Romola Garai is a 41-year-old British actor and film-maker. She has appeared in the 2007 film Atonement, the BBC series Emma (2009) and The Hour (2012). Most recently, she has starred in the film One Life and the second series of the crime drama Vigil, which tracked a police investigation on a military base in the Middle East. She also wrote and directed the 2022 horror film Amulet. Next up, Garai stars in the UK premiere of Nachtland, a play by the German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, directed by Patrick Marber, which opens at the Young Vic next month. She lives in London and has two children with the actor Sam Hoare.
I interviewed Suranne Jones before Vigil season two and she said you were “hysterical”. She was adamant you should do more comedies…
Oh, that’s so nice. It’s obviously a boring truism to say Suranne’s a really fantastic actress, but she is a really fantastic actress. Also, Vigil was an incredible opportunity for me to do something quite different. It was really fun to be in military uniform, in beret and sunglasses and have a gun, and be telling people what to do. I was having such a jolly time that maybe that was infectious.
Could this be the start of an action career for you?
Well, I’d love that, but I am very physically unfit.
Nachtland is set in modern Germany and is about a family who find a piece of art that may have been painted by Adolf Hitler and argue about whether to burn it or sell it. What did you think when you read it?
It’s very confronting, like very confronting. The conversations that happen between the characters relate strongly to modern conversations around antisemitism in a way that I found shocking when I read the play. That made me want to do it, because it’s just so exciting to be in a room where people are saying the unsayable.
In 2022, Channel 4 made a (somewhat bizarre) show called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, where a studio audience had to decide whether the comedian should shred a painting by Hitler. Did you see that?
Oh, no. I’d not heard of that and it’s weird that hasn’t come up in rehearsals. That’s really interesting because the problem when you’re having these conversations as a group of actors and a director is that we have such an outsized idea of the importance of art that it feels like a really profound thing to keep a piece of art or to burn it. But for most people who don’t care about art at all, it may be less of an emotive debate.
What would you guess the audience decided?
I would have guessed destroyed.
Correct! Is it exciting to be the first actor to play your character, Nicola, in a British production?
Yeah, absolutely. I get a massive kick out of doing new plays: it’s intoxicating, you can get really drunk on that. As far as acting goes, it is by far and away the best thing. You’re intellectually challenged and you have a lot of power and control. It’s a completely different experience from films and TV. But it’s hard to just do plays, because, you know, you’ve got to live.
You are in Scoop, a forthcoming Netflix movie about Emily Maitlis’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, which stars Gillian Anderson as Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Andrew. You play Esme Wren, the Newsnight editor.
Often I’m a bit suspicious of true crime and adaptations of things that have happened very recently. I’m very wary of voyeurism. But I felt when I read the script that Andrew and that story seem to have slightly gone away. So I was very interested in being part of something that put it back on the table. Essentially, at the centre of it, there’s this man who thinks he’s untouchable and it’s about journalists doing their job to dismantle this power structure, rather than propping it up.
Talking of #MeToo, how has that movement changed the film and TV industry?
I’d hope there is less physical assault and young women aren’t in danger going to work. But we still don’t have parity: there are not the same number of female directors, there’s not the same number of women working across the board, we’re still choosing to tell specific stories that support certain ideas. So if the ultimate goal of #MeToo was gender parity and the destruction of sexual stereotypes and the power dynamic that exists between men and women then… No, it hasn’t achieved that. But then that feels maybe an unfair thing to ask it to do!
Your horror film Amulet was very well-received. Have you more films you’d like to make?
Yeah, I’m desperately trying to make more films. And I have loads and loads of ideas. But it’s really, really, really, really hard. And a lot of the stories I want to tell are hard stories to get over the line. But I’m still travelling hopefully.
What’s your favourite thing to do outside work?
I go on very long walks, sometimes a whole day on my own. I walk around London, I walk around the Downs, I’ll sometimes just walk for miles in the countryside. Last year, I went to Paris and did a two-day walk. I just find it very soothing. Also, particularly as I get older, I’m feeling more communist! Privilege and joy can’t be bought and sold, so sometimes I’m just going to do exactly what I want to do, which is nothing. I’m going to walk around looking at stuff or take really long naps. Not be productive.
Do you have a personal goal for 2024?
I’d really like to make another film. But, in terms of things I can orchestrate myself, if I got to go back to Lake Annecy in France in the summer, and swim in the waters there looking up at the Alps, that would make my year.
• Nachtland is at London’s Young Vic theatre from 20 February to 20 April
