Andrea Riseborough: ‘Psychologically, acting is no picnic for me’

The magic of Andrea Riseborough is never quite knowing where you’ve seen her. I tell a friend her name, and he hasn’t a clue – then he googles her and realises he’s seen her in 16 films and two limited series for television. He recognised her face instantly. Riseborough tells me that it’s important to be slightly unknowable. It takes her a while. The actor speaks in long pauses, gathering her words and thoughts as if they’re precious, fragile little things.

“If you’re going to represent people in real life... you should retain... to the best of your ability... what might be considered a real life... in the sense that you can move through the world... in quiet observation.” Speaking to me over video call, Riseborough is curled up on the sofa of her London flat, a temporary abode while she’s appearing in a play. Surrounding her is vast nothing – white walls, a cushion. All the better to disappear into.

Riseborough has her hits: as an ambitious Broadway diva in Birdman; as Emma Stone’s love interest in the Billie Jean King film Battle of the Sexes; as Nicolas Cage’s spectral betrothed in Mandy. But she also creates the kind of puzzlement wherein you think you might have brushed up against her on the Tube that day, or seen her waiting at a bus stop. The word “chameleonic” appears in so many of her profile interviews that I’m slightly embarrassed even to mention it here.

When half of Hollywood’s A-list seemed to launch a grassroots Oscar campaign on her behalf in 2023 – for the notoriously little-seen indie To Leslie, about a woman in poverty putting her broken life back together – yes, it seemed a genuine response to an actor giving a full-bodied, emotive, painful, scrappy performance in a haunting character study of a film. But it also felt like a celebration of a woman who’s cracked an elusive Hollywood code: great performances, great projects, great directors – and absolutely none of the celebrity noise that tends to obscure it all. She is, that whole saga suggested, a wonderful actor and an actor’s aspirational ideal.

To Leslie was a tale of wrong-side-of-the-tracks melancholy, and provided a showcase for Riseborough to weep, flail, and furrow her brow. It’s an effect mirrored in her latest film, too, an eerie suburban drama called Dragonfly, which is also about people who tend to slip down the back of our cultural sofa: erratic loners, the elderly, the poor. “It was such a perfect expression of friendship and loneliness and what it feels like to be marginalised in some way,” she explains.

Riseborough plays Colleen, a woman on benefits who has a dog and a murky past, and who ingratiates herself to Brenda Blethyn’s Elsie, the pensioner who lives in the bungalow next to hers. They strike up an earnest if oddly charged friendship – Colleen buys Elsie’s milk and does her household chores, and ragefully goes after the visiting carers who have been hired to look after Elsie but seem to do the bare minimum. Elsie is flattered but wary. Elsie’s son, a pompous busybody played by Jason Watkins, takes an immediate dislike to his mother’s unofficial new guardian.

Dragonfly is directed by Paul Andrew Williams, a filmmaker so accustomed to genre-spinning – his credits include the sicko revenge movie Bull and the coming-of-age thriller London to Brighton – that it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when Elsie and Colleen’s relationship darkens. By its end, Dragonfly has transformed into something deeply disturbing.

“I very specifically knew Colleen on the page,” Riseborough says. “And I think her character speaks for the place that I come from; she speaks for, adjacently, family members or my family background, or people I’ve known.” She adds that while she was born and raised in Newcastle, and Dragonfly is set in a nameless Yorkshire town, the principle remains the same. “A huge portion of our society gets marginalised through absolutely no fault of their own – you can’t choose where you’re born, and you can’t choose where you end your life.”

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Blethyn stepped into Dragonfly with just a week’s notice, replacing the film’s original star, Vanessa Redgrave. She and Riseborough make a little more sense together: both grew up working-class, Blethyn in Ramsgate and Riseborough in Whitley Bay, and both discovered themselves at drama school. Both, too, found early film success with Mike Leigh – Blethyn, to an Oscar nod, for Secrets & Lies, and Riseborough with a small role in his Happy-Go-Lucky.

“When you first go out into the world and you’re attempting to act professionally, you recognise people who’ve gathered the same tools from similar places,” Riseborough says. “Brenda’s one of those people. Working with her was like coming home, because it’s almost like you share a very different language together. I don’t know whether it’s because you spend so much time making an absolute f***ing fool of yourself when you’re training, and in front of all of your peers, that you then act without ego... but whatever that language is, it’s very fun and comfortable, in light of the fact that where you’ve got to go is mentally horrific.” She smiles. “Psychologically, what I do is no picnic. Or, if it is, it’s one where they’re serving prickly pears with the skin still on.”

Riseborough speaks in dramatic metaphors – working is a “plunge”; the women of Dragonfly sit in a “gaping dam of isolation”. I don’t think she dislikes interviews – as has been claimed by some other journalists – but I do think she keeps an interesting distance from the “dance” of them. Entirely innocuous questions are extensively chewed over. Theories are challenged. She disagrees, and then – after moments of humming and hawing – agrees to agree. I ask her how she chooses roles, each of them seeming so wildly divergent from the others. One day she’s a young Maggie Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley. The next, she’s Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Oblivion.

“I don’t know how this has all happened,” she says. “I don’t consider myself particularly strong-minded. I’m as easily led as anyone.” Still, she adds, “I’ve always had my own taste. And I respond to things that feel authentic. I credit that to Newcastle. It’s quite a geordie quality, I think, to be able to be lovingly critical of everyone, and especially yourself.” She pauses. “I think back now, and how on earth did I have my head on my shoulders enough to be able to know what I wanted to work on, and who I wanted to work with? Especially coming out of drama school, you’re just like jelly with a strong diaphragm, you know?” She laughs. “It’s amazing that any of us make any good choices at all, really.”

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In some ways, Riseborough seems like the absolute worst person to receive a shock grassroots Oscar nomination – I wonder if it’s a bit like switching a massive floodlight onto a tiny ladybird who just wants to get on with their business. Riseborough, though, doesn’t express any discomfort with what went down in 2023, when the flank of A-listers loudly and unexpectedly backing her – Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and Edward Norton among them – was met with a mix of cynicism, anger and utmost confusion.

“No matter what you feel, it’s such a joy to be recognised by your peers,” she says. “But what was and remains completely bamboozling is that [To Leslie] was responded to in the way that it was. Because if I’m backing a horse creatively, I’m never thinking, you know, ‘Everyone’s gonna love this.’ But that film became very meaningful to many, many people, and that was the real jaw-dropper for me, of that entire experience.”

“As an actor,” she continues, “we get so caught up in the project, and the character we’re playing. It feels like throwing something out into a canyon. You don’t always expect a huge echo.”

And with that, our time is up. I sign off our Zoom call, and leave Riseborough on the edge of her canyon.

‘Dragonfly’ is in cinemas