This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
When you get to my age and you’ve been acting this long, you are in full control of your powers,†Emily Watson, 57, tells me over lunch at a swanky London hotel. In person, the actress exudes intellectual intensity and modish English reticence, though there’s a certain mischievous energy, of the kind that defined her early performances, that glimmers in her eyes. (She arrives toting a ceramic cup that her husband, an actor and potter, had crafted himself.) “It’s like you’re a really well-tuned engine,†she says. “It’s great to have the opportunity just to vroom, vroom, vroom.†Her most recent roles have placed her in positions of great authority: In the upcoming film Small Things Like These (Watson won a Best Supporting Performance prize for it at the Berlin International Film Festival), she plays the Mother Superior of an Irish convent, quietly but powerfully threatening Cillian Murphy lest he release information about its abuse of women. She’ll also star in HBO’s Dune: Prophecy, a prequel series spun off the Denis Villeneuve films. She plays Valya Harkonnen, leader of the sect of witchy nuns eventually known as the Bene Gesserit, which plots the future through subterfuge and arranged marriage.
The characters resonate with Watson’s own life. Her family was part of the School of Economic Science, a cultish religious organization founded in England and influenced by Hindu traditions that proposed to teach meditation and philosophy and operated private schools for its members’ children. Those schools were, according to former pupils, hotbeds of cruelty and child abuse — an independent investigation in 2005 found evidence of criminal assault at the boys’ school in the 1970s and ’80s — as well as highly traditionalist values.
She was still a member of the SES when her big break arrived: a role in Lars von Trier’s 1996 film, Breaking the Waves. It catapulted her into the heart of Hollywood, netting her an Oscar nomination, but it also got her in trouble with the organization. In order to make sense of the sudden rupture from her community, Watson threw herself into work, going on to star in some of the most acclaimed films of the aughts: Gosford Park, Punch-Drunk Love, and Synecdoche, New York. “I wanted, I guess, to hold myself together as a person,†she says.
Let’s start with Dune. You’re not someone who has done much science fiction or this kind of franchise project. What was it about this that made you say “yes�
Initially, I got a call from Johan Renck, who had directed Chernobyl. Then there was a bit of shuffling. I think his vision of the show was more Lynchian than it was …
Villeneuvean?
Yes, I was trying to think of the right adjective. Then Alison Schapker came on and it just took on a life. My character, Valya, is driven by something that happened to her as a young woman and the unhappiness of her childhood. Our overt motive is to set the universe on a good path in an era 10,000 years B.C. — as we call it, “Before Chalamet†— but my inner motivation is a very vengeful thing Valya doesn’t quite know what to do with. What an opportunity getting to play someone who is steely and strong and manipulative and just bad, basically. And, also, to work with Olivia Williams. We go back decades. We were at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the same time.
Before we left for Budapest to film, Olivia and I went to the newly reopened National Portrait Gallery and went round all these portraits of Tudor women. These women were powerful but also paranoid. It’s all control. That’s what Dune is: It’s about oil, really — who controls the energy.
In a 2020 HBO miniseries, The Third Day, you played a cult leader. For that role, you drew on your experiences with the School of Economic Science. Was that on your mind playing a character like Valya, who is herself running a school for these initiates?
I was just saying to my husband, “Should I talk about that stuff?†I can’t not. It’s in my wheelhouse, really. Yes, I was feeling the sense of young lives being controlled and a sense of appropriation. People end up in those places because they have a kind of damage. That was my way into it. I thought, I grew up with people who had that kind of presence.
From what I’ve read in accounts of SES’s school programs, there were very traditional expectations for women as well as intense punishment if you didn’t behave. What was your experience of that?
No sex outside marriage, marriages for young women encouraged with older men, live at home until you’re married or with a family. We were told that “women can hold hands to change the world,†which I absolutely believe to be true. But then we were encouraged to become mothers, nurses, and teachers. Independence was frowned upon. Needless to say, I wasn’t a very good student and did none of the above. I was, in part, protected from it because my parents were removed from it emotionally. We were a very strong unit as a family. Probably all religions have this, but when people are given power — and when you have power over children — it can get out of hand so easily. The day school was very new, and it was a very new organization that didn’t have any sense of governance. The whole thing started back in the ’40s. My dad joined when he was 18, so I think in the late ’50s. There are still things I’m grateful for, but there were a lot of things that were not right. All of us were desperate to be normal kids. We felt like we were on the outside looking in because we went to this strange setup.
What were you grateful for?
I learned about the idea of there being a unifying force of love in everything and that everything is a version of that. I’m also able to concentrate, to really hyperfocus. I’ve got one of those slightly odd brains, possibly because I learned to concentrate out of fear.
Fear of punishment?
Yes, or just survival. Doing your utter best meant being okay. There was very much a discipline of being in the present moment and being connected to your senses, which is massively helpful as an actor.
You read a lot of classical spiritual texts and performed things like Shakespeare as part of the SES’s schooling. Did that start your interest in acting?
I would’ve found it difficult to walk away from if I hadn’t had acting, because acting is a version of searching for meaning. You’re always investigating human nature. It makes you feel very alive. I grew up with the fear that leaving the path would be your undoing, but acting rescued me, really, and Shakespeare as well. I did a bit of acting at school, and we did Shakespeare. I appeared in Much Ado About Nothing. Then I did acting when I was at university, student theater, and then I went to drama school. My first professional job was at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It felt like, Here’s the path. This is where you can go.
What was your time in the RSC like? I believe it’s where you met both Olivia and your husband.
To spend that amount of time with Shakespeare gives you a sense of rhythm and structure that is invaluable. You go through your career from job to job, and people come and go, but I remember everybody’s name and every detail. I think Olivia and I met probably in the pub. There was a whole circle of friends that were all at Cambridge together. My husband, Jack Waters, was at Cambridge with her and Sam Mendes and Tom Hollander. They’ve all gone into the industry in various ways, and we’re always encountering them.
What was your first role there?
Literally, I was spear-carrying, going, “News from Rome, my lord.†I had to come on with a dish with a secret finger on it for Antony Sher because he had to chop somebody’s finger in Tamburlaine. One night, I forgot! He went, “Where’s the finger?!†Though he was really sweet about it, actually.
After a few years at the RSC, you’d done a little television, but your first film role came with Lars von Trier’s 1996 Breaking the Waves. You play a sheltered, deeply religious Scottish woman, Bess, who marries a Danish oil worker (Stellan Skarsgård). When he is paralyzed in an accident, he encourages Bess to pursue sex with other men; Bess does so at the expense of being ostracized by her own community. Talk about throwing yourself headlong into something — what gave you the confidence to go after that role?
I was weirdly very ambitious to do interesting things. Before I got my first job, I was sharing a house with Mark Ravenhill, the playwright. We’d been at university together. He’d gotten one of those self-help books to do for fun, and it was like, “What do you want to do next with your life?†I said, “I’d like to get a job at the RSC.†He said, “I’d like to have a play on the West End.†Bingo. Both happened pretty quickly. Then I remember talking with my husband, and we were out by the National, thinking, “I should do a film next.†Then, lo and behold …
But with Breaking the Waves, I recognized something in the character when I was auditioning for it — something abandoned and devotional. It was a leap of love, really, and quite antithetical to the controlled situation that I was still a part of.
So you were still part of the SES while auditioning for Breaking the Waves?
Any big decisions you made, you had to run past them and get permission. There was a tutor who was in charge of your small group and then if they couldn’t answer a question, it would go up the hierarchy. Your life was very much under scrutiny and discussed — what you were doing and why you were doing it. When I told them what I was doing, they told me I wasn’t allowed to do it. I said, “Well, I’m going to do it anyway.†They told me to go on my undignified way. It was a very uncomfortable meeting. I was demoted, as it were. After that, it took me a while to finally extricate myself.
From what I understand, the cast of Breaking the Waves knew nothing about this at the time. You didn’t tell Stellan Skarsgård about it for decades.
I was frozen in turmoil of What does it mean? What have I done? Will I survive? It took me years to talk about it. It was very painful. My husband was amazing. He was, when I was still part of it, very accepting. Then when it all went down, he was just like, “I got you.â€
Was your family still part of the organization when you were cast out?
Yes, it was tricky and uncomfortable. They were actually very supportive, but they were still loyal to it all, so it wasn’t easy. I was young and probably immature as well. Over time, we came to find ways to talk about it and resolve things.
So in the midst of that, Breaking the Waves came to Cannes and received a pretty immediately rapturous reception and won the Grand Prix. What was that like to experience?
Of course, it was amazing. But the ethos of the institution — and not at home; not my parents — was that you have to acknowledge that nothing is yours. You have to surrender your individuality and serve. When suddenly everyone is looking at you … I froze. It was like being on two parallel tracks. That’s taken me a long time to be honest about.
Lars von Trier didn’t come to Cannes that year, so you were suddenly the face of a quite complex movie about faith and sexuality and had to explain it to the world.
I remember being in my hotel room getting ready, and I’d never been to a film festival or anything before. The publicist knocked on my door saying, “Lars has decided not to come.†He was at the time suffering from intense travelphobia. I’m, to this day, grateful for the presence of the other actors: Stellan, Katrin Cartlidge, and Jean-Marc Barr. They knew, more than I did, what an intense thing it was going to be. Had I known what a confronting thing the film would be, and how much exposure I would’ve gotten, I would have gotten my ass on a plane home.
I’ve read you say that something clicked with you artistically, specially with film — rather than stage — acting in making Breaking the Waves. What was it about that style of performance that connected with you?
If there’s enough to the role, there’s the precision of film acting. It’s not the same skill as telling a whole story over the course of one evening but the precision of discovering a moment fresh, as if it never happened and you’re unboxing it right there. It’s a hit like nothing else, really.
There’s a level of intimacy with a camera, I guess; every muscle can express something.
And I’m blessed with a readable face!
Breaking the Waves is sexually explicit. You’re nude on-camera, and Bess is performing these acts with men around the village. Did you worry about being sexualized?
I was terrified about it but also felt a sort of Damn it, I don’t care! In a way, you shouldn’t care. But the experience itself wasn’t exploitative. I felt very looked after. It was a gift. It changed my life, and I felt very loved and alive. It didn’t make me feel diminished in any way.
In 2017, Björk posted that a “Danish director†— by implication Lars von Trier, since they worked together on Dancer in the Dark — had sexually harassed her. Did you see those allegations, which Von Trier denied?
I did, yes. For a while, I was like, Well, she comes from a different world. She’s a singer and her own person. I think there was probably a clash, because she clearly has her own strong vision of life. But the experience of the last few years has told us that it takes a lot of courage to speak up about things, and you have to really, really respect that. So I do. I do. But my experience was not that.
After Breaking the Waves, you suddenly get the attention of Hollywood with the Oscar nomination at 29. But you seemed to approach that world with a level of skepticism.
My guiding principle was to do good work with a good script and a good director. I also had a great agent. She’s still my agent. We sat down at the bar in the Four Seasons in L.A., and she got out a sheet of A4 paper and said, “Emily, these are all the things you’ve been offered,†and went down the list, and we just started laughing. It was lots of spandex. Then it was just preposterous. When you’re suddenly hot, things come your way that are just … Really? Mother Teresa! Janis Joplin!
In the films you did choose after Breaking the Waves, it seemed as if you were turning toward working-class social-issue dramas: The Boxer, Angela’s Ashes. Was there an intention to that?
I don’t think I had a plan. It was just like, “Oh, really? He’s called?†Jim Sheridan and Daniel Day-Lewis! I was just rolling with what came, with what landed on my mat. Literally, scripts used to come sliding under your door in those days.
What was it like to act opposite Daniel Day-Lewis? He’s someone who approaches his roles very intentionally. I’ve read he wanted to stay apart from you on set initially because your characters were reuniting.
It was challenging because I had to find a way to relate to that. But he is so amazing, and what he does is so powerful and intense. I don’t think I could do it that way, but there’s a purity of intention that’s incredibly effective.
There’s a similar kind of abandon in your performances in Breaking the Waves and then in the controversial Hilary and Jackie, in which you’re playing Jacqueline du Pré, this prodigy cellist depicted in the film as totally self-destructive in her personal life. The film was based on her sister, Hilary, and brother Piers’s memoir, A Genius in the Family, which claimed to reveal salacious details of their sister’s personal life, including that she demanded to sleep with Hilary’s husband. It ignited criticism from Jackie’s colleagues — led by the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber — and Hilary’s daughter, Clare Finzi.
I’d always known about her, and her recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto was one of my favorite pieces of music. So as soon as I heard it was being done, I was like, Oh my God, yes. Then they told me the story of the book the sister had written. I have to say now, when I look back on it, I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the way we told that story. I felt defensive then, because it is true that artists have very messy lives. The filmmakers were very sincere in what they were trying to do and came from a documentary background. But I think now I’m older — however true the revelations were, there must have been people for whom that was very hard to bear.
Soon afterward, you were in the one-two punch of Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, and Punch-Drunk Love, by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Paul and Robert became close around that time. Paul was Robert’s stand-in director on A Prairie Home Companion because he had to have one for insurance. Nobody knew it then, but in Gosford it was Stephen Frears. And that was a joyous, amazing job. It was a who’s who of the British theater. I remember Altman saying, “Ah, you get that many egos in a room and they police themselves.†His company was called Sandcastle because that was his approach to making a movie: You build a sandcastle and then sit back and watch the tide take it away. Any time there was any sort of problem, he’d say, “I’m going to go lie down. Just wake me up when it’s fixed.†He’d turn up on a Monday morning, barely able to walk, looking terrible. Everybody was going, “Is he dying? What’s happening?†It was just that he’d smoked so much weed over the weekend.
It was such a lesson to me, because on Punch-Drunk, Paul was the sort of director who went over every detail. Then I turned up late from that to Gosford Park. My first scene was my last scene in the film: I’m in a wig; I’ve got an accent; I’m carrying a dog. We did one in sunlight and one in cloud, and he said, “I think I’ve got it.†Altman said, “I’m not really interested in what you do when you’ve worked it out.â€
Then we shot that big scene when I’m serving sauce, and at the very end I have this interjection. We did two takes, and it was a giant half-an-hour reset because of all these quails that people were eating. And I hadn’t nailed it! He said, “I think we got it.†And I was thinking, I haven’t gotten it. It was mortifying because Maggie Smith was sitting right there, and Kristin Scott Thomas was over there, and they were all being lovely, but I was dying inside. I begged him for one more take, which was this big reset. And that’s the one in the movie!
Do you have any favorite memories of Maggie Smith on that set?
In that scene, she was lovely to me. I said, “Maggie, help me,†and she was really sweet, making suggestions. I don’t exactly remember, but it was about where the motivation would come from, and, really, the solution was to forget you weren’t part of the conversation. It wasn’t a conscious interjection. It was as if you’re chatting away with all these people in your head.
Punch-Drunk Love was such a change of pace from some of your other movies at the time — this Adam Sandler vehicle from Paul Thomas Anderson. How did he first approach you?
I was staying at the Chateau Marmont doing press for something. He asked if we could meet, and we went to his favorite diner in the Valley. He said he was interested in making a 90-minute romantic comedy. I said, “Well, I don’t want to die or cry,†because I’d done quite a lot of that. He sent me the script, and I sat down and watched all of Adam’s movies, then had this nice thought that, somewhere in Hollywood, Adam was watching Breaking the Waves.
In one interview you did, you said that before each take, Paul would tell you, “These are not the droids you’re looking for.†What did he mean by that?
It was more that he wanted me to be in the present. So that was his way of doing it. I had done a number of things that were about doing masses and masses of prep and getting into character. This character wasn’t really a real person; she was a kind of cipher, an alien. Her name is Lena, which means light. She’s just a light going on. The moment that really encapsulates, for me, what I learned from him creatively was that when Adam goes to Hawaii and is trying to track me down, he goes to the phone booth and calls me. When I eventually answer the phone, all the lights go on. It’s a really lovely moment. But when they were shooting that scene, one of the extras told Paul there was a parade going through there tomorrow, and he went, “Let’s come back tomorrow.†There was a sense of folding life into the making of it, allowing yourself to be infected.
At a certain point, you started turning more to television. You said at the time you were increasingly just getting offers for film roles that were wives and mothers — more secondary characters. Was there a moment when you felt things shifting?
It coincided with needing to be home more because I’ve got kids. I was sort of not necessarily expecting it to work out. But your life expectancy on television is much higher than it is on film. Olivia and I just did some pickups for Dune the other day and were saying that when we were younger, there was the expectation that the pickings would get thinner for actresses of our age now. They haven’t! They’ve gotten fatter — at least for me, anyway.
Appropriate Adult, a drama based on a real-life serial-killer investigation, seems to have been your first big television project.
It was. I found a good place to land. My agent sent this script about Fred and Rose West. I said, “I don’t think so.†She said, “Read it. It’s good.†It was fascinating and really different. The whole subject had been a feeding frenzy for the tabloid press. This was a completely different way of looking at it, based on verbatim testimony. It was my first time working in television, and the pace of it was new. We would do 11 pages a day of them sitting down talking. It was actually more like my first experience with Breaking the Waves because there wasn’t any sitting around. We just went and went.
For a British actor of your age and stature, it feels notable that there are certain roles you haven’t done. For instance, you weren’t in a Harry Potter movie.
I was asked. It was one of those things where they wanted you to be available over a long period of time, and I was just like, I’m not sure I want to do that. My kids went through a period of being quite cross about that, but they got over it.
Are there genres you just aren’t interested in?
I don’t know. I guess I’m bored by procedurals with body counts and all that, but I don’t want to get high and mighty and snobby about anything. Because there’s a lot of very talented people out there who utterly deserve the opportunities I’ve had, and maybe they haven’t had them.
Your other big role this year, in Small Things Like These, is a little like Dune: Prophecy. You play a Mother Superior controlling this community.
I’m finding myself playing these very powerful, controlling women. I feel like I snuck in there, because Cillian initially told the casting director, “I don’t want any British actors in this. I want really, properly Irish people.†I didn’t know him before, but I’ve admired him as an actor for a long time. But then he had a dream that I played this part. So he sent it to me.
It is quite an honor to be Irish enough for Cillian Murphy.
Yeah, it is. It was one day on set, that scene. There’s no overt reference to anything. It’s just that she knows she has power over him, and she just has to mention one or two things to go, “I can actually ruin your life.†When I read it, I knew I wanted to have a go at it. I think I was remembering how little people need to do to control you with fear. When the person in power knows everything about you, they can push any number of buttons and ruin your life. I’ve been in situations like that. I remember talking to Cillian about it and the sense that when you actually stand up for yourself and say “no†— as his character does in the film — I just remembered my heart taking flight like a bird. There’s a rapturously euphoric moment that’s in the book Small Things Like These when he goes, “Fuck it. No.â€
You just wrapped Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, in which you’re the mother of Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare and mother-in-law of Jessie Buckley’s Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife. Zhao is another idiosyncratic director who’s done work with nonprofessional actors and a big Marvel movie. What was it like to work with her on this kind of period film?
Her main interest in a scene is what’s going on at a poetic, spiritual level. Everything else is happening too, but she’s, like, in another element. How the film comes out, I don’t know, but it was amazing. I’ve played Paul’s mum before, in God’s Creatures, so it was fun to give him a tongue-lashing and be really harsh. But it was interesting to unpack the character’s harshness, because Jessie’s Agnes represents something in her head that is dangerously illegal, which is witchery.
And you’d worked with Jessie before on Chernobyl.
Actually, when she won a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit, one of the things they do is offer you a mentor. She asked for me. That’s how we met. At the end of our conversation, I said, “What are you doing now?†And she said, “Chernobyl.†I was telling her earlier I recognize something in her where you have to be a bit of an idiot, as an actor, to see an open door and hurl yourself through it and only afterward go, Oh shit. It’s childlike. It’s a trust thing, and she has it in spades.
What kind of advice do you give someone like Jessie or a younger actress like her in the industry?
Well, she doesn’t need acting advice. But for someone like her, it’s more about just saying, “You have authenticity and integrity, you beast. Just be yourself.†We’ve talked about how there’s been change for women my age and how that’s been positive, but she’s been able to inhabit so many versions of being a woman without all the preconceived tropes that have been laid down. But as time’s gone by, I’ve seen her doing things and thought, Jessie, look after yourself. Because what you’re doing is so huge, you’ve got to take care.
Are there ways you have learned how to take care of yourself after throwing yourself with that kind of abandon into performance?
If you’ve just done something immersive and difficult, you have to understand there’s still work to do when the film stops. When you’re coming off a job after all that time, you’re coming off an adrenaline high. You have to be careful where that lands you. I’m very lucky I have a partner who was an actor and is acutely aware of that realm. Even sometimes when I don’t know it myself, he goes, “Emily, are you all right with this?†I’m like, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.†But he goes, “Emily, you’re not fine.†He’s been there for me in that way from the beginning all the way through.
More Conversations
- Quincy Jones on the Secret Michael Jackson and the Problem With Modern Pop
- The Master of Compulsively Watchable TV
- Jennifer Tilly Outsmarts Them All