Interview: Andrea Riseborough, actor

It’s early morning in Los Angeles, not that you would know it from talking to Andrea Riseborough. The hour is clearly irrelevant. This woman can talk for Hollywood, and anything can set her off. Forget for a moment that she is the actor whom Madonna recently said she wanted to play her in a musical of her life. Forget that her performance in Rowan Joffe’s remake of Brighton Rock was so breathtaking it put co-stars Helen Mirren and John Hurt in the shade. Forget that, at the age of 30, she has the unique honour of having tackled a role before Meryl Streep got to it (Margaret Thatcher). Right now Riseborough is talking about a Glaswegian family she met recently on Sunset Boulevard. “Ah, a British voice – lovely!” she announces when I introduce myself. And needing no further cues, she’s off.

“There are so many Brits abroad nowadays,” she notes. “I was walking down Sunset, coming back from the gym and there were these Glaswegians, a totally regular family in sweatpants and T-shirts. Lovely, lovely people,” she sighs. “So I stopped them and said ‘hello, I’m from Newcastle!’ It was a lovely bonding experience. Quite an unusual scene to witness on Sunset amongst all these really slim blonde women and tiny dogs.” She roars with laughter, a proper Geordie guffaw with a bit of RADA thrown in. I wait for her to pause for breath so I can slip in a question. I wait a long time.

While Riseborough motors on I notice a lot of noise in the background. It’s probably a bunch of harried Californian publicists (with tiny dogs?) rushing around thumping scripts on tables and taking the temperature of bottled water. Then again... “Listen, you must forgive the racket,” Riseborough says conspiratorially. “I’m trying to cook a sausage.” Next, a brief pause while she gulps down her morning ginseng and Vitamin C. “My greens for the day before the sausage,” she explains. By now accepting that I’m just along for the Riseborough ride, I cast aside my questions about Resistance, her new film, and W.E., in which she plays Wallis Simpson under Madonna’s direction, and ask if she is still a teetotaller instead.

“Well, I may have been at one point,” she says. “But I don’t drink very much, that’s true. I would love to have the time to drink more. But look, all this work is a fantastic opportunity and I want to completely immerse myself in it. I’m not interested in doing it any other way. You can have all of me or nothing. Not that I’ve ever given nothing...” she adds, which seems screamingly obvious given her performance so far in this interview. “That’s why I stay healthy. I want to have great longevity and be as focused as I can be on my work. And I want to enjoy life. I don’t want to be huffing and puffing when I go on a hike. I want to have every synapse and blood vessel alive.”

Welcome to the rise and rise of Andrea Riseborough, an actor on the brink of major stardom. She’s been pictured on the red carpet with her arm slung through Madonna’s, she was named one of the ten Shooting Stars at the Berlin Film Festival, and she featured on the cover of AnOther Magazine’s Best of British tenth anniversary special issue. And that’s all just this year.

It’s been a swift ascent. Riseborough only graduated from RADA in 2005. And it’s only been three years since she shot to fame for nailing Thatcher in the BBC’s acclaimed The Long Walk to Finchley. “If I play a character who is a historical figure,” she tells me, “I love that there is already this framework of suggested emotional responses. But also you can never know exactly how someone would respond because no one is knowable, despite what people think. I’ve had so many people sit beside me at dinner and tell me exactly who Margaret Thatcher was and they never even met her. But that’s interesting too. I love to experience how people respond to my characters.”

Since Thatcher, most of her work has been in film: Never Let Me Go, Made in Dagenham, Brighton Rock, and now Resistance, a spare, lyrical indie film set in a Welsh valley during the Second World War. Directed by first-timer Amit Gupta, the film (adapted from a novel by Owen Shears) imagines that the D-Day landings failed, Britain is under Nazi occupation, and all the women in a remote valley wake up one morning to find their men have disappeared. Riseborough plays Sarah, a farmer’s wife, and once again her performance – understated, nuanced, and very good – is being spoken of as career-defining.

“I saw that script and it reminded me of that time in the night, around 3am, when you wake up really disoriented and wonder if everyone else in the world has disappeared,” she says. “It’s kind of an apocalyptic feeling. That’s what attracted me to it. I wanted Sarah to have a stillness and quietness that reflects the land and time she inhabits. What was liberating for me was there was no need to be smiley and give everyone constant affirmation. I’m conscious of doing that because I never want people to feel uncomfortable. I’m always over-compensating. It’s funny. Playing a character can almost change you.”

Some of Riseborough’s success is down to luck: she was cast as Rose in Brighton Rock after Carey Mulligan pulled out to do Wall Street II and the same happened with W.E. when Vera Farmiga became pregnant and Madonna cast Riseborough as the American socialite who marries Prince Edward, leading him to abdicate the throne. But most of her success is down to sheer talent. Sir Peter Hall, who directed Riseborough at the RSC, called her one of the “bravest and most impressive actresses I’ve come across in recent years”. Joffe, who directed her in Brighton Rock, has referred to her extraordinary “chameleon-like ability to be totally different from part to part”.

It’s true. Riseborough can disappear so completely into a character that you don’t even notice it’s her. This is even more impressive when you consider how striking she is herself: the Snow White combo of dark hair and porcelain skin, the enormous blue eyes and rosebud mouth. If she wasn’t so expressive, so animated, she would look like a doll.

“Each character is a different chapter in my life,” she says when I ask her how she transforms herself from role to role. “I’m the tool that lends itself to their creation and then they seep into me. I see so much of myself in all of them. But I choose not to make a judgment about how different they are because then my motivation wouldn’t be pure. It would be about wanting to be as different as possible all of the time. I have no interest in that at all. That would be about feeding my ego and I don’t choose to operate in that way.”

Riseborough can be grand and theatrical, giving her the air of an old-school studio star. She is hilariously gushy, falling over herself to compliment everyone on the set of Resistance from her co-star Tom Wlaschiha (“gorgeous, gorgeous person, totally incredible and plays Rachmaninov beautifully”) to her driver (“wonderful, wonderful accent”) and the people of Abergavenny (“I called my partner, Joe, as soon as I landed and said ‘it’s all right, I’m being taken care of by angels’”).

The only subject off-limits is W.E., which recently had its UK premiere at the London Film Festival and has been panned by some and praised by others. “No, no, no, no, no,” she says firmly when I ask her about working with Madonna on one of the most hyped films of the year. “We’ll have to talk about that at a separate time. I will be inundated with questions about the wrong films at the wrong time if I answer that. I just can’t. Do you have more questions about Resistance?” The message is loud and clear. We move on.

Riseborough grew up in Whitley Bay, a seaside town outside Newcastle. Her father was a used-car salesman and her mother a secretary. During the economic boom of the Eighties the family prospered and sent the young Riseborough to an independent school. She was, unsurprisingly, a high achiever from the start.

“I was very gregarious but I also needed solace,” she says, rather dramatically. “I lived far away from my school and we were the first people to move into the street so we actually had to wait for neighbours. There was a period of time when there was no option but to have a full internal life.”

Her father was and remains a serious cinema buff, though it’s only in recent years they’ve started to discuss and watch films together. “It was never talked about,” she explains. “His relationship with film was very private. We didn’t watch them together. He would sit and watch films on his own and I would come in and catch snippets..

“My relationship with film and discovery of acting happened very naturally and very privately,” she goes on. “I did a lot of talking to myself, sometimes in front of the mirror. I was desperate to get home every day to draw or paint or finish a story. I just remember having this feverish desire every single day from the moment I woke up to do something.”

Her teachers began encouraging her to apply to Oxford to read English. She was also considered a talented dancer and there was discussion of becoming professional. But then, just like that, Riseborough dropped out of school when she was 17. She decided she wanted to move out of home, choreograph some dance, and shred duck in a Chinese restaurant. “The talk was that I was Oxford material, whatever that means,” she sighs. “So what happened? Something inside me, and it seemed like utter rebellion to the rest of the world, just needed to get out there on my own. Looking back it was a wisdom of sorts but it felt accidental, almost hormonal. And then, really, I had the best of times and the worst of times. One day, that was it. The last duck shredded. I decided to apply to RADA.”

And of course they snapped her up. I’m not sure there’s much that Riseborough couldn’t make happen. She seems extraordinarily single-minded. “I just love my job,” she says airily. “I do. I love it.” I had heard a rumour that she was moving to Paris to perfect her French with her partner, an artist and former model called Joe Appel, but that plan seems to have been shelved. For now, anyway. “I did feel a few years ago that I just needed to be in Paris,” she sighs. “That was always the plan. The thing is, I haven’t had much time to lock the one place down recently.”

How did a girl from Newcastle wind up in Idaho? “My partner’s family are there,” she says. “Wonderful people. Incredible place. I love the music scene that comes from Portland, Oregon, Seattle is close by, and there’s a real counterculture going on. Have you been? You really must go...” I sense Riseborough, not for the first time, has found a new subject. “I do get a kick out of being a Geordie in Boise, Idaho,” she goes on, warming up. “I’m the only Geordie down at Terry’s Karaoke. Actually we’re looking to buy a house with some land, a ranch-y type affair. Not that I’ve got the first clue what to do with horses,” she admits with a theatrical sigh. “I don’t suppose you know anyone who could help me out?”

• Resistance is on general release from 25 November.