Ruth Wilson on her return to the West End stage, the threat from AI, and why London tops New York

“The play is about the lies people tell themselves, and whether they can bear their own truth. Men lie about what Josie has been up to as much as she does herself. Really, it’s about two people looking for some honest connection, some intimacy, but it’s impossible for them to find that because they’ve got so many layers of armour.”

A play about lying might be even more relevant today than one about slut-shaming, we agree.

The production came about by happenstance. Wilson’s professional and personal life is transatlantic. As well as shooting The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp in the Midwest in 2013 and The Affair around Montauk, LA and NYC between 2014 and 2019, she appeared on Broadway in Constellations opposite Jack Gyllenhaal in 2015 and as Cordelia to Glenda Jackson’s King Lear in 2019. She has also for some years been in a relationship with a Manhattan writer whom she chooses not to name or discuss, although she refers more often to “my boyfriend” than in our many previous interviews and also says “he’s over here more now”. (More on the Trumpian reasons for this later.)

On one stateside trip last year she met Michael Shannon and they discussed appearing together in NY in a brace of short plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Back in the UK she met director Rebecca Frecknall, who was fresh from directing Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in London and New York and wanted to stage A Moon for the Misbegotten. “I’d read the play when I did O’Neill’s Anna Christie years ago,” says Wilson. “And it always left me in floods of tears as it’s so poetic and spiritual and says something deep about human longing.”

Shannon, Oscar-nominated for Revolutionary Road and Nocturnal Animals, was also nominated for a Tony in 2016 when he played the younger version of Jim Tyrone in O’Neill’s earlier Long Day’s Journey Into Night, “so he’s very connected to the role” and he jumped at the opportunity of performing in London.

Wilson was shocked to realise Shannon had learned all of Tyrone’s looping, reiterative lines “on day one, so it took me and David [Threlfall, who plays Josie’s boozy father Phil] a while to catch up”.

She smiles when I point out she is not an obvious physical match for Josie. “Ha ha, no, she’s described as six foot tall, blonde, a big, heavy-set woman but also very feminine,” says the slender, 5ft 6in, dark-haired Wilson. “But Mike doesn’t look like Jim either, and he’s 6ft 2in so we look like an odd couple anyway, just the other way around to what’s expected. It doesn’t matter because the motor of the play is the emotional feeling. I’m pretty physical, so it’s just about being physical in a different way.”

I assumed that after The Second Woman, where she played the same short scene with 100 different people — mostly men, and most of them amateurs — this role would be a doddle. “That was physically tiring, just being up for 24 hours, but there were very few lines and I was constantly stimulated by each new person coming on,” she says. “Here Josie carries the weight of the emotional journey and she’s on stage the whole time, and I find that pretty draining.”

Wilson has worked in theatre mostly with male directors but when I ask if Frecknall is different she says that all directors are different regardless of gender. Here it might be worth mentioning that Wilson has always refused to confirm or deny widely reported rumours that she quit The Affair because of the number of sex scenes she was required to film and tensions with its showrunner Sarah Treem.

She’s happier to discuss the changing of the guard in London theatre, where the historic dominance of white men running buildings has been partially diluted by the appointments of Indhu Rubasingham at the National, Nadia Fall at the Young Vic and Lisa Spirling at Stratford East. For balance, I should add that Dominic Cooke will soon succeed Rupert Goold at the Almeida; and Frecknall, currently Goold’s associate there, will fulfil the same role under him when he takes over the Old Vic.

“I think Covid burnt a lot of artistic directors out, so there was bound to be a major turnover,” Wilson says. “It’s good that it’s different figures in charge and a fresh energy. I’m really excited about what’s out there and what’s happening, and it feels like theatre’s in a really good place here, though it’s increasingly hard for artists to live in London because everything is so expensive.”

She lives in a loft-style apartment in Bermondsey but says she’d be unable to afford to do so if she worked only on stage. Income from film and TV enables her to eat out at the restaurants on Bermondsey Street (“I’ve become very local”), visit art galleries and go to the theatre. She cites Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant and Ava Pickett’s 1536 as plays that recently wowed her. A fitness freak, she runs along the Thames and cycles everywhere.

“London is so much cleaner than New York, much quieter, the air is better and there are people on bikes everywhere,” she says. “I’m gonna give a little thumbs up to Sadiq Khan because he gets so much shit from people and he’s done an amazing job. The other day I was thinking, if I died tomorrow what would I miss, and it was cycling in the sun around London. There’s nothing better.”

Dirty, noisy, even-more-overpriced New York, where she still has many friends, is also now a city cowed by the re-election of Donald Trump. “Everyone’s terrified and kind of can’t believe what’s happening to their country,” says Wilson. “It’s the most powerful in the world, and it’s led by someone who’s deeply unserious. And in the film and TV industry — not so much theatre — there’s definitely a reluctance to commit to things which might be a bit more provocative or have a particular stance against Trump. And that’s what we’re supposed to be doing — challenging the status quo.”

In previous interviews I’ve sensed a relief in Wilson that The Lone Ranger — which she enjoyed and learned a lot from but was something of a flop — didn’t turn her into a Hollywood star, leaving her to work in arthouse cinema, theatre and prestige TV. She began her career in 2006, bagging the lead in a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre straight out of drama school. Now, she laughingly says that as soon as she played Alice, the psychopathic nemesis to Idris Elba’s cop in the BBC’s Luther, “ingénue roles were off the table, thank God”.

It’s no longer the case that as an actress gets older, the roles dry up. “As more women are writing and directing, the roles are getting more interesting, and that’s as it should be, because human beings get more f***ing interesting the older they get, maybe women more than men.” She is also working as a producer on three projects — a film, a play and a “TV thing” — which gives her more agency than she’d have as an actor for hire.

But there are fresh challenges in the industry now. She recently shot the thriller series Down Cemetery Road, based on the books Mick Herron wrote before the Slow Horses series, with Emma Thompson for Apple TV. But the streaming services, having smashed the model of terrestrial TV, “aren’t really making money now; they can’t. Economically the whole thing has fallen apart.”

This leads to cost-cutting and cautiousness and may eventually result in scripts being written by AIs programmed to offend no one and appeal to the lowest common denominator. “There’ll be a film soon that’s a huge hit that’s AI-generated; and then there’ll be more of them made.” And it’s not just people like her writer boyfriend — or journalists, come to that — who should be alarmed.

The recent actors’ strike in America was partly an expression of concern that lack of regulation would enable studio bosses to substitute real stars with digital creations (which is already happening to extras and background artists). “I think it’ll be a while till actors are computer-generated but it’s terrifying,” she says. “I hope people want to watch things that aren’t just generated by robots. Maybe theatre will become more exciting: it will be where people get to see live humans doing things.”

Ruth Wilson by numbers

2015

24

2018

£30k

2021

Our time is almost up and I ask Wilson about her 81-year-old father Nigel, a former investment banker who is suffering — as my father did until his death in 2020 — with Alzheimer’s. Her mother Mary, a former probation officer, is now his primary carer. The family is famously close: Wilson and her three older brothers were brought up in Shepperton and all four of them, plus a nephew, ran the London Marathon for Alzheimer’s Research UK, raising £30,000. Running at a pace that would have led to her finishing in under four hours, Wilson had to walk the last mile or so after her ankle and calf gave in. She is now an ambassador for the charity.

“They believe in a cure, and they are getting closer and closer, with more treatment available, so all donations are welcome,” she says. “My dad is lucky because my mum has dealt with it so well. She has gone into carer mode but she takes him everywhere with her, and he is content to go along with her, which is amazing. He likes socialising and being around people and he is happy. That may change as he declines but I think it helps slow the decline if they feel safe.

“Dad still recognises us all but he can’t remember what happened yesterday or what’s happening tomorrow or in the next two hours. You realise you have to be incredibly present with them. That’s all that matters. It’s the very moment they’re in now. Last weekend I was down there and Dad and I were a little team, helping my mum garden, and it was lovely. It’s how we should all live, really — finding beauty in the small moments.”

A Moon for the Misbegotten is at the Almeida Theatre from June 18 to August 16, almeida.co.uk. To donate, go to alzheimersresearchuk.org

Photography by Sarah Brick