The stars of Wicked Little Letters talk work, friendship and profanities
By Adrian Lobb
WICKED LITTLE LETTERS
Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley are quite the duo. On screen or off screen, they are like firecrackers in each other’s presence. When they get together with The Big Issue, to be in their presence – even on a video call from different parts of the country in advance of their new film, Wicked Little Letters – is to witness a friendship full of energy and love.
The friendship was sealed when they shot The Lost Daughter for Netflix, for which they each received Oscar nominations – Best Actress (Colman) and Best Supporting Actress (Buckley). Because they played the same character at different times in her life, they didn’t share any scenes, but that didn’t stop them connecting.
“It was a joy,” recalls Buckley. “We were in Greece together for about a week with each other and immediately hit it off. We were like, what is the naughtiest thing we could do?
“We didn’t get to work together, but we would drive home together then have chips and wine outside our little huts.”
Many a strong bond has been formed over chips and wine. And this one seems special. “We spend New Year’s together, don’t we?” Colman says.
Their characters spend most of Wicked Little Letters at loggerheads. The film contains some of the most brilliantly inventive swearing seen on screen. And the wild thing is that it is all based on real events that took place in a 1920s seaside town when anonymous poison-pen letters, crafted with a seriously foul-mouthed flourish, caused a sensation.
In the film, conservative, unhappy, put-upon Edith (Colman) is swift to point the finger at her next-door neighbour – rowdy, hard-living, Irish single mother Rose (Buckley) – when she starts to receive a barrage of imaginatively abusive post.
There is a delightful playfulness in the language of Jonny Sweet’s script. Rose is described as someone who “curses like a fish, has straggly hair all the time, and walks round on the Sabbath with feet as bare as goose eggs” or “turning up at women’s whist with the general attitude of Ireland”.
No wonder Buckley and Colman responded to the script with such glee.
Olivia Colman: Shall I go first? Well, I remember reading Jonny’s script and loving that it’s a real story and it had these two women in the 1920s swearing at each other like this. A lot of it is taken from the real letters. And I wanted to work with Jessie.
