Anne-Marie Duff has the best laugh – loud, full bodied and infectious. She’s sitting in her kitchen in London in front of a white fridge freezer festooned with the usual domestic ephemera, wearing a pretty black top accessorised with fine gold jewellery.
She’s talking, on the video call, about how her Catholicism shaped her growing up, as she did, in Thatcher’s Britain, the daughter of Irish parents on a council estate in southwest London. “I think for a lot of teenage girls our first crush was Jesus,” she says, with that distinctive chortle. She went on, as many did, to reject that church’s teachings, but aspects of the religion were formative.
“It connected me with the notion of otherness … with theatricality and ritual and how powerful they are. And also Communion. I love Communion, and that’s theatre.”
We’d been talking about Catholicism by way of a role that brought her huge critical acclaim in 2007 when she played Joan of Arc with an Irish accent in Shaw’s Saint Joan at the National Theatre. Her face was on posters for the first time in her career. “It was like being a rock star,” she recalls. The play had the effect of catapulting her back into her childhood religion “It was like getting a Charlie and The Chocolate Factory elevator straight up into Catholicism for me. I hadn’t realised that it would accelerate my connection with my childhood faith rearing.”
To trawl through Duff’s acting CV is to marvel at the range of roles she’s played since graduating from college at the notoriously rigorous Drama Centre London. “You’re so masochistic when you are young,” the 54-year-old says of that strict training. Duff was determined from a young age to make it as a classical actor. She had the full backing of her parents Brendan, a painter-decorator from Meath, and Donegal-born Mary, who worked in a shoe shop. “They wanted me to be more of myself,” she says of their support. She applied for drama school twice. “I phoned every day and I think they just got sick of me.”
She has spoken a lot over the years about the “duality” of being second-generation Irish in Britain. She mentions a teacher joking about “bombs in the bags” and fellow attendees of Pogues gigs being subjected to anti-Irish discrimination by police.
Saint Joan is only one of several iconic women Duff left her mark on. She’s been Lady Macbeth on Broadway opposite Ethan Hawke, a macaroon-scoffing Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Queen Elizabeth I in the TV series Virgin Queen.
She is, she says, “incredibly grateful” that she’s never been pigeonholed: from her breakout television and film roles as Fiona in Shameless and Margaret in The Magdalene Sisters to playing John Lennon’s mother Julia in Nowhere Boy and Tracy in The Salisbury Poisonings, her roles have been rich and various. A whole new generation of fans recognise her as heroin addict Erin in Sex Education, and she won a Bafta for her portrayal of abused wife Grace Williams née Garvey in Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters. But she’s on this call to talk about her role in yet another gritty and potentially award-winning television drama, Reunion.
It’s an extraordinary four-part thriller from the BBC, produced by Warp Films, the company behind the Netflix hit Adolescence. Set in the northern English city of Sheffield, the story centres around the deaf community and is fully bilingual – Duff learned British Sign Language in six weeks for the role. In Reunion she plays Christine, a woman who is determined to get answers about her husband’s death from his murderer, family friend Daniel, played by Matthew Gurney. Daniel, a deaf man, has been released from prison and is looking for revenge and redemption while trying to repair the fractured relationship with his daughter.
Duff was attracted to the role because of the “brilliant, brilliant writing” by deaf writer William Mager. But also because it was both a challenge and an opportunity to contribute something impactful. As an actor she’s used to being “thrown a banjo and told to play”, and relished the opportunity to learn to sign and be part of a project that will likely make a significant difference to how that community is perceived. “Deaf people are desperately underrepresented so hopefully it’s a bit of a wake-up call,” she says.
The dramatic storyline – the makers describe it as “an urban western” – follows deaf characters having sex, doing drugs and generally being flawed human beings. It shouldn’t feel subversive, but the lack of representation of deaf people in mainstream culture means it most definitely does. “We do normal things, we do stupid things. Deaf people make mistakes – we learn from them, we are just the same,” Gurney has said of his role. It’s what makes the show as compelling as it is innovative.
Duff loved learning to sign and has kept it up since. “If you watch two deaf people having an argument or being very passionate about something, it’s very hot, you feel that space between people very clearly, because there’s no subtext. Nobody’s going round and round the garden to get to the gate. You get straight to the point very quickly. And so there’s a sort of dynamism, and there’s a truth. I found that really refreshing, and it makes you very bold.”
We move on to Bad Sisters because I’m under strict instructions from my teenage daughters to find out why her character Grace was killed off at the start of season two. Fans of the show were shocked and horrified when an emotionally vulnerable Grace met her end in a car crash at the end of the second episode. Why did Grace have to die?
“It was just a good plot device,” Duff says, having clearly fielded this question a few times. “We were constantly being bombarded with the question, what happens to Grace in season two? And I suppose the more interesting question was, what happens if you take Grace out of season two?”
Anyway, she says, Grace never seemed to her to be long for this world. “It’s like a sort of Greek tragedy, Grace’s life, isn’t it? So there is only one way out. Although I was sad, I was also relieved, because playing Grace was kind of like over tuning a string instrument, it’s so taut, and it made me quite sad playing her a lot of the time.”
She’s a regular visitor to Ireland, so making Bad Sisters was “a joy”. “The very first time I stood in front of a camera was when I did Amongst Women a million years ago. It’s interesting to me that a lot of my most satisfying work on a set has been in Ireland.”
Over the last couple of years she has used her profile to raise awareness of issues around Alzheimer’s disease. Her brother, Eddie, was diagnosed with early onset dementia in his 40s. How is he now?
“He’s at the stage where he needs to be in full-time care ... it’s terribly sad, but at the same time you get these moments where you are so joyful because he’s giggling or he’s said something that’s made everyone so charmed. You have to ask, what are the gifts inside of this situation?”
Alzheimer’s is “a cruel, a motherf**ker of a disease because it’s a long goodbye. There’s that inevitable final act; you never know when it’s coming. There’s no prognosis … I remember Mariella Frostrup articulating it so beautifully. She said ‘I watched my mother turn into a piece of paper lace’ and I remember thinking it’s so profoundly accurate. It’s cobwebby. I just do the best I can. I watch my parents – that’s the hardest for me, watching my mum and dad go through it. Because I have my boy [Brendan, her son with ex-husband actor James McEvoy] and if I had to watch that happen to him ... ”
She does a lot of work with the Alzheimer’s Society. Navigating the care system is the biggest challenge, she says, “and I am sure it’s the same in Ireland … you have to keep banging the drum. This is not something we have inbuilt expertise to deal with; towards the end you need help. You need nursing care and you need a psychological break from it.
“People put a lot of pressure on themselves, husbands and wives feeling they have to be there until the end otherwise you’re not a good spouse. But it’s not true. And sometimes the best thing you can do for them and for yourself is have them cared for professionally. But it’s a rocky road, and my heart goes out to anyone going through it.”
She has cleared the decks for a few months, to spend time with her son and her parents while she chooses between projects. How are her 50s treating her? “It’s really interesting,” she says. “Because you do know yourself very well by this stage but you have to go, ‘Okay, what’s next then?’ And I’ve noticed a lot of women around my age are doing that … we’re like, ‘Okay, I have the second half of my life, please Jesus, to go. So what am I going to fill that f**ker with?’ That’s where I am at the moment, I’m at that fork in the road. I have to decide which way I turn, get the old backpack on and go.”
What kinds of adventures are waiting at that fork in the road? “I’m not telling you, mate,” she says and there’s that huge laugh again. The best laugh.
Reunion starts on BBC One on Monday 7th April at 9pm.
