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Friel, at last - actress Anna Friel - Interview
Interview, April, 1999 by Edward Helmore
Anna Friel likes challenges. With four movies featuring Friel out this year, America better get ready for this seductively straightforward actress, who's also making her Broadway debut
Twenty-two-year-old Anna Friel has cut a figure of fascination in her native Britain since she was fourteen. The broad spectrum of parts she's played - from a groundbreaking TV lesbian in the gritty Northern soap Brookside to a feisty, jodhpur-wearing farmhand in the wartime film drama The Land Girls (1998) - has made her one of the most versatile and fearless of the crusading new generation of English actresses. A succession of movies set to open this year is about to lodge her in the collective American consciousness. She plays Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, an early-'70s fashion designer in Sunset Strip, the wife of the man who broke Barings bank in Rogue Trader, and a crazy Australian in Mad Cows.
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But first, she'll appear on Broadway as a troubled lap dancer in Closer, this year's hotly anticipated theatrical import by British playwright Patrick Marber. Rehearsing the play's fight scene has exacerbated an old acting injury. She nurses her wound as she sinks into an armchair at the bar of New York's Paramount Hotel. Between a stop at the hairdresser's to tweak what she describes as her "demure and urchiny" bob and a trip to a strip club for research, the busy actress pauses to give Interview her version of the Anna FriLl story so far.
EDWARD HELMORE: How did you hurt your back?
ANNA FRIEL: The doctors say it dates back to a film where I had these huge prosthetic breasts because my character was breast-feeding. The weight of them, and of the baby, did my back in.
EH: Did you have implants for the part?
AF: No. You can now buy ones that go on top of your breasts, with nipples that go hard if it gets cold. They're not just for actors, they're for anyone - you just put them in your bra. They feel totally real but they're just so bloody heavy.
EH: Some actresses have surgery for roles.
AF: I wouldn't go that far. It's really important to draw the line on what we do as actors. I'm twenty-two and I've got a life ahead of me.
EH: Are you looking forward to Closer?
AF: I'm petrified, basically. I've never been onstage in my life. But if I wasn't terrified, I'd be an arrogant fuck. It's exciting; I can't wait to go to rehearsal each day. Onstage, there's no hiding; you either can or can't act. There's no second take.
EH: You've never been onstage before?
AF: Actually, no, I lie. I've been onstage once for one performance with four days' rehearsal. This is my first time on Broadway, in a twelve-hundred seater! The best thing is, I'm actually getting to rehearse. I've just done several films back to back, and none of them had rehearsals. For Closer, we've had five weeks. You go into every single word because it's very, very concentrated dialogue.
EH: What's Closer about?
AF: It's four people - two couples - who meet accidentally and become entwined. It questions love, sex, relationships, and whether honesty is always the best policy. In England, when they leave the theater, men have said to women, "I'm not really like that, am I?" There's something in the play that everybody can relate to. It's very dark and depressing, but it's so truthful and frank that it's quite horrifying. You think, My God, is there any romance in this world? Is there any love?
EH: You've done four films in the last year. Was it time for a change?
AF: This is a whole new challenge. You can get very enticed by and mixed up with the film world, and I don't want that. I want to do something for myself, not because someone says, "It's good. You should do this. You'll cam that much money," or "It's with this director or this person." Working in L.A., I realized how easy it is to become a commodity. I look at being an actress as being like a mummy: You're bandaged up and preserved as soon as you start making other people money.
EH: You seem to like challenging stereotypes.
AF: I've always chosen incredibly different roles and things that are quite offbeat. That way you're not limited. I get bored with this dead, wimpish, "I'm a little girl" character. I don't like that. I love to see personality. And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist. You can see when an actor gets bored: Their eyes go dead. I promised myself I'd never let that happen. If it does, I'll go and live on a desert island for a year.
EH: Your first real brush with fame in England came as Beth Jordache in Brookside.
AF: She didn't start out as a lesbian, but this huge story line developed as she questioned her sexuality. I said I'd do the story line as long as she remained gay, as long as it wasn't just a phase she was going through. It was a watershed when she came out - it made the front page of the papers. The show was watched by such a wide scope of people, from four-year-olds to eighty-year-olds, so when it hit it made me a household name. We didn't do it for shock, but three years ago in England everyone was going, "Oh, gosh, this plain-Jane girl next door is gay!"
