Natascha McElhone interview: Tears and laughter

Published on Friday 1 May 2009 17:12

THE last time I met Natascha McElhone she was bemoaning a lack of laughs. She was proud of her most recent film, slow-moving and intellectual, but couldn't understand why no director up to that point had exploited her passion for comedy.

That film was Solaris and the actress could see the funny side of trying to promote serious work when the hacks at the junket were more keen to know what it felt like to share a screen with George Clooney's bare backside. Her comedy potential was obvious to me when she quipped: "You should see his front side."

Fast forward seven years and at last McElhone has her comedy: she's switched to the box for the new golden age of American TV drama and Californication, a clever, daring and witty series about writing for Hollywood, or rather not writing at all and having lots of wild sex instead. But you couldn't have scripted this tragic irony: she's having to be funny at work while away from it her gilded world has been shattered.

Last May, McElhone's husband, Martin Kelly, died suddenly of a heart attack at their London home while she was in Los Angeles filming the second season of Californication, which is about to air in Britain. A few minutes before, he'd left a phone message telling her how he couldn't wait to fly out to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. She was pregnant with their third child.

Kelly, half-French and a gifted plastic surgeon, was a fit 43-year-old who played in a rock band and had been snowboarding just weeks previously. Right away she penned a heartbroken tribute to the man who made her feel like "the luckiest woman alive" and who taught their sons chess, surfing, foreign languages, truth, integrity – "beautiful manly manners and how to leap into the unknown at least once a day". "I can't believe I won't feel his skin any more," she wrote in the obituary.

Today, McElhone, 43, is en route from a television studio to her home in Fulham, and her boys Theo and Otis, who now have a baby brother, Rex. She's been on the go all day, having begun interviews on a breakfast TV couch, and I imagine she's talked out. Publicity can't be an actress's favourite part of the job at the best of times, and with the anniversary of Kelly's death fast approaching, these cannot be the best of times.

"Well, I have to do my job," she says, "because there are three little people who are now very dependent on me. That's the way it is, the way it has to be – the last thing I'm going to do is curl up and be morose." McElhone was the main earner before, when Kelly was a student, and adds: "I want to try and maintain the lifestyle Martin and I established and at least for the next couple of years the boys shouldn't be hit by another tectonic shift so I'll do the work I get given. Lots of people are in similar situations to me and now I've got to be two parents if I possibly can. This is something I'm taking very seriously; I cannot let them down."

Californication, though, is far from being a needs-must grind. She adores the show, and a script which throbs with great one-liners. "I love women – I have all their albums," quips Hank Moody, the writer with a creative block but no such impediment in the trouser department. He's played, in a career-best performance, by David Duchovny who last August reportedly checked himself into a clinic for sex addiction. McElhone is the mother of his teenage daughter, who appeared to be getting Moody out of her system at the end of the first run, only to jump right back into his beat-up Porsche, leaving her safe, dull fianc at the altar. Although English, McElhone effortlessly looks the part of boho beauty Karen.

Seven years ago this journalist's daughter was describing the kind of film roles she invariably got offered as "introspective, slightly inaccessible". Californication was TV but there was no shame in that, not in America where "the writer is king; in Britain, he's just above runner". Twenty pages of Tom Kapinos' pilot script persuaded her this could be a bold and bawdy satire on Hollywood, Californian culture and the sex wars; the involvement of the "incredibly smart and creative" Duchovny as producer was the clincher.

"It's extremely liberating for me to be involved in such a funny and provocative show," she says. "The moral right in America don't like it, which I'm delighted about, although there are still some things we cannot say, at least in the US. If you let slip 'God', 'condom' or 'screw' during scenes that are improvised, they have to be dubbed out later. That's practically my entire vocabulary!"

McElhone's marriage was obviously blessed. Although we didn't get to speak for long the first time she still found lots to say about Kelly; words that now ring with poignancy. They met briefly when she was a 16-year-old restaurant greeter and a decade later he tracked her down. "He said he'd never forgotten me." Everyone on that promo day was a bit obsessed with "Gorgeous" George Clooney but she stressed she hardly noticed the other actors in her love scenes. "I had a good time before I met Martin and he likewise. But now I'm very loved by him."

Soon McElhone will return to LA to shoot the third series of Californication and the boys will go, too. "They love to skateboard, horse ride and swim in the sea, although Otis has obviously overheard my friends talking because the other day he said: 'Mummy, California isn't very real, is it?' I'll enrol them in science school this time. Otis and Theo are quite nerdy and brilliant at maths and that's Martin's legacy because he was always doing these daft experiments and encouraging them to blow things up."

Then her thoughts turn to Rex, who will miss his influence. "What am I going to do with him? I know, he can become a great ballet dancer..."

• Californication returns to Fiver on Thursday, 10pm