The Witch is a supernatural horror film filled with haunting, indelible imagery. But nothing quite tops the sight of Scottish actor Kate Dickie breastfeeding a raven. It’s the sort of double-take weirdness with which she’s become associated, carving out a career defined by the unconventional and strange.
Dickie was a woman with an elaborate and perverted rape revenge plan in Andrea Arnold’s powerful Red Road, she strangled James McAvoy for sexual gratification in Filth, she murdered her children in the play Aalst, and she returned to the underpopulated niche of “women who indulge in unusual breastfeeding practices” in a small yet memorable turn as an overbearing mother in Game of Thrones.
“I’m very interested in … I shouldn’t say the arse-end of society, but characters you might not like but don’t know why,” the 44-year-old says with incongruous enthusiasm. “I don’t get offered light roles very often.”
That seems a little unfair. Off-screen she’s an excitable presence, thrilled by everything from working with Ridley Scott on Prometheus (“He’s amazing, so clever!”) to Will Ferrell (“I love Step Brothers!”) to the coffee in front of her (just a general look of wonder). But in her new film, she returns to the shadows, quite literally. She stars as one half of Couple in a Hole, a grim yet poignant drama about grieving parents who go feral in the French countryside. While she had (I assume, and hope) limited real-world experience of nursing large birds, she found this difficult subject matter easy to relate to.
“I’ve lost both my parents, so I understood what it was like,” she says. “I remember looking out of the window and I couldn’t understand how the world kept going and hadn’t stopped to grieve with me. I understand having a refuge, a place where the outside world isn’t showing you how well it’s doing without the person that you’re grieving.”
Like many of her films, Couple in a Hole involved a degree of hardship. Living wild on screen meant something similar off-camera, with a strict diet to ensure a believably skeletal look (“I looked like a tortoise”) and, along with co-star Paul Higgins, a gradual abstention from washing (“It got manky”). Dickie didn’t have it easy, but refrained from pulling a DiCaprio and going full Revenant.
“I didn’t skin the rabbit myself because I am vegetarian so I struggled with that,” she says in reference to one of her character’s many obsessive practices. “I’m terrified of spiders – like, really arachnophobic. In the film, the spider wasn’t even allowed on set when I was there. And I was really disappointed in myself for not eating maggots. Instead they made some out of marzipan.”
On-set disappointments aside, this is the sort of unglamorous role we’re used to seeing Dickie play. “A lot of the parts don’t do me any favours,” she says. “I look like shit. I don’t look that great in real life anyway. I don’t have that kind of face, so I would find it more stressful to try and look nice.” This does, however, encourage certain assumptions about the real Dickie. A little bit of me expects to find her covered in dirt and blood, or coming towards me with a weapon.
“People are quite scared to meet me sometimes,” she says. “They really do think I’m as weird as my characters and as stern and joyless. I’m quite a light person and I laugh a lot.” Although we’ve covered grief, extreme hunger and arachnophobia, this is true. Even when I raise film industry inequality, she finds a silver lining.
“I hate getting into that whole debate, but I think there are more roles for men,” she admits. “As you get older, especially now that everyone’s so youth-orientated, if you’re not really beautiful then it can be hard. I’m a character actress, so in a way I think it’s easier because I’ve never been cast on my looks.”
Not many actors are willing to go so far for a role, or worry so little about how they look on screen. But Dickie admits some concern about the after-effects. “Breastfeeding a raven is the weirdest thing I’ve had to do,” she says. “I’m actually hoping people don’t go ‘Who could we get to breastfeed a giraffe? Oh, Kate Dickie!’ and ‘Who can we get to breastfeed a snake? Kate Dickie!’”
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Couple in a Hole is released in the UK on 8 April.
