she branched out – an appearance in Doctor Who, another in Skins, the drama Exile – and then suddenly everything seemed to collide at the same time to take her to the next level.
Olivia says she has every sympathy with The 7.39’s commuters (the show is so called because the adulterous pair always take the 7.39 train) because she was one herself for many years.
‘I spent all those years working as a temp and I hated the commute so much,’ she recalls. ‘I’m terrible in the mornings and I’d always struggle on the train. The show is beautifully done, particularly the scenes where everyone’s trying to get on the train and they’ve got their fists in each other’s backs. It used to drive me nuts.’
It’s her first time working with David Morrissey who she knows through friends. ‘It’s a treat to be working together; he’s a very nice man,’ she says. ‘The last two days of filming were particularly good. We were filming scenes of Carl getting in and out of bed and I was genuinely fast asleep quite a lot of the time.’
But she says that until recently she was still considering giving up acting. ‘I didn’t want to give it up, but I thought it might give me up,’ she says.
‘I’ve always enjoyed my work and felt lucky to be doing it. It’s a lot nicer now I’m doing more of it, though, but there’s still that feeling that it could all go wrong.’
After trying to carve out an acting career himself, Ed now works from home – he’s writing a novel – while Olivia takes advantage of being the most in-demand actress in Britain. She knows how much she depends on him and says that, unlike her character in The 7.39, she’s careful to make sure her husband knows he is appreciated.
‘When you’ve got children it’s easy to do that thing of keeping a tally of who woke up earliest and whose turn it is to put them to bed. But I think the important thing is to appreciate and love each other and to show that appreciation. This story shows how you need to be aware of what you’ve got.’
Stardom hasn’t changed her. She and her family still live in the south London suburb of Peckham – Del Boy’s manor in Only Fools And Horses – only these days she has her two BAFTAs sitting on the mantelpiece. She still regularly takes the train, but that’s a slightly different experience now.
Instead of being elbowed out of the way she’s more likely to be asked for an autograph. ‘People in general are rather sweet,’ she says almost apologetically.
‘You can see what they’re thinking, “Oh, she’s from that Broadchurch thing.” It’s nice to be at the stage I’m at now. I appreciate it very much. I feel lucky.’ And her face lights up.
Source:dailymail.co.uk – Olivia Colman reveals she is racked with self-doubt despite being biggest star of 2013
