Telegraph
By Jasper Rees
Wilson, who is following her turn in Luther with an appearance in Through a Glass Darkly at the Almeida, is building a career on charisma and individuality.
Is it possible for an actor to be too good? There was a moment when it looked that way in Luther, the current BBC One cop drama (which ends next week). Idris Elba, playing a detective with anger issues, attempted in episode one to tease a confession from Ruth Wilson’s deliciously insane physicist. Though prime suspect in the murder of her parents, you wouldn’t have guessed it from the storm of tears she prettily conjured up in the interview room. Wilson, the scene told you, is a very good actress playing a very good actress - maybe too good for such a shameless slice of high-concept hokum.
“I’ve had more positive comments about that show that I’ve had about anything I’ve done,” she says - this a slightly bruised riposte to its negative reception. ”I love the fact that it’s bold and completely unrealistic. I just loved the tongue-in-cheek element about the dialogue and thought you could have a lot of fun playing with it. It was completely different to everything I’d read before.”
Does it go without saying that it’s completely different to what she’ll do next? In Through A Glass Darkly at the Almeida theatre in Islington, Wilson will portray a very different kind of instability. Being the only one of his screenplays which Ingmar Bergman gave permission to be adapted for the stage, Through a Glass Darkly is a subtly detailed, carefully elusive four-hander. It tells of a family holidaying on a Swedish island once associated with happiness, now revisited at the behest of Karin. Recently released from an asylum after some sort of breakdown, she seeks to recreate the ingredients of a bygone contentment, but her father, brother and husband for their own various reasons seem unable to usher her back there.
Wilson is obviously keen to promote the distance between Bergman’s Karin and nutty Alice in Luther. “People give labels and anything with ’psychopath’ or ’schizophrenic’ everyone lumps into one category. They’re very different things.”
But on reflection she concedes that the roles call on the same skillset, a fleetness of thought that keeps the audience always guessing.
“Alice is able to switch from one moment to another, from being fairly normal to weird. With Karin her thought processes are so quick she’s ahead of everyone else. She’s almost bipolar, incredibly hyper. She is constantly moving from moment to moment. That’s really intrigued me. There are lots of moments that are great for an actress.”
You wouldn’t have necessarily predicted that kinetic style from Wilson’s career-making dramatic debut as the watchful and mostly silent Jane Eyre. “There was an awful lot of looking and listening,” she recalls of her BAFTA-nominated performance. “I remembered a mantra that one of my teachers used to tell me at drama school, that every thought will pass across your face. Even if you’re thinking about Shreddies the camera will read it. I had a period off afterwards when I went through the whole four hours in my head, wondering how I could have done it better. I thought, if I get slated for this, I don’t know what I’ll do because I knew that I had broken ground myself as an actress.”
Jane is famously plain, and while you would never apply that epithet to Wilson, her face does not have the bland perfection of classic beauty. Much younger-looking in the flesh (and younger-sounding: she is 27), the features are bold - the eyebrows questioning, the mouth forthright. “The camera sometimes likes it, sometimes doesn’t,” she says. “I think it’s an unusual face. It can be very ugly and distorted and then it can be serene and beautiful. I talk about it like it’s an object outside myself but I suppose you do start to think about yourself like that when you watch yourself.”
The features in question have been framed by striking bottle-red hair ever since Wilson went out to Namibia to film The Prisoner, in which she played a doctor. “I thought, she’s a bit of an odd character, a little bit on the edge, let’s make her red. I loved it and I’ve kept it ever since.”
Nothing is said on tape, but you get the impression her new hair colour was the most memorable thing to come out of those four months on set remaking a TV classic in the desert. She’ll revert to a more natural colour for Through a Glass Darkly.
Wilson grew up in Surrey, where ability was matched by drive - she took her school to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time.
At drama school she has no memory of particularly shining. “I think I was in the top few but I wasn’t the one that everyone went ’wow!’” Nor does she recall idolising a particular actress. The best she can come up with is Katharine Hepburn and Julianne Moore - coincidentally, both natural redheads.
“I haven’t got one or two people that I aspired to be like. I like careers.”
But it seems clear that she is in a continuum of striking actresses who hover somewhere between leading lady and character actress - the likes of Judi Dench, Penelope Wilton, Imelda Staunton, Helen McCrory - all of whose durable careers are built on charisma and individuality, and of course stagecraft.
Jane Eyre led to other work in television, including Steven Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary and Small Island. Through a Glass Darkly will be only Wilson’s third professional role in the theatre. Her first in 2007 was in Gorky’s Philistines at the National, in which Wilson recalls the terror of opening and closing the play on the vast Lyttelton stage. She reckons she didn’t nail her performance till the last week.
“I was putting too much pressure on myself to get it right rather than let it go free-flow. When I went on with a different energy, the cast heard on the Tannoy that there was something different. It was a bit annoying that there were only three more performances after that.”
But she took the knowledge into A Streetcar Named Desire last year at the Donmar. Rachel Weisz as Blanche Dubois may have sold all the tickets, but Wilson also won an Olivier Award playing her sister Stella. Don’t all homely Stellas harbour envy that poor tragic Blanche gets all the headlines? Not at all, she insists.
“Every actor turns everything round to their character. Stella is the focus of these two characters who both want her. Blanche and Stanley are fighting over her. There is a part of me that goes, she is actually pivotal to this. It’s all about me!”
Through a Glass Darkly opens at the Almeida theatre, London N1 (020 7359 4404) on June 16
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