What was the question again? Sorry, I’m dreadful…” It’s the third time – or is it the fourth? – that Shirley Henderson has said this during our interview. Not that she has anything to apologise for; I honestly can’t remember what the question was either by this point. Nor do I much care. It’s hard not to feel hypnotised, in fact, as the actor drifts away on a meandering, mesmeric tide of anecdotes, reflections and tangents in her soporific, Scottish lilt.
Appearing far younger than her soon-to-be 60 years, Henderson is instantly recognisable, having barely changed since her star-making turns in Bridget Jones’s Diary (as high-flying “am I codependent?” financier Jude) and Harry Potter (as the brilliantly comic ghost Moaning Myrtle) at the turn of the millennium. Bizarrely, both roles required her to hide in the loo and sob. There’s still an innocence and guilelessness to her wide, hazel eyes and thick, untamed brows set in that familiar, childlike face – as if she’s somehow managed to live outside of time itself, immune to its ruthlessness and ravages. Her famously small 5ft 1in frame is today wrapped in a big black coat, her soft brown hair casually pinned back, as she chats to me over Zoom from her home in Fife.
Indeed, there’s a gentle, otherworldly quality to Henderson that belies her incredibly wide-ranging performances over the past four decades. She’s played everything from a Canadian grappling with advanced Parkinson’s disease in poignant drama Never Steady, Never Still to the scene-stealing, rip-roaring Matron in tween romcom Wild Child, taking on characters that run the gamut from hilarious to heartbreaking. Despite a distinctive look and that voice – which can be cranked up to her signature helium-pitched squeak on demand – Henderson has somehow managed to sidestep being typecast or pigeonholed. The only thing her parts seem to have in common, in fact, is that they are all undeniably… interesting.
That’s certainly true of her latest project, the dark and gripping six-part Channel 4 drama Summerwater. The series, adapted from the Sarah Moss-authored novel of the same name, explores one day on a small holiday site in the Scottish Highlands from multiple characters’ perspectives. The 24-hour period ends in tragedy, but events are shrouded in brooding mystery; the truth is oh-so-gradually spooled out via intersecting timelines across episodes.
Henderson plays Annie, a woman whose declining health and cognitive functioning, due to dementia, mean she’s often at one remove from reality, increasingly residing in the realm of the past. For the first four episodes, Henderson barely has any dialogue, and yet there’s heft to her presence – with just a flash of the eyes or a twitch of a smile, she conveys an entire internal world that the viewer isn’t yet privy to. “I liked the idea of a woman for whom things are changing,” says Henderson thoughtfully. “Part of her is leaving, and other parts of her are coming in through memories and the past. She’s questioning things and haunted by things.”
Another draw was the idea of working with fellow Scot Dougray Scott (Mission: Impossible 2, Desperate Housewives), who plays her husband David, oscillating between barely contained fury and seismic grief and regret. In one of those quirks of serendipity, Henderson met Scott for the very first time the night before she was offered the part of Annie. “That was another huge appeal and a surprise – I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “The timing was very strange, as if it was meant to be.”
The scenes between them are taut and powerful, showing the wafer-thin line between love and hate that spouses dance along in a long-term marriage. “I think that’s life, isn’t it?” Henderson muses. “Who said life was going to be easy? We could all just walk away, we could just say, ‘OK, I’m fed up.’ But people don’t – we cling on. You need the battles in life.”
Amid emotionally charged scenes, Henderson and Scott would defuse the tension by sitting around drinking endless cups of tea, eating cheese toasties and having gentle conversations about books and soup. Henderson describes the process as “lovely”: “We just hung about together, and tried to make it nice for each other, because it’s a journey. When it’s big, emotional stuff – for me, anyway – it’s nice to not be that off set. It’s nice to just have a laugh or a giggle or just be quiet. Bring it down to ordinary, and then you can kind of cope.”
I would never have expected to be in a film like ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’. It just seems such a pretty, chocolate-box type thing: beautiful colours, beautiful storylines
It’s not the first time Henderson has played a character grappling with dementia. Her depiction of Elizabeth Laine in the Bob Dylan jukebox musical The Girl from the North Country earned her a best actress Olivier award in 2018. Henderson gave an astonishing performance, pendulum-ing between catatonic detachment and childlike wonder. As well as the mentally and emotionally taxing process of embodying such a character, Henderson was also contending with the physicality of singing every night – a challenge she dealt with by isolating herself.
“It’s hard – the way you’ve got to look after yourself, and look after your voice, while you’re doing it,” she recalls. “I didn’t speak to anyone, really. I just did the job and then went home every night. I didn’t go out socialising, I didn’t do anything, because I was nervous of the singing.” Despite this, she “thoroughly loved it. I loved it much more than I maybe imagined.”
Audiences who weren’t previously familiar with Henderson’s origin story may well have been surprised at the staggering set of pipes on her – but singing was her first love, touting her vocals in local working men’s clubs around her hometown of Kincardine-on-Forth in Fife. Experience of drama was confined to local am-dram, pantomimes and school plays. Then, at the age of 16, it was time to make a call about her future career path. “By that point I was thinking I’d like to be an actress,” Henderson explains. “I don’t know quite where it came from, because I’d never even seen a professional theatre show. I’d never been to see a play. But you just sort of decide these things, don’t you?”
It’s a comment that feels oddly indicative of Henderson; everything she does has a flavour of the unconventional, offbeat and idiosyncratic. Luckily, she was encouraged to attend the one local college that offered a drama course. From there, she learnt about drama schools and auditioned successfully for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, moving down to London at the age of 17. It’s a far cry from the trajectory of many British actors, plenty of whom get a leg-up via existing theatrical connections or benefit from the buffer of wealthy parents.
As it turned out, Henderson needed neither to jump into an eclectic range of roles. She went from playing reporter and love interest Isobel in the BBC’s gentle dramedy series Hamish Macbeth in 1995, to Spud’s girlfriend Gail in cult heroin flick Trainspotting the following year. She followed up starring in Michael Winterbottom’s unsparingly realistic portrait of London, Wonderland, with her iconic portrayal of posh singleton Jude in Bridget Jones’s Diary – which painted an altogether more aesthetically pleasing vision of the capital. “I would never have expected to be in a film like that,” she admits. “It just seems such a pretty, chocolate-box type thing: beautiful colours, beautiful storylines.”
What was it like, being part of Bridget’s “urban family” across the phenomenally successful four-part film franchise? “Our little unit is just lovely – it’s a very caring, nice family,” Henderson says warmly, reminiscing about the heady early days when she and her castmates would hang out in London bars and practise pretending to chain-smoke to get into character. “I love these people: James [Callis, who plays gay best friend and former Eighties popstar Tom] and Sally [Phillips, who plays foul-mouthed journalist Shazzer] and Renée [Zellweger, the eponymous Bridget]. That’s our wee group. We sit in Sally’s caravan and eat lunch together and James tells story after story. They’re just so smart and so lovely.”
Henderson describes every project she’s ever worked on as “nice”, without any sense that she’s being the faintest bit disingenuous. One gets the impression, rather, that here is a contented soul who appreciates everyone she meets, every opportunity she’s been given, every role she gets to inhabit.
In fact, the only experience that gets anything less than a glowing review was filming one scene opposite James McAvoy in 2013’s black comedy crime thriller Filth – and that’s only because she got stuck inside a prosthetic chicken head. “We’re meant to be having mad sex in the living room, and he sees me as a chicken,” Henderson tells me gleefully. “And I had to wear a rubber chicken head made for my face. But because we’d forgotten you’re meant to put powder in it, it got stuck on my face – we couldn’t get it off. It was absolute agony trying to get this rubber chicken head off and half my hair went with it! I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, I am never doing prosthetics again!’”
It is a quintessentially Henderson story – somehow inherently grounded and down to earth, despite featuring a major Hollywood star. She’s so unassuming, in fact, that even her cameo in one of the biggest film franchises ever made did not, she claims, propel her into the fame stratosphere. “No, not at all,” is her response when I ask about life after playing the flirtatious ghost of former Hogwarts student Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter films. “I don’t think anybody recognised me at all.”
Her eternally youthful looks were instrumental in landing her the coveted role in The Chamber of Secrets and The Goblet of Fire – Henderson was, unbelievably, 37 years old at the time of depicting a 14-year-old schoolgirl. “The casting director said, ‘Go for it – and don’t mention your age.’” Henderson attended the audition, did her best impression of a hormone-fuelled adolescent ghoul, did “a wee bit of moaning” on request, and the rest is history. Though it perhaps wasn’t as glamorous a job as people might imagine: nearly all of Henderson’s scenes were shot alone on green screen. Still, it was, I am by this time unsurprised to hear, a “nice job”.
Are there any more nice jobs on the horizon? “I’ve done a wee film with Brian Cox, but I don’t know when they’re bringing that out,” she reveals. “He’s directed it as well, and it’s a lovely piece of writing. But beyond that… I don’t know what happens next. We shall just have to wait and see.”
Whatever it is, I’d be willing to bet that it will be, like Henderson herself, nice. And lovely. And exceptionally interesting...
‘Summerwater’ airs at 9pm on Channel 4 on Sunday 16 November
Tom Felton’s return as Malfoy halts Broadway performance with massive reception
Moaning Myrtle actor had ‘never heard of Harry Potter’ before starring in films
What Mormons really think of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
Alan Cumming: ‘After my rant about trans rights, I was worried I would be deported’
Strictly’s most emotional episode yet proved Blackpool means even more than the final
Play for Today: The revival hoping to save British TV from a class crisis
