Multi talented actress Shirley Henderson discusses her career from Bridget Jones to Harry Potter, providing the voice for Babu Frik in The Rise of Skywalker, and her new film The Trouble With Jessica with Star Wars alumni Alan Tudyk and Indira Varma.
It is easy to feel protective of Shirley Henderson on this gloomy winter afternoon. Is she warm enough? Does she want to put the heating on? “Aye, I’m OK,” she says from her home in Fife, a few strands of chestnut hair falling over her glasses as she huddles close to the laptop. “It’s a wee bit blowy out. But I’m at the age where you can get too warm, so I’m all right.” Her giggle is helium-high: the sort of sound you want to trap, like in one of those toy moo boxes, so that you can play it when you’re down in the dumps. Hearing Henderson laugh, or say “Sorry darlin’?” when she hasn’t quite heard your question makes you feel as if you’ve been cuddled.
Her allusion to the menopause, though, takes a moment to sink in. Though 58, she looks barely old enough to be online without parental controls. (No suspension of disbelief was required when she played a mother who dresses as her own adolescent daughter to sit an exam in May Contain Nuts.) Henderson came to prominence in the 1990s as one of the UK’s most probing, unpredictable character actors. After being spattered with excrement in Trainspotting, she won pivotal roles in two masterpieces: she was a soprano pining for her son in Mike Leigh’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan extravaganza Topsy-Turvy, and a feisty hairdresser smacking her lips at London life in the rhapsodic Wonderland. That was the first and best of her six collaborations with the director Michael Winterbottom, as well as the one which got her hooked on improvising.
Henderson’s new film, The Trouble With Jessica, brings her back to the capital, though this is a precisely drilled comedy, as macabre as its Hitchcockian title might suggest, with no room for ad-libs. She plays Sarah, who is about to sell her swanky London home, rescuing herself and her husband (Alan Tudyk) from financial disaster. Their closest friends (Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams) drop in for a celebratory dinner, bringing with them the irritating Jessica (Indira Varma), who then has the temerity to kill herself in the garden, thus imperilling the sale. If only she had died elsewhere …
The corpse-shifting scheme turns out to be the making of Sarah. “She finds a kind of freedom in being the leader,” Henderson agrees. “She has this brutal, selfish idea. But what I was trying to do was get you to like her and feel a wee bit sorry for her. It’s OK to hate her for a moment. Yes, she’s bad but she is also sad and trapped. And she’s a smart lady to come up with all this!”
Henderson is the movie’s engine, her arms going like pistons as she scurries around placating police officers, nosy neighbours and the house’s prospective buyer. The sound of her heels clicking on the floor becomes a kind of metronome against which the action is paced and played. “I started to hear that clickiness myself,” she says. “I thought: ‘That’s the sound of her stress.’ She is this modern woman, trying to be everything, bring up her daughter, love her husband, take on this house they can’t afford, but bits are breaking off.”
When preparing for a role, Henderson comes to her little room to experiment with accent, movement, gesture: the pencil marks that will add up to the final portrait. “I start off thinking: ‘How will I ever be able to do this? What’s the first thing I’m going to do in the wee place where I practice?’ Then gradually, you realise it’s happening. You’re not thinking too much, you’re not forcing it. It’s there.” She refers to that “wee place” with such reverence that I’m picturing a glowing grotto or candle-lit shrine. “It’s just a tiny wee room,” she says chirpily. “That’s where I am now. If I’m up here, I feel I’m away from the world.” All I can see of it is the comfy coat hanging on the door behind her.
Read the interview in full here, and see The Trouble With Jessica in UK and Irish cinemas from today, April 5th.
