Cate Blanchett

Rewrites the Book on Scandal

by Brad Balfour

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Copyright ©2007 PopEntertaiment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: February 21, 2007.

In Notes on a Scandal, a high-school teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) starts a affair with one of her students, Steven (Andrew Simpson), and is discovered and emotionally blackmailed by her colleague Barbara (Judi Dench, receiving a Best Actress Oscar nomination for this film). As adapted by Patrick Marber – who garnered accolades over his previous screenplay Closer – Zoë Heller's 2003 Booker-shortlisted novel becomes a Hitchcockian treatise on betrayal and obsession.

Blanchett has become a Hollywood institution without actually having become Hollywood, acting in such acclaimed films as Elizabeth, Charlotte Gray, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This has been a particularly good year for Blanchett, having starred in three similarly-lauded films – The Good German, Babel and Notes – which landed her in the Best Supporting Actress category for this year's Oscar.

Is it important to be inquisitive – as inquisitive as say, Barbara, while performing in or watching Notes on a Scandal?

I think it's important to ask all the questions, but not necessarily to answer them. It's important to let all of those ambiguities breathe because once [Sheba] dives in [the affair with Stephen], there's no way back. The wound is open and there's no way in closing in, no matter if the affair ends or not. Given the damage to her children, to her husband, to herself, she's on the public hit-list, so to speak and will be forever so.

How did you get into this role?

Once I understood Sheba as being somebody who's incredibly lost, enormously fragile – and a time bomb, there was a way "in" for me.

Did you use the novel when you prepared for your part?

The novel [of the same name by Zoë Heller] was a great source, but it was from a very unreliable narrator. It's all from Barbara's perspective. I think what Patrick [Marber, playwright and screenwriter of Notes and 2004's Closer] did with the screenplay, which is fantastic, was to liberate Sheba from Barbara's perspective. That enabled the film to become its own entity.

One review put forth the idea that while Sheba is in an incredibly lonely position, it's not due to a lack of love in her life. How complicated was it to get that sort of nuance into the character?

Well anyone who embarks on a destructive relationship like that.... There's an enormous cry for help in there. Sheba doesn't actually know where to start. What I like about the film is that it doesn't really attempt to justify or explain in simple terms why Sheba does what she does. If she sat down on the analyst's couch and had about fifteen years to deconstruct it, she might find the language to explain it, but I like how fragile she was.

How do you think Sheba and Barbara ultimately felt toward one another?

I think that they both underestimated one another, Sheba to a fatal degree. Sheba feels quite sorry for Barbara in a lot of ways and has no idea of the lengths to which Barbara will go to attach herself to her. And I think Barbara completely underestimates how lonely Sheba actually is. I think she just sees the trappings of her life and how peopled it is.

So how tough was Judi Dench during the fight scene?

She can hold her own. We had to do that [scene] quite a lot and she had this, sort of, ninja turtle [thing] and I had to thrust her into the bookshelf. We were both dreading the scene, actually. Because it – it reaches a certain level of absurdity – the stuff that they're saying to one another. It's actually thrilling to hear the words that
Patrick put into the characters' mouths because the stakes are so high and "Where did you get my hair? Did you pluck it from the bath with some special fucking tweezers?!" [laughs] It's a pretty great line.

Did you ever consider what would happen if Barbara didn't expose the secret?

Sheba's not someone who's going to write her life story. She's not Mary Kay Letourneau [notorious American schoolteacher who went to jail for having sex with her 13 year-old student and once released, married him] or somebody who stayed with the boy. We did talk a lot about what would happen if Barbara didn't expose the secret and I, sort of, feel like it would peter out.

It's interesting that it doesn't. There's a desire to blow apart her world. She describes herself as a good wife and a good mother. There's a sense that she just wants to fuck it all up. I think that there are a lot of people who feel that way. The more happy people perceive them, the more they want to destroy it all and almost start again and have an adolescence that she never had. Sheba herself married her teacher, so there's an echo, there's a mirror up there held to herself.

Were you able to suspend your moral judgment?

Yes, absolutely. I think it was very important for me to suspend my own moral judgment because there is no way to defend what Sheba has done. I don't think that this film intends to do that at all. The main thing is that the relationship with Steven is the catalyst which propels her into Barbara's arms and there lies the true drama and its delicious and thrilling side.

Is there universality to Barbara's self-involvement?

Look — [I think] we're all absorbed in our own lives and we're the heroes of our own narratives.

How did you feel about the way that Heller imagined Barbara in the book version of Notes?

It was an interesting description because it was all from Barbara's perspective. Barbara never struck me as somebody who had an enormous fashion sense. She describes [Sheba] as being fey and I found that quite helpful. She describes her dress as being floaty. The costume designer and I talked about fabric that floated. Given the hard edge of the punk of her adolescence, I had met several English women like that. They all had bangs and there's a, sort of, gossamer quality to them.

Since you are working with an amazing set of actors, director and screenwriter all schooled through theater, what's the difference between actors in plays and actors in films?

People who primarily work in film can be very private about their process. There's something about being in a theater rehearsal room where people just go for it and they're not embarrassed to make mistakes because they realize that it's just a rehearsal. So, it's a much more open process.

With Notes, it was a very open set. That comes from the director, Richard Eyre, who runs the National [Theater] and is an extraordinary producer, but also, as a director, he's a great lover of actors. It was certainly enjoyable from that perspective. You could just feel like you could muck it in and throw it all around. There wasn't really any judgment.

How does it feel getting all this press for doing The Good German, Babel and Notes on a Scandal?

I'm certainly sick of talking about them [laughs] – proud as I am of them. But they're all very different. To have gone from Notes on a Scandal to The Good German and to be part of an endeavor like Babel — they are three things that I am very proud of. Years like this don't come very often.

Director Shekhar Kapur Deepens the Myth

Shekhar Kapur on the set of Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Shekhar Kapur likes to play god. From his Oscar-nominated Elizabeth to his comic-book endeavors, the director enjoys immersing himself in new worlds that he creates. Kapur invited Premiere to sit down with him and discuss his latest, a second look at Elizabeth — this time in her Golden Age.

When you're preparing for such a sweeping epic like either of the Elizabeth films, what is your process?
I work very instinctively. I allow my camera to follow … I mean, while I prepare all the time, I'm very scared of knowing — I walk into a film and my biggest fear is not that I won't know what to do; my biggest fear is that I will know what to do. And so I wake up in the morning, and I then try and deconstruct myself. And I think that's the hope: to then find the answer somewhere in the ether, and then I allow myself to be very instinctive after preparation. So to prepare for the epic quality — especially in this film, because this film to me works on many levels, on a political level, on a mythic level — and the sweeping scale that you talk about is not political, it's mythic. It's to get the audiences to understand the mythology of our own lives. So mortality and jealousy and sex and love and all of those are mythic events in our lives; and therefore, when you use an icon like Elizabeth, or when [someone like Princess] Diana falls in love, it's a mythic event, but what happens when you fall in love? It's not mythic to you. So the idea is to set these things against a mythic, epic scale so you understand the mythology of it. So how do I prepare for it? I kind of keep following my instincts. So I actually see a film, so the moment I think of a scene, I start to see it, then I write it down and then I give it to my people and say, "That's how I see it." And then you adapt because the actors are not going to do the same thing. They're not puppets; they're thinking everyday of mythic human beings, it changes many times, and sometimes what they do is so fantastic that you have to change and adapt to that.

Do you draw the scenes?
Yeah, all the time. We do drawings, we do storyboards, and then we change it all.

Could you speak a little bit about the sensuality of the film? Sir Walter Raleigh, especially, punctuates his language in his speeches so that seemingly innocuous words like "hope" suddenly become scandalous.
Did you like that? It's fun, isn't it? When you can take something sort of innocuous and make it sexual. Yeah, it was very deliberately thought of because there was no sex between them. But there was intimacy, and intimacy is not always physical; intimacy can be — two minds getting together can be very intimate. So the whole idea of the sensuality to come to the fact that there was no sexuality, and yet it could be very sensual and intimate is the reason for the way to work like that. Yeah, it was all thought about: to work it like that. To me, that one scene, when she and he are actually at a distance talking to each other, but then I only treat it in close ups as if they're together in bed, so that he's talking to her like he's seducing her, but he's talking about immensities and they could be in a very intimate position when they're talking like that.

And then there's the dance scene. Historically, was the Volta scandalous at the time that it was introduced?
It was, but Elizabeth actually loved the Volta. That is what history tells us. And it was — the whole idea of lifting a woman from her crotch was scandalous, but it was part of the life. Yeah, it was very scandalous, but people did it all the time, but it became an accepted part of the culture. And she uses it to such effect.

Aren't the women actually lifted by part of their dress — the busk? To modern audiences, it will look like he's lifting her by her crotch….
Yeah, but the dress would've ripped apart.

Could you talk about the contrast between the sort of bloodlust and animalistic qualities of the warmongers compared to the elegance of their surroundings and their dress?
That's what makes that time interesting: That's what makes kings and queens. Let me give you an instance of what I was trying to do once and it never made it to the film, the last film: In the party, the coronation party of the last film, I was trying to put the fact that chamber pots were brought in and put under the table so women could just lift their dresses and take a pee, and food was cooked, and dogs would eat right next door. So there is an essential contradiction between the glamour of what you see and the reality that lies behind that glamour. And for me, that's a very essential part of examining those ages. Because we have this tendency of [getting caught up in] "Kings and queens and beautiful palaces," and these things — behind that is like a movie, isn't it? I keep telling my friends who want to come to the movie sets, I say, "All you'll see is dirt." You'll see one beautiful woman standing there, lit beautifully, and you look around yourself, and there're cables and dirt and studios and sweat and everything. And yet that woman will look pristine — it's very much like that.

That seems to draw an obvious parallel between that time and now. You could compare it maybe to Hollywood.
And politics. And that's why I'm saying that unless you can make contemporary references in a film, why make it, right? Unless somewhere it deals with our lives now — whether political or psychological or mythic life now — why make it? But, certainly, what do we see of presidents? Look at Clinton: You saw his pristine office and everything, and then you realize he was getting a blowjob back in his offices. It's like you try and visualize it and your mind will rebel because that's not how you saw it. That's not how you saw the Oval Office. So I'm trying to understand: Where did he sit? Where? If I was making a film, would it be against the American flag? So it's literally like that. So you see in the politics, I'd love to eavesdrop into those conversations that are going on. Like, "We have to go and we have to wipe out terrorism," and then suddenly when the cameras are off say, "Go fuck the bastards." It's like that. It's like, what is the truth and what is the reality and behind the façade of nobility, what lies behind — anywhere in the world, not just here, not just in Hollywood — what is the ruthlessness that lies behind the façade of religion? What is the ruthlessness that lies behind the façade of nobility or politics? That's constantly the question, isn't it? Do we know the truth or is it just an illusion? What is it?

If you are drawing those parallels, you could say that everyone is guilty in this scenario, and it's the same sort of ruthlessness now as at that time.
Yeah, it's the same ruthlessness. It's the same conflicts. That's the amazing thing: It's exactly the same conflicts. Maybe a different religion, but the conflict's the same. I mean, the Spanish Inquisition was like the Taliban, wasn't it? You say, "You can't do this, and you can't do this, and you can't do this." Is that what Catholicism said? No, it's just an interpretation of Catholicism. Just as the Taliban, the things they put down and the laws they put down on women, it's the interpretation of Koran, it's not the Koran. So it's exactly the same here: dogmatism and faiths and beliefs and the conflicts of religious wars that kill thousands and thousands of people, whether it's been Christianity, Islam, or Shiite and Sunni, or Hindus and Muslims. And ultimately led by politics, ultimately led by the quest for power. And then what happens is that the people in power begin to believe that they're anointed by God. And that's a fundamental fallacy.

Are you quoting President Bush?
No, I'm not. [laughs] You know, Tony Blair felt that. You're not anointed by God — this is your man-made thing. They start to feel they're anointed by God to do this.

Wasn't that actually said about President Bush: that he believed that God anointed him?
Yeah, yeah. You read between the lines, and you know he does, he thinks that. I mean, toward the end of his Prime Ministership, Tony Blair was completely — he said so: "In my God, in my belief, in my faith, I believe I've done the right thing."

It's convenient.
I don't think it's convenient — I think they start to believe it. I don't think it's just a political statement. By the time they say it, they believe it. That's frightening. If they knew they were lying, it wouldn't be so frightening. It's because they don't think. When Bin Laden and leaders of Al-Qaeda say that they are following the tenets of Islam, they believe it — they don't think they're lying. And that's what's frightening.

After you finish working on a production that's as elaborate as this one, do you miss constructing that fantasy? Just on a day-to-day basis, on that level?
How did you know that?

Wouldn't a person miss building a fantasy? It's like playing God.
Absolutely. I'm just dying to get back in sets to create again. And to create is to play with the universe, isn't it? To create is to take all of the elements of the universe and to put them together in your own interpretation. And in a way that's playing God. All creation is like that, isn't it? God's creation, Picasso's creation, the film director's creation, a poet's creation — is the realignment of the creative elements of the universe in the artist's vision. It's like a drug — you want to do it again and again.

And, so that brings us to the obvious question: What are you working on now?
I think there's a third Elizabeth, but I don't think that's my next film. I'm thinking of working on a film that — it's a film based in 2025 in a city like New York which has been divided between those that have water and those that don't. It's a time when water has become the key decisive — it's not about class anymore; it's all people who can fight with arms to keep the water, and how they use water to exploit, as a weapon of exploitation. And there's not enough water to go around. And the water wars have begun in a city like New York. And it's an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet — there's a strong love story going in between, but it's in the context of the conflict of water.

It's funny because that sounds almost like a comic-book plot…
I have a comic book company. And it is a comic book, but it has such a resonance to our time.

Could you talk a little bit about what you are working on in regard to the comic book company?
It's called Virgin Comics. It was started by me and some friends of ours, like me, Deepak Chopra, a company called Gotham Entertainment, and some friends. And we got together, and I started to write comic books — I wrote the first two comic books for the company. And the basic thing was: Could we bring new, iconic characters from Eastern mythologies and draw them out and reform them into Western and international icons? So that became very successful, and Richard Branson joined us, and so we called it Virgin Comics. Now I just oversee it. And we have over 200 artists in India, and 25 writers. And we have many directors working with us because they like the style of our comic books; they give us ideas, we make the comic books, they make films on it. It's a very, very, very exciting business. I go back to Bangalore, where all our artists are in India, and I just sit there for like two days watching these young people create these amazing, amazing works. It's fascinating.

What have you had the most success with in terms of characters for that company?
Well, the first one I wrote was Devi. Again a woman. It was a woman. This'll interest you. I started out with the premise that: What is man's impression of woman that sometimes he wants the nurturer, and then sometimes he looks for some excitement — almost the whore. Between the nurturer and the whore, the sexual object and the nurturer, the mothering nature and the sexual nature lies his fantasy. And so it becomes the story of an iconic two women: one the nurturer and one this mythic goddess fighter who's flirtatious and sexy and everything. And as you read the comic book, you realize that both of them are in love with this man, and this man can't make up his mind — you realize that they are the same person. Rather like in this film, Bess and Elizabeth are the same person. So I guess I'm obsessed with shadow selves of each other — this idea of shadow selves. [Devi] is actually very well read. What else? We've done a retelling of an Indian epic called the Ramayan, which is very, very popular. I wrote something called The Snake Woman, and The Snake Woman is interesting because it takes a traditional Eastern belief that if you kill a king cobra, the mate — if she sees you — will follow you for many, many incarnations until she destroys you. So it's a story about, ultimately, the reptilian brain and our more loving brain and the conflict between the two, where a young girl doesn't realize that she's the reincarnation of that snake and the battle that's going on between her for being a reincarnation of a reptile and a human being in love. So there are mythic conflicts as you can see.

I think I should stop at the comic shop.
Take a look.

Cate Blanchett: The Golden Icon

Revered actress Cate Blanchett revisits the role that thrust her onto the international stage in 1998's Elizabeth. Now ten years, two kids, one Oscar, and innumerable critically lauded performances later, the Australian actress commands the screen again in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, also directed by Shekhar Kapur and costarring Academy Award–winner Geoffrey Rush, hunky leading man Clive Owen, and newcomer Abbie Cornish.

You've said that you were reluctant to take this role again. What changed your mind?
What convinced me was time really. Shekhar, the minute we finished the first one, was talking about my playing Elizabeth again, but hundreds of other ideas. And we've remained friends and talked about various projects, and Tim Bevan from Working Title said, "Look, just let us work a script up, and if doesn't work, it doesn't work." And I found the notion of the love triangle, the very structure of the narrative was quite different, because I've always said that if I did another one, Elizabeth shouldn't be the central character. And because the structure of the romance — because it's an unabashedly romantic film — I think was quite different, and it didn't feel quite like treading the same ground. So, yeah, time in the end and knowing that Geoffrey and Clive were on board. And that Remi [Adefarasin] was going to shoot it and working with Alexandra Byrne who did costumes, again, who was different, a genius I think.

Congratulations on the win in Venice as best actress for I'm Not There.
It was cool wasn't it? I was very surprised and pleased.

It seems that people are putting you in the mix for the Oscar again. You already won for playing Katharine Hepburn, and now you're playing another famous person, Bob Dylan, who happens to be a man. Is it daunting to play somebody real, or, in this case, with Elizabeth, somebody who is real and has been played by many people before?
There's a long and glorious legacy of actresses who played Elizabeth I — from Flora Robson and Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Anne-Marie Duff. She's constantly reinvented. One of my favorite plays is a [Friedrich] Schiller play: Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart), about a fictitious meeting between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I. She's right for reinvention because she's such an enigma. Also if you think about the Elizabethan age — when the English culture as we know it was really crystallized — it's a fascinating period of history, so I think there'll be many more Elizabeths, long after this film. Because I think she's a fantastic — particularly for a director like Shekhar — a point on which to leap off for a story.

And is protecting something iconic like Bob Dylan irresistible to you as an actress?
Well, Elizabeth I is iconic, as well. I think I run 100 miles an hour away from projects every single time and in the end, the ones that stick are the ones that sort of pursue you and you can't say no to. And the idea of playing Bob Dylan was just so utterly ludicrous — I mean, of course I had to say yes. And it was very daunting, and I was a bit nervous about returning to a character [like Elizabeth], I suppose, that allowed me to walk into a door to an international film career. You don't ever want to feel like you're going backwards. So once I perceived that I could actually progress forward through playing it, then it became exciting to me.

Could you talk about the first day in costume — getting back into her skin?
It was quite organic. Obviously, I started with Morag Ross, who did the hair and makeup, and Alex Byrne — we had long, long discussions about where to start. And, obviously, in the end, no matter how much research you do, you're telling the particular story that the script and the director prescribe. And I think the great thing about Shekhar and I working together is that I'm fascinated by history and he's utterly disinterested, so I think we temper one another really well. But, you know, we did a lot of research, but in the end you have to say: Well is she starting off at a point where we kind of left her at the last film, except she was at a point of utter rigidity in the end of the last film, so how does one exist within that rigid place? So you have to sort of open that up a little bit. But it felt strange — it was like there was an echo in the room, yet it felt very fresh. And I'd seen Shekhar and Abbie — because I don't think she'd seen the first one — we watched it just before we started to film. And I was incredibly uncomfortable with the notion of — I was thinking, Oh, god, it's 10 years later — have I aged that much? You know, being an actress in film is a bit like, you know, aging in dog years. But I was surprised at how well it stood up, and I thought, Well that's that, and it is its own thing, and I was excited by the fact that this film was at once an echo in that you've got the same sort of creative team, a few of the same characters that was its own creature. It's a much more internal film, I think. An interior film, despite the kind of epic backdrop. It was a bit like a homecoming. I think I was uncomfortable in a healthy, useful way.

Speaking of iconic characters and franchise, could you talk a little bit about your decision to climb onto Indiana Jones?
Literally, "climb onto." It's such a well-oiled — as you say — "iconic" franchise, one in which I grew up with. And on the first day of shooting it was extremely surreal. I was watching the monitor as Steven [Spielberg] set up the frame. And I knew the iconography of the frame — I knew the trucks, I knew the layout, I knew the way that these things were lit. And then I was meant to enter the frame — it was a real, like Zelig moment. But it's been fantastic and so much fun, and my boys have had an absolute ball.

Are they sworn to secrecy too?
Yeah. Absolutely.

One of the things that's so interesting about these performances as Elizabeth are the subtle changes in your face that convey all of her different moods —
You can say it: "Age." [laughs]

Not at all! What did you do to distinguish each little look she gives that lets us in on what's going on behind the scenes?
I think it's tricky but vital that as an actor working in film, you have a sense of the third eye in that you can be aware of what you're projecting but not in a self-conscious way. So, I think if you're internally engaged with the set of feelings and emotions and also the actions you're trying to play on the other actor — because it always has to be active — then that will externally take care of itself. I mean, I hope I wasn't mugging too much, but yeah — I didn't think about that on the day very much. Obviously when you're getting into hair and makeup, like I was suggesting before, it is a form of masking up, but even when you're in your Elizabethan war paint, you don't want that mask to be opaque, it has to be transparent. So hopefully there was a transparency to it.

This film takes license with the facts, as Schiller did in Mary Stuart —
That's what good drama does.

So, is this fictionalized history, historical fantasy, or the exploration of legend — how do you perceive it?
I think it's all three. In the end when you only have — I don't know quite how many minutes and seconds the film is — but when you have a couple of hours to tell an incredibly dense period of history, by the process of selection, you're automatically telescoping the events, and you're automatically saying, "This event has more significance than the one that's been omitted." So it's never going to be like reading the letters, or the court documents, or reading Alison Weir's biography of Elizabeth. It's not the same experience, but then going to see a film shouldn't be; you're being told a fable, and a fable through the eyes of that director, and it's very temporal, too, filming, so hopefully the film has a contemporary quality. I think like all good stories that they're able to connect to the current collective unconscious, what we're all thinking about, what it means to be female now as much as what it means to be female then.

Elizabeth and Raleigh seem to have an incredible romantic chemistry between them, yet they don't get together — the timing seems to be off.
Yeah, timing's everything, isn't it? What interested me about the relationship between Raleigh and Elizabeth in this particular incarnation of the set of events was that there was a vicariousness to it. And I think that happens in a lot of so-called love relationships, where you almost want to be the person as much as you want to possess the person. I think there were a lot of male courtiers that Elizabeth over the years had strong connections with, and I think that she was probably fascinated with the freedom that was afforded not only an adventurer like Raleigh, but also the men in the court who could travel a lot more freely than she could. I mean, she never left the shores of England.

Can you talk about Clive himself?
I think every woman who works with Clive has incredible romantic chemistry. [laughs]

Is he a professional charmer?
No, he's very frank and open and not at all self-conscious. I think that that's incredibly attractive — when somebody is as attractive as he is, but seemingly as unaware of it as he is.

When the queen says "I have a hurricane in me," we believe her. For you personally as an actress, what do you have in you that makes you believable to us?
Oh, god. I'm utterly the wrong person to answer that question — I have no idea. Hopefully a rich set of life experiences that I'm able to draw on, but at the same time, I'm not at all interested in playing myself or imposing my own value system onto a character. It's like having conversations continually with like-minded people: You get a very skewed perception of the way the world works. So I like having conversations with characters who think in very different ways to me, and have very different sets of experiences.

Elizabeth seems to have a very difficult time finding a mate and having to remain the Virgin Queen because of her position — what do you think is the most significant difference between women of her time and women now?
I was reading Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking again the other day, and she referred to various psychologists who were analyzing the notion of grief, and the grieving process, and saying that somewhere along the way in the last century, there became this notion that we all need to be happy, so nobody fully grieves anymore because we can't be seen to be unhappy. So the notion of happiness for someone in Elizabeth's position is sort of a strange one. I think it's a very modern concept that happiness is something that we not only have to strive for, but can achieve in this lifetime. I think Elizabeth's situation was entirely different. In relation to what you're saying about finding a companion, the reasons for getting married were then deeply unromantic. It had to do with securing a nation, and it was a political tool. Women were used as part of the political negotiation process between countries. And the fact that Elizabeth claimed that political mechanism for herself, and was able to use it herself, meant that the prospect of finding love for her was very elusive. The history books say — you know the history books were written by courtiers at the time — that the closest she came was the Duke of Anjou. But in Shekhar's first film, the Duke of Anjou is a raving transvestite — so everything's up for grabs in these films.

This question has to do with her sexuality: It seems like she almost teeters on madness when watching the courtship of Bess and Raleigh — how much did you play with that idea of her being somewhat demented?
I don't think I thought about it a lot, which the film — I did it in about three or four scenes, one of which was cut because it was talking about Mary Stuart, and I think they decided it was a bit too much discussion about Mary Stuart, so they cut it out. But I tried to see it through — and of course, this is not in it at all — her self-medicating with herbs and being physically unstable, because I thought that at the time that I'm playing her, she would've been quite menopausal. Pre-, you know, menopause. That she's going through "the change."

She was likely in her 40s?
I think, at the time, I kept telling Remi, who shot it, to take off the 12-denier stockings that he was shooting me through to show a few more wrinkles, but you know, Shekhar likes women to look beautiful, so — in terms of that madness, it was not only what was going on for her psychologically, but what was going on for her physically. That's great that you got a little texture of that, but I think that the whole complexity of what I was trying to do maybe wasn't in the film.

Do you think that if it weren't for Elizabeth that England would be speaking Spanish today?
Quite possibly. It's a really interesting thing to look at history, the history of failure. I mean, if we analyze history by the failures that took place rather than the victories, [they] have influenced us in incredibly — the way we've ended up where we are today. But, absolutely, it would've been a very different place.

Was there any discussion about a fictional scene — as in the Schiller play — between you as Elizabeth and Samantha Morton as Mary, Queen of Scots? I would've loved to — I think Samantha Morton's incredible. She's such a dangerous, exciting, unusual, unpredictable presence onscreen. I so admire her work. But maybe if anyone's going to ever do the Schiller, I'd be there with her absolutely.