Penny Dreadful season 2: Billie Piper on playing the Bride of Frankenstein
The actress talks about her role in Sky Atlantic's gothic horror series
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Your support makes all the difference.'Game of Thrones' doesn't own the monopoly on lusciously realised immersive universes, and while the mythical Westeros has been largely created on-set and outdoors in Northern Ireland, south of the border the late Victorian world of Sky Atlantic's Penny Dreadful is based at Ardmore Studios in County Wicklow. Once home to The Tudors it is now dominated by John Logan's grand guignol mash-up of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and, er, Oscar Wilde.
When we left Penny Dreadful, African explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) had sacrificed his kidnapped daughter Mina for his witchy sidekick Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), who had in turn rejected the romantic advances of Dorian Gray (very wise – he's much older than he looks); wild-west showman Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) had turned into a werewolf and killed the Pinkerton detectives pursuing him; Frankenstein's monster (Rory Kinnear) was still have trouble finding a woman who could see past his looks and Irish prostitute Brona (Billie Piper) had succumbed to her TB – oh, and a spot of suffocation from Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway). As season two begins, he is busy resurrecting Brona as a mate for his lonely creation.
And here is Billie Piper, fresh from shooting a scene that I was not allowed to watch because it contained a major spoiler. Suffice to say she is wearing what looks suspiciously like a wedding dress. "Dying of consumption and then coming back as the Bride of Frankenstein… that had massive appeal to me," says Piper, casting looks at the producer, since she is unsure what she can say about the new season. "It's such a minefield. Er, scratch head...
"Actually, I'm pretty good. I'm not a great sharer, I think we've all kept pretty tight-lipped about it, we've kind of had to. It's frightening that level of responsibility, you don't want to be the one who's fired." Hadn't her years as Rose Tyler on Doctor Who taught her the way around confidentiality clauses? "Exactly. I'm pretty well versed in hiding things."
In Mary Shelley's novel Victor Frankenstein creates a mate for his monster, but destroys it for fear of creating a family of little monsters. But the character of Elizabeth was immortalised by Elsa Lanchester in James Whale's 1935 classic, The Bride of Frankenstein, emitting an unforgettable yelp when she first claps eyes on her bolt-necked groom. Piper says she has read the book but has not seen the movie. "So we could go at it fresh and free from that," she says.
In the film, Elizabeth finds the monster repulsive. Will her Bride be more loving? "It's a perverse relationship I'd say, it moves around a bit. There's a lot of feeling, but she also has a quest and she wants him on board. So she goes about that using her great tools of manipulation but whether it's formed through genuine love I suppose you'll have to wait and see."
Before Brona becomes the bride, Victor needs to work his alchemy – scenes which required a prosthetic body-double, painstakingly cast from Piper's own body – and which I am introduced to in the workshop overseen by Nick Dudman, who worked his prosthetic magic on all the Harry Potter films and is responsible for moulding Benedict Cumberbatch's hump in the upcoming BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. What was it like meeting her body body-double?
"That was weird," Piper admits. "That kind of had you thinking at night, 'where is it? Who's with it? Is it all locked up?' Seeing yourself that way is bizarre – not something you want to fixate on." The stuff of nightmares? "I kind of sleep like I'm dead, so no."
Rory Kinnear has had an even more radical makeover as the monster, or Caliban as he's known in Penny Dreadful, and now looks even more like Marilyn Manson than before. "One of the influences I'm sure," says Kinnear.
"The first day when we were trying on looks that was nine hours, and the next day was eight hours, so I thought 'I'm signed up for six series'... But now we're down to three and a half. The first time I Skyped my son was interesting because I hadn't told him about it, and a four-year-old responding to his father looking like that..."
The monster's is searching for acceptance – or humanity. "He [Caliban] is constantly trying to find the human connection, despite his monstrousness and his external appearance," says Kinnear.
The monster isn't the only character looking for love in season two, and Sir Malcolm Murray's choice of sweetheart turns out to be equally questionable: Evelyn Poole (played by Helen McCrory) – aka spiritualist Madame Kali – who has been promoted to chief baddie for the new episodes.
"He's feeling vulnerable... she's consolation for him – a terrible choice," says Timothy Dalton, who is heavy with cold and in a philosophical mood after six months of filming in Ireland (his home is in Los Angeles). "My first movie ever was made in this studio," says the former Bond star, looking about him. "A Lion in Winter with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn."
What, apart from the obvious benefits of plentiful, well-paid work, attracted him to such a time-consuming project? "I remember the old Hammer horror films that weren't horrifying, and I don't understand the term horror and don't like the fact that people call our show horror," he answers discursively.
"What I love about this is it's a big, gaudy, lurid sort of wrapper in which those forever questions of evil and love and what it is to be a human being are done, within that wrapper, in quite a serious way."
John Logan, who wrote the Bond movie Skyfall, and is a co-writer on the upcoming 007 adventure, Spectre (not to mention Gladiator and the screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Hugo and The Aviator), agrees with Dalton about the ambition of Penny Dreadful.
"The reason I wrote it wasn't because I wanted to write a horror show about vampires it was because I wanted to write a Charles Dickens novel – something that just kept going and going in instalments," he says. "As much as I love James Whale and Hammer films, I pushed those aside. I went back to Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde. This Frankenstein, is he my creation? Yes partly. Is he Mary Shelley's? Yes, completely."
New characters are played by Douglas Hodge, David Haig and Sarah Greene, while the roles played by Helen McCrory and Simon Russell Beale have been exponentially beefed up.
"I'm very honoured to be part of the gang, I know I'm the newest member. Dear old Ferdinand, I'm very fond of him," says Russell Beale himself, who adds, perhaps speaking for the casual viewer. "But I'm still slightly confused by the plot."
Season two of Penny Dreadful begins on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday 5 May at 10pm
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