The Fades S01E06

The real beauty of being an actor is the huge cross-section of projects you can work on,’ says Natalie Dormer. And she should know. In the last couple of years Natalie has spent six months playing a sensual turn-of-the-century Viennese woman in Sweet Nothings at the Young Vic, portrayed the young Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the Queen Mother) in Madonna’s Wallis Simpson film, been a junior barrister in the BBC’s new courtroom drama series Silk and a sassy Second World War American private in the giant-budget Captain America, alongside Tommy Lee Jones, Hayley Atwell and Samuel L Jackson. Now she's playing beautiful, complicated and damaged Sarah in BBC3's supernatural thriller The Fades.

Her character is cursed by her powers and torn from the comfort of her loving home and family, but eventually manages to rebuild her life and find solace with Mark (Tom Ellis). Before things go wrong all over again. Sarah can be tough and determined and is incredibly loyal. She is Juliet to Mark’s Romeo – hopelessly in love but always just out of reach. “She’s married and has this double existence, because she is an Angelic," explains Natalie. "Her gift is that she’s a seer, she can see the future, and she has visions which she then relays to other Angelics. So she’s normal, but she’s got a history of mental illness and it’s obviously something she’s really struggled to come to terms with. Mark has been her saviour from that. The marriage has broken down for a plethora of reasons, the most pertinent being that she’s living a double existence that he doesn’t understand, which creates a lot of friction. She’s been clutching at straws, trying to maintain a normal life, pretending to herself, lying that she can have a normal, average, uneventful life – and she can’t.”


So does Sarah see her gifts and status as an Angelic as a blessing or a curse? “When you meet her at the beginning of the series she would definitely say it was a curse, because her marriage and her life have been destroyed by it," insists Dormer. "And that’s something that Iain’s character Paul has to face. It’s about finding your place in the world, where you belong, and not denying who you really are. Identity and self-identity is a very strong theme of the show. There is real, genuinely intelligent writing behind it, behind all the fun and the running around and the entertainment.”

Ah yes, the running around. "This has been one of the most physically demanding jobs I’ve ever done!" she states. "I couldn’t begin to list everything, but it was crazy! For example, being submerged in freezing cold gloop and goo all day, vomiting black stuff, ash being thrown in your face for three or four days, you name it we’ve done it. There’s been a sort of hellish physical experience for all the cast at one point or another. We’ve all been supportive of each other when it’s been that person’s turn! We’ve really been pushing the boundaries especially in the second half of the series."

The actress says she was attracted to The Fades by the the strength and the dexterity of the writing. "Everyone loves a good love story, and everyone loves a bit of action, and everyone loves a bit of guts and gore, you know, even the girls do," she explains. "Nothing in this is gratuitous – everything that is done is done to create true, weighty emotion. So there’s no pornography in this. When it gets really dark, it gets dark for intelligent reasons."

After that, it seems the nude scenes, intelligent or not, were a breeze by comparison. As Natalie puts it in a classic case of understatement, "It’s just a slightly tougher day at work. They are daunting in so far as it’s a very personal thing and you are doing it in front of eight other people, closed set or not." As she said in another recent interview, "You do become numb to the shock to the system of having to take your clothes off in front of people and obviously it helps the more submerged you are in the character and the motivations behind the actual act."

Natalie, all slanting pale blue eyes and waves of ash-blonde hair, says the process is hopefully handled in a very sensitive, discreet way and with the director being incredibly protective and generous with her in her most vulnerable state. People, she says, would be amazed at how unerotic the process actually is, because it’s heavily choreographed. Of her revealing scenes, she added, “I think actresses have a responsibility to protect the sisterhood. It is not something you can be flippant about. You wouldn’t do it unless you had given it weighty consideration, which I always have."


Television Series: The Fades (S01E06)
Release Date: October 2011
Actress: Natalie Dormer
Video Clip Credit: Webmskn & Trailblazer










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The Fades S01E05

Natalie Dormer reveals that filming sex scenes with Tom Ellis from Miranda was an mortifying experience. "The Fades was my first experience of being asked to do a love scene with a friend," she says. "I know his wife, he knows my fiancé, we've been to the pub. I actually found it harder because it's difficult to turn that part of your brain off. Anyway, it was just nice to get out of long skirts for a change, and to run around and do some blood and guts and gore and action... really modern. I've done stuff like that in the past, but it's not what I'm known for."

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










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