Jessie Buckley (Juliet) and Josh O’Connor (Romeo) in Romeo & Juliet at the National Theatre.
(Picture: Rob Youngson)Romeo & Juliet star Josh O’Connor said filming the play during the pandemic helped recreate the couple’s doomed love affair.
The Crown actor and his co-star Jessie Buckley originally signed up to perform it on stage at the National Theatre but lockdown made that impossible and instead it was filmed at the empty Southbank venue.
It was filmed over three weeks with the couple only able to film “intimate” scenes for a few hours after receiving negative results from regular covid tests.
O’Connor, who played Prince Charles in the hit royal drama, said: “Actually it kind of works quite well because that’s what Romeo and Juliet had - grabbing the odd hour when their parents would turn the other way to get a snog or whatever”.
Director Simon Godwin said the physical restrictions of lockdown and social distancing made filming “more charged”, while Tamsin Greig who plays Lady Capulet said the pandemic made the idea of intimacy suddenly less “casual”.
She said: “To actually allow somebody to kiss when there is a global pandemic it suddenly means a kiss is incredibly powerful and dangerous and could be the undoing of these people and I think it really played into what’s at the heart of the story.”
The National was one of many theatres forced to close by the pandemic only managing to briefly re-open for Death of England: Delroy before the third lockdown came in.
Buckley said it had been “a privilege” to be working in lockdown and to “put light back into a building that had otherwise been dark”.
The actress said meeting Josh and National Theatre Artistic Director Rufus Norris in the empty building had been “heartbreaking” and made her more determined to see the film through.
She said: “One day Josh and I went to the empty theatre and sat on the stage with Rufus and I genuinely felt struck that we need to put light and love back in this place, it needs to live again and have that kind of agency and the need to do that was something that I felt throughout the whole of filming.”
