Interview with Harriet Walter (Margaret Thatcher)

How did you get involved in the role?

I got involved sometime in November/October of 2023. I was extremely surprised when my agent said there is this thing called ‘Brian and Maggie’ and it’s about Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher.

Do you remember Brian Walden?

I do remember Brian Walden quite well. I had always switched off my TV whenever Margaret came on because right in the swim of the 80s, I couldn’t be objective about her. I was very surprised when I was asked to play Margaret because I didn’t see any association with her, but it was irresistible to follow along with it because of its credentials with Steve Coogan and James Graham. Stephen Frears was on the horizon, and I would’ve killed to work with him, so I just thought…well I’ll keep tracking with this and see what comes of it.

How did you go about your research into Margaret Thatcher as a character?

Lots and lots of people have played Margaret Thatcher and extremely well. Along with doing my research watching YouTube videos of her, I watched other people’s performances that I had already seen. I’d seen Meryl Streep in ‘The Iron Lady’ and Gillian Anderson in ‘The Crown’. My favourite of all, if nobody minds me saying this, is Fenella Woolgar who play Margaret Thatcher in ‘The Reckoning’ opposite Steve Coogan. Fenella is sensationally good at every little tick of Margaret, but dare I say, she’s too young to do what I was doing, which was to play her when she was quite a bit older. I decided I don’t look anything like Thatcher, I’m the first brown eyed dark-haired person who’s taken on the role, so I won’t go into this role attempting to do a direct impression but to just try and get behind the thinking of this person. I asked for a lot of help with the makeup, hair, voice lessons etc. I thought it was a very long journey, but it was written to tell a very specific story at a very specific point of her life looking at her relationship behind the screen, off camera and I thought nobody knows what that bit is like. I got a few clues by watching some YouTube things of her talking woman to woman with Miriam Stoppard. I got the odd little ad-lib joke she’d do while preparing for an interview, just before the cameras rolled. Those were very, very helpful. Along with various documentaries and not to mention James’ reliable imagination. That all fed into deciding that I’m not going to try and compete with those brilliant people. I’m going to just tell a different story about her that nobody else is quite told. I wanted to try and get under her skin. There were two things to consider when approaching the role; one was that there are some scenes in Brian and Maggie that are documented on YouTube so anybody can compare my performance with the real thing. I thought I’ll just have to get as much as I can absorbed of the rhythms and attitudes behind that interview with Brian Walden. Some of the research was to try and ‘repeat’ a lot of gestures etc. to get a flavour of what was going on inside. And look at how she presented herself in this all-male House of Commons.

Secondly, I looked into anything I could find that was more personal, when she was talking about worries regarding her looks e.g. about her hair, her skin, how she wore pearls because it lightened her face, that she wore big bows because she wanted to soften her image. I thought that was all quite interesting because you never get a male politician talking in those terms. It showed me that there was this sort of woman who was worried about her appearance just like so many women. I also did discover a sort of lightness of touch, a bit more wit, a bit more candour in the way she spoke, particularly in the interview with Miriam Stoppard. The interesting thing with Miriam Stoppard and Brian Walden, in the early days, was that it seemed as though Margaret felt that the person she was talking to was trustworthy and on her side. That in turn makes for a different kind of interview, you get more of a revelation. Take note future interviewers! It’s always better to encourage people and make them feel safe, then they’re more likely to tell you the truth than if you bash at them. Then again, sometimes they need bashing as we find out in the film!

Do you feel this story still has a relevance in the modern world?

I think the story does have a modern relevance in that the interaction between the press/the media and the Political parties has changed so much since the Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher interview that we see. It’s very important to recognise that we can’t put the clock back, with TikTok and Instagram a lot of the time people digest their news in very short soundbites, but it does make for very superficial opinions and very immediate reactions. I think, it contributes to the sort of silos that people put themselves in where we don’t listen to one another. I find that Brian and Maggie sort of provokes anybody watching to think ‘gosh those were the days when you could actually sit down across from a politician and have quite a high level of debate and make them say what they really were intending and then share it with the public in a way that’s much more informative for when they go and vote. Even though the politician is following a party line or sticking to the chosen line, someone like Brian Walden can reveal that the politician is repeating themselves, or that the politician isn’t answering the question and keep goading them.

What was it like working opposite Steve Coogan?

Working opposite Steve Coogan is surprising because I thought it would be a laugh a minute and we’d all be rolling in the aisles as he does impersonations, but he takes his work very seriously and the results you can see on the screen are amazing. He doesn’t look any more like Brian Walden than I do Margaret Thatcher, but I followed his cue in a way. He got the rhythms; the rhythms of somebody’s speech, their text, etc. Steve Coogan could do imitations standing on his head but it’s about getting behind those masks and gestures, to the heartbeat that makes that rhythm and what the thoughts are behind those masks. He set a real high standard for that. I thought ‘right I’m not going to imitate Margaret Thatcher, I’m going to question why does she put her finger out like that at that particular point? And what does that tell me about her? What does that tell me about what she wants to tell the public and how does that contrast when she’s not being looked at by a camera?’ Steve had that nailed through damned hard work. He’s a real grafter and I had total admiration for him. It was fun! It was really, really rewarding to work with him. I hope he says the same thing about me!

Do you think this was an unusual era in political history?

There are so many reasons why this is quite an unusual era in political history. The fact that she came to power and that Ronald Reagan came to power. That whole fruition of the economic plan, of trickling down, of less government, of privatisation, of homeownership. All that momentum came at a point when the country felt ready for it. That’s how history works. We’d had a bad phase (I didn’t think so at the time) of the unions taking over politics and people were fed up with that. So then, on both sides; the working class and the upper class, there was this kind of ‘fed up-ness’ about the Labour world. They thought let’s give the others a go. It ushered in a time that we’re still living in. I think we’re still living under ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganism’ because basically it’s the rule of big corporations, big money and huge divisiveness and things are going their way. We’re basically responding to or going along with ‘Thatcherism’. It’s interesting to see where that began and in tandem with that, much to my sadness, is the fact that a woman got to be the top of the team - which I am of course keen on-but Thatcher was no feminist sympathiser, and I regret that hers has been the role model for other female Tory politicians. However, while shooting this story, I kept seeing things from her point of view, as a woman surrounded by men and that coloured my way into her. It was my way into empathising with her, it was my way into understanding her. It was being a woman in that situation and everything about her rigidity and her personality or her public persona - was about trying to prove to the boys that she could be as tough as them. It gave feminism a bad name and didn’t help women really but as a feminist woman playing her, I couldn’t not see it through that prism.

What was it like acting out a James Graham script?

James Graham writes beautifully for actors; I don’t know how he does it. It’s a total mystery to me how you turn political ideas into natural dialogue and put one scene next to the other so that it tells the right story. I’ve seen a lot of his work, and I knew he was particularly clever at making tricky things sound very natural and playable. Actors just sit round the table on the first day and read it and we all just knew it was doable. It’s something you just smell very quickly as an actor. He’s an actor’s gift. We just come in and there’s never “well I don’t think I’d say that there.” Or “I don’t think this is in the right place.” It’s quite an unusual script. It’s quite an unusual topic. I didn’t know what motivated him to write it and then I discovered this book ‘Why is that Lying Bastard Lying to Me?’ The author Rob Burley was around on set, and I was pointed in the direction of the chapters that were particularly relevant to me.

What physical changes have you had to resemble Margaret Thatcher?

If you look at me, I do not look very like Margaret Thatcher. I thought I just need to believe I could vaguely look like her before I could even start. We had a brilliant wig department under Vanessa White that created three different blonde wigs – each slightly aged to represent different stages of Margaret’s life. We made my complexion much more peaches and cream. I had contact lenses. blue eyes for when I was younger, blue grey eyes for when I was older. I had a fake set of teeth made as Thatcher had a slight overbite, so the fake teeth slightly influenced the way I spoke. Gabriela Yiaxis the costume designer helped hugely. In my costume I had a full padded bra and broader shoulders. All these little details were so important. Then I basically watched her a lot and watched her movements and watched her mannerisms. What was very, very difficult to achieve was that I’m very animated and she’s quite mask like in a way. I had to really control that. What I find with her, she would smile with her mouth and not smile with her eyes, and I couldn’t do that. I tried but I’ve watched back some of it and my eyes are smiling.

Were you shocked by what Margaret dealt with in the show?

I think I was very surprised at how revolutionary it was to see a room full of men in grey suits and one woman in a blue skirt with floppy silk blouses. Nowadays if you look at a large representative group who are supposed to be representing the country, we expect to see different ethnicities, different age groups, different genders, different clothes, different colours, different accents. I think the most shocking thing was that this all happened within my own lifetime. We lived through a time and accepted a time when undisputed patriarchy was the accepted way of life. Margaret Thatcher stepped into that and braved it out. I would love to have admired her more because I do admire her for that. I don’t admire every step she took, her political philosophy or how she carried it out, I certainly don’t admire her legacy or what she did to the country, but I do admire a woman who walked into that scenario and said I’m going to change things. I just wish she had understood that she could’ve helped other women into that position. I hope it’s provocative to watch that old footage of those days and go “golly did my mum, and my grandmother really live through that?”