Indeed. The Fades, the supernatural BBC3 drama involving spirits trapped in the temporal plane created by Skins writer Jack Thorne, represents Dormer's "Fight Club moment" – a reference to the David Fincher film in which Helena Bonham Carter broke away from what Dormer calls "being tainted by the corset". She has often compared herself to Bonham Carter for this reason – an actress who not only also played Elizabeth the Queen Mother (in The King's Speech), but was Anne Boleyn to Ray Winstone's Henry VIII in a 2003 TV movie. Dormer calls this form of costume-drama typecasting "Helena Bonham Carteritis".
For anybody acquainted with a certain TV history drama Dormer will forever be a Tudor. Those of us who were glued to this sudsy mix of sex and 16th-century politics will however know that the spark went out of the series when Dormer's Anne Boleyn was sent to the scaffold, leaving centre-stage to Jonathan Rhys Meyer – never the most compelling of leading men – as a rather too trim King Henry VIII. Or as the Boston Herald put it: 'Dormer's unconventional beauty and frantic scheming made the first two seasons crackle every week and her departure leaves a void.'
"I didn't just want to play her as this femme fatale – she was a genuine evangelical with a real religious belief in the Reformation," says Dormer, showing how she might have been accepted for a place to study history at Cambridge University (fatally, she misread a question in her A-level exam and didn't get the necessary grade). "The show was an absolute joy because it was an amalgamation of my two greatest passions – drama and history. I read everything by Starkey... good old Starkey... opinionated Starkey [this was soon after the historian's controversial utterances about the August riots]... Antonia Fraser, all of them. But there is a lot of sex and violence in the programme, so it's hard to explain it to the guy in the street who's saying, 'The Tudors? Tits, man!'."
Dormer's naked romps with Rhys-Meyer are a YouTube favourite – often weirdly mashed with the most cloying of music (I have done my research) and not something the actress herself will ever be surfing. "It's very traumatic, it really is," she says. "Actors undress ourselves emotionally, and then it's kind of like... 'Fuck, he wants to do it physically as well'. It's like a all-over medical examination that us women have to go through at the doctors – it's never pleasant but it's for the greater good. But that's why it's so important to trust in your writer and director."
After 21 episodes of playing a brunette Anne Boleyn, Dormer has quite literally washed that girl right out of her hair – returning to her natural blonde. "I made the conscious decision to go back to my roots," she says, laughing at her unintended pun. "I was finding that people would look at me and see Anne and I needed to get away from her." After The Tudors there was a leading role in an ITV Miss Marple whodunit, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?; a low-budget film by X Files creator Chris Carter, Fencewalker (a biopic about Carter's early life that she doesn't think will see the light of day); the big-budget Captain America, and playing a trainee barrister in the BBC1 legal drama Silk.
Silk has been re-commissioned, but without Dormer, who has signed up instead for HBO's epic, on-going adaptation of American fantasy author George RR Martin's staggeringly popular novel Game of Thrones. "I start shooting that next week actually," she says. "I'm going to be playing Margaery Tyrell; she marries to a contender to the throne. She really comes into her own for seasons three and four, so I'm sort of committed for a number of years, which I'm really excited about." She's looking forward to poker sessions with the cast and crew (another unexpected hobby: Dormer was runner-up in the celebrity heat of PartyPoker.com Women's 2008 World Open in London, and is particularly sharp at Texas Hold 'em), but not to the sex scenes. More sex scenes? "Yes. Oh God, here I go, taking my clothes off again, I'll have to start running round Richmond Park again."
A squash addict and one-time member of the London Fencing Academy, Dormer seems to be constantly on the move – and every time I look up from my notes she seems to have switched seating position. She's tactile – giving my arm a squeeze on arrival and departure – and in repose has an interesting rather than a classically beautiful face. Her elfin features – a nose that's somewhere between pointy and retroussé, and large blue slanted eyes – have been satirised by one journalist as belonging to "a member of the House of Elrond" (Tolkien's Middle Earth-dwellers). Dormer becomes truly beautiful when animated, which is often – and rather fortunate considering that she's primarily a film and TV actress and not a photographic model.
Right now she is exploring her own potential, even if she has to wade through some insecurities to get there. "I feel like I've really earnt my stripes – I feel ready to play a lead," she says. "I would just love to prove I'm good enough to carry a project. But like any actor I berate myself on a day-to-day basis – I'm not doing well enough, or I didn't get that role, or I haven't done enough theatre... I'm shit, I'm shit, I'm crap, I'm crap... Oh, God... you know. It is important to stop and look and think how far I have come. We all need some TLC and to pat ourselves on the back from time to time."
Television Series: The Fades (S01E05)
Release Date: October 2011
Actress: Natalie Dormer
Video Clip Credit: Webmskn & Trailblazer
Easyshare
Deposit
Filesonic
Wupload
Rapid
Mega
No comments:
Post a Comment