Romola Garai: ‘I’d question directors about nude scenes and they’d kick off’

If you google the British actor Romola Garai, you’ll be presented with some additional suggested search terms. Most are nosy classics of the genre: “Romola Garai relationships”, “Romola Garai children’s names”. But one is more curious. “What happened to Romola Garai,” we are prompted to ask, as though the star of Atonement and Netflix’s recent drama Scoop is the subject of a mysterious true crime podcast. And I’m actually starting to wonder what happened to Romola Garai myself... she was supposed to be here about half an hour ago.

We’re meeting at the Almeida Theatre, where she is starring in an adaptation of The Years, the autobiographical masterpiece by Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux. Just as I’m musing over all the things I want to ask her about – her enjoyably forthright views on feminism and the film industry, why Briony had to ruin everything in Atonement – she bursts into the room, brandishing a bike helmet, her face glowing with sweat. “I’m SO sorry,” she says, the picture of mortification. Only when she was innocently walking her dog before work did she discover she’d got the time wrong and had to bomb it over from where she lives in Stoke Newington.

So, no need to worry about what happened to Garai. She’s here, speaking pretty eloquently for someone who has just done a bike ride at top speed. Already she’s telling me about The Years, first published back in 2008, in which Ernaux elegantly blended the personal and the political in a memoir simultaneously about one woman’s life and her entire generation. “Annie Ernaux basically invented a new form, which I think was an inevitable part of her being a woman,” Garai explains. “It’s like: how do I write about the experience of being female, being born in a woman’s body and having the experience of your body dictated so much by the culture that you live in?”

The stage adaptation, originally seen in Amsterdam in 2022, features a cast of five actors all playing “Annie” at different times of her life, who often directly address the audience in an attempt to replicate the intensity and intimacy of Ernaux’s own writing. The Years is remarkable in how epic in scale it feels, given that writing about women’s lives is often dismissed as minor or “domestic”. Garai recognises that assumption. “That’s just so clearly true. It’s just always historically been the case, hasn’t it?” she says, dissolving into laughter at the irony of it.

That laughter punctuates our conversation. Even though she clearly approaches interviews as the professional obligation that they are, Garai regularly laughs her way through her sentences, finding mirth in most topics – particularly the strange industry in which she operates. At one point, she discusses her “work”, before adding her own brackets: “For want of a better word.”

Dressed for rehearsals in a grungy T-shirt, blonde hair tied back, she’s a genial mix of someone who doesn’t take themselves that seriously but has strong opinions about plenty of things. When I ask if she’s ever felt obliged to speak about particular subjects, she seems surprised at the concept. “I just... do speak about things. I’m very garrulous and very... I’m angry as a person,” she shrugs, before sounding amused again. “There have been times in my life where I’ve been pissed off and I’ve had the opportunity to talk about that.”

This is when the penny drops. Back in 2017, Garai was one of the early clarion voices sharing unsettling experiences of producer Harvey Weinstein, describing not just being summoned to his hotel room where he answered in a dressing gown, but, aged just 18, having her weight monitored and food taken from her trailer on the set of Dirty Dancing 2. It dawns on me that this might be what people are searching for when they ask what happened to Romola Garai. Not to find out if she was somehow banished.

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It’s true that, thus far, her best-known roles are the ones she took on early in her career: Dodie Smith’s wide-eyed hero in I Capture the Castle; aforementioned life-wrecker Briony Tallis in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Atonement; gossipy Emma Woodhouse opposite Jonny Lee Miller in the Beeb’s 2009 imagining of Austen’s Emma; pale-lipped sex worker Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White; fast-rising TV producer Bel Rowley in the 1950s-set drama The Hour. In fact, Garai seems just to have been doing things her own way. The work she does is deliciously eclectic and assured in its tastes, from playing Measure for Measure’s Isabella amid a sea of blow-up sex dolls at the Young Vic in 2015 to performing in Ella Hickson’s incendiary 2018 play The Writer here at the Almeida, and writing and directing her debut film, Amulet, in 2020, inspired by the “trauma of childbirth”.

And, she tells me, she no longer has to do work she hates. Garai slightly has the air of someone who has been through the trenches and lived to tell the tale. “I started in the industry in the Nineties, which was a very different landscape,” she says, eyes widening. “No one in my family was in the industry. I was incredibly young. I hadn’t gone to drama school and I was put into a professional workplace at an incredibly young age. And no one gave me a single piece of advice about how to manage any of it: how to appear, how to interact with journalists, how to be on a film. None of it. So, you know, it was all pretty bad.”

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Garai spent her early years in Hong Kong and Singapore, where her father was a high street bank manager and her mother a journalist, before returning to England with her family at the age of eight. She was spotted by an agent while doing her A-levels and was just 18 when she took on her first lead film role, as Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle. On reflection, she appreciates her good fortune in being offered such a good part so early. “When you get very lucky, very young, it’s like becoming head features writer at The Independent when you’re 17. You just think, ‘Oh, good stuff just happens!’” But she also had no experience of being on a set, and remembers feeling “scared a lot”. “Like a lot of people that age who were in an adult environment, I was pretending to be a grown-up a lot. Now I look back and think, ‘This was insane. Why was I unchaperoned?’”

Falling into acting at such a young age made her unsure whether it was the career for her, and she “deeply wanted” to have options, so she completed an English degree with the Open University while working on a number of acting projects. But there were always aspects of being an actor that she struggled with. “Particularly when I was younger, I found it extremely difficult that you are trading in your body a lot as a woman, and that can be very complicated.”

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It’s a concern that The Years shares. “It really details how difficult it is, as a woman, to understand your body as belonging completely to yourself,” Garai says. “Particularly as a young woman, I definitely did not understand that. I thought that my body was the property of the society that I lived in. I didn’t really understand that it belonged to me, and that I could dictate its size and shape and what went into it and what went out of it, food and sex and all of it. And I don’t know, actually, that women definitely do feel that any better now.”

This is part of what made her comments about Weinstein in 2017 so powerful; she described an atmosphere in which she was constantly under pressure to change her body, even alleging that people were paid to make sure she didn’t eat on the set of Dirty Dancing 2. Her words preceded a wave of testimonies about the way that Weinstein abused his power, and I wonder what she made of his 2020 rape conviction being overturned earlier this year. She’s not familiar enough with the legal situation in America to talk about that specifically, but “I can say what it makes me feel in relation to rape convictions in this country”. Garai told me earlier that she’s an angry person, and I’ve not seen that yet – but she speaks now with an anger that is red hot. “It’s a f***ing disgrace. Rape has effectively been decriminalised in this country. I think it’s an epidemic of sexual violence that women live in.”

One of the most concrete things that came out of the #MeToo movement was the rise of intimacy coordinators, who help to supervise sex scenes for actors. It struck me that it might feel bittersweet to Garai that they weren’t around in the early days of her career. But nope. “There’s no bitter. There’s only sweet. It was just nonsense. I mean, what were people doing? There’s just so many situations where you’re like, this is a workplace. We’re at work. It needs to be very clear that I’m not a sex worker. Like, nudity is not something that I’m being paid for – it’s an element of what we do that needs to be managed,” she says.

Garai felt this strongly from a young age. But when she used to question directors about scenes, “people thought I was crazy”. “I’d say to a director, ‘But wait, I want to know what it is you’re asking me to do.’ And directors would kick off. If you were just saying, could you just explain it to me? Or if there is a night where, for whatever reason – if I’m on my period or something – I feel very uncomfortable doing it, is there a way round it? People would freak out, like you were being...” – her lip curls around the word – “difficult.”

It was starring in Penelope Skinner’s play The Village Bike at the Royal Court in 2011 – a comedy about a pregnant woman whose husband ignores her sexual appetites – that made Garai see why she wanted to act: she could make important, challenging work with people she admired. Motherhood focused her work further. “I felt much more in conversation with my history as a woman. And the sort of tension that exists between trying to be an artist and trying to be a mother – I think that crystallised my understanding of the patriarchy.”

When she started her career, it was a “generally accepted fact” that older actresses would be “farmed out of the industry at a certain age”. “Particularly if you had children, your agent would just stop calling, and it was just accepted that you had made a choice in your life to become a mother. And that obviously did not impact fathers at all!” She laughs that laugh again – but it’s one that says it’s not really funny.

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After The Years, she’ll jump straight into another stage project: Giant at the Royal Court, a new play that imagines a meeting between Roald Dahl and his Jewish editor Tom Maschler following the publication of an antisemitic article by Dahl. “It’s partly about how you manage a successful person if you’re reliant on them; it’s also a lot about antisemitism and Israel, and what it means to be a Jew,” Garai – who has Jewish heritage of her own – tells me. What does she make of the debate now woven into our culture, of whether you can separate the art from the artist? “Oh, God, I mean I’ve been WhatsApping my friend about the Alice Munro story this morning,” she says, dismayed. A recent article written by Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner alleges that the Nobel prize winner – who is one of Garai’s favourite writers – ignored her second husband’s abuse of Skinner, which she claims began when she was nine years old. “I think time is the only thing. Like, will I have the instinct to pick up her books and read them? Maybe not. Maybe it will forever colour my relationship with that work.”

In 2022, Garai directed her husband, actor and sometime playwright Sam Hoare, in his play at the Park Theatre in north London; Press was about a tabloid journalist with dodgy methods. “It was a lot of time together,” Garai says, before adding, jokingly, “but we’re still together.” After the warm critical reception of her directorial debut, though, it’s films she wants to make more of. Unfortunately, she says, it’s “really, really, really, really, really hard”, and the model for independent filmmaking in this country has “kind of collapsed”. She has, she tells me wryly, “a lot of projects” – a period romp, a country house horror, literary adaptations – and “I just try to keep them all ticking over, in the hope that the industry will reshape itself into some sort of thing that makes sense.”

Just then, some muscular drumming starts to boom from beneath us. “Yes, that’s our play. Sorry,” Garai says, sheepishly. After several more abashed apologies for her late arrival, she darts downstairs. What happened to Romola Garai? She was busy doing things her own way.

‘The Years’ is at the Almeida until 31 August; almeida.co.uk