Romola Garai has lit up cinema screens for more than twenty years, and is now fearlessly taking her career in new directions
an hour in her company confirms my suspicions: romola garai is the opposite of a pretentious luvvie. Sweary, funny and selfdeprecating, with the confidence of someone who knows who she is and what she thinks, the Atonement and Suffragette actress’s answers to my questions are as direct as her eye contact. When I point out what a major year 2024 is set to be for her – with two appearances on the silver screen, a leading part in Netflix’s all-star dramatisation of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview Scoop, a powerful turn on stage at the Young Vic, and the second film she’s written and will direct in the offing – she looks straight at me and laughs. ‘You advertise it like I have this excess of creative energy. Definitely not like I just had a really long gap with acting and had to do something to fill it. Let’s go with your version.’
Garai has a no-nonsense pragmatism to her, but as anyone who saw her performance as an army-squadron leader in Vigil ’s second series can attest, the conviction of her performances betrays psychological investment. It’s that commitment to her characters that has led directors including Richard Eyre, Stephen Poliakoff and Marc Munden to choose to work with her. Last month saw the cinema release of One Life, in which Antony Hopkins plays Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who helped 669 mostly Jewish children flee Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of World War II. Garai is the efficient Doreen Warriner, a former economist who co-ordinates the rescue with him. The Holocaust looms large, too, in Nachtland, the new play she is soon to be starring in, in which a modern-day German family finds a hot-potato heirloom in the attic – a painting by Hitler. ‘It’s a very explosive thing to put on a stage,’ says Garai, for whom this period in history is close to home – many of her Jewish-Hungarian ancestors died in the war.
Garai likes work that divides opinion and kickstarts conversations. ‘Surely the whole point of art is to be provocative,’ she says. ‘To some extent, it should feel uncomfortable for the viewer.’ For this reason, she laments the reduction in arts criticism in mainstream media. ‘It’s a critic’s job to defend the new, to herald innovative work and say to audiences, “you may not like this, but there’s value here.” I’m a massive snob – in the sense that I don’t like things being dumbed down, not in the sense that I don’t love Selling Sunset. That’s doing something else and does it perfectly.’ Her other film The Critic, on general release in May, draws on this subject, with Ian McKellen in the titular role as an ageing journalist set on bringing down the career of a theatre actress (Gemma Arterton). ‘It’s quite a twisted story of the
