After being frustrated with the limited roles she was being offered, the actress co-wrote her new film with her partner Anthony Byrne.
In an Earl’s Court apartment block hallway, Natalie Dormer gestures for me to sit down. “Get yourself over to the stairs,” she smiles, “the red Hitchcockian stairs.”
The film she is shooting is In Darkness, a contemporary thriller – as if her nod to Hitchcock hadn’t already given that away – about a pianist named Sofia. Played by Dormer, the visually impaired Sofia gets entangled in a murder case when her upstairs neighbour is killed.
Today’s scene sees Dormer fumbling her way into the building’s lift, white cane in hand, with the creepy Marc (played by Ed Skrein) – who may or may not be the killer – in pursuit.
Dormer, the fiercely intelligent and striking-looking 36-year-old, who rose to fame on The Tudors and Game of Thrones, has spent days with people at the Royal National Institute for the Blind, getting “a crash course in visual impairment” to help perfect her character.
Intriguingly, Dormer is also the co-writer of In Darkness, scripting it with the director – and her off-screen partner – Anthony Byrne.
“There was a drought of intelligent thrillers when we started writing this seven years ago,” she says, when we retire upstairs to chat, sitting at the dining room table on the set of Sofia’s apartment.
“You’re a woman. You’re a sensual creature are you not?” demands Natalie Dormer, fierce blue eyes narrowing. You could imagine Dormer delivering the line as shrewd seductress Margaery Tyrell in Game Of Thrones, or The Tudors’ Anne Boleyn, but here, she’s saying it to an interviewer in an EastEnders-themed room of BBC Broadcasting House. (There’s a replica of the Queen Vic pub sign hanging above the door.)
Dormer has just been asked about the surprising erotic voyeurism in Picnic At Hanging Rock, a six-part adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel about the disappearance of a group of Australian schoolgirls at the turn of the nineteeth century. Adapted by playwright Beatrix Christian and showrun by director Larysa Kondracki, it’s a story largely about women, largely told by women. Why should that fact make the eroticism surprising? Dormer fires back “Why can’t a female story be erotic and sensual?”
“God, it’s overdue to see that sort of storytelling, isn’t it? To see sex and sexuality through a female gaze—female producers, directors, writers—as opposed to coming from a male gaze. For me, for that reason alone, it’s refreshing.”
“We all,” Dormer looks around the room at her half a dozen interviewers, all women save for one man, “all but one” she corrects with a laugh, “—you gentlemen have your own version of it—can remember what it is to be an adolescent girl grappling with puberty and the intensity of the bodily changes and the emotional changes… if you put young pubescent girls, with their hormones going everywhere, in a contained space, that is the reality of the situation.”
Dormer is keen not to put too much significance on Picnic At Hanging Rock being led by writers and directors who are women. On the press circuit for the show here in the UK, in the US and Australia, the focus on its gender provenance has obviously become something of an irritant.
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