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– May 10 | ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’ FYC Event In Los Angeles
After starring as Game Of Thrones’ fiery Margaery Tyrell and rebel Cressida in the Hunger Games franchise, it’s safe to say actress Natalie Dormer has proven to be quite the on-screen chameleon. So it’s hardly a surprise that her new role in BBC2’s adaptation of Picnic At Hanging Rock – based on Australian writer Joan Lindsay’s 1967 mystery novel of the same name – was offered to her outright.
“The reason I took the role is that [the show’s director] Larysa Kondracki wrote to me and said, ‘I need an actress who can be terrifying but also bring vulnerability. I think you can do that,’” Natalie, 36, explains.
Natalie stars as Hester Appleyard – a draconian headteacher who has fled her enigmatic past to start afresh in Australia. But when a group of girls from her boarding school go missing under mysterious circumstances during a picnic at Hanging Rock, everyone else’s lives begin to unravel – and her past catches up with her.
Natalie explains: “She’s run away from a past life and constructed herself as something else. But when a massive tragedy, like the girls’ disappearance happens, you realise how flimsy that is.
It’s like Joan Lindsay herself said about the novel; it’s like dropping a stone into a pond and watching the rippling effect, as everyone becomes destabilised.
“Hester certainly becomes destabilised – and that’s fun to play, someone losing their mind. That’s Hamlet, that’s Blanche DuBois – that’s a gift as an actor.”
“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.
“Good storytelling is genderless,” says the Picnic at Hanging Rock actress.
Natalie Dormer has insisted that male viewers shouldn’t feel excluded by female-fronted TV and film projects, like her new series Picnic at Hanging Rock.
BBC Two’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel features a female-led cast and had a female writer, with four out of the six episodes also directed by women.
“It has a different tone via osmosis, by being female-led,” Dormer told press, including Digital Spy, of the story of three adolescent girls and their governess, who mysteriously go missing in the Australian bush in 1900.
“God, it’s overdue to see that sort of storytelling, isn’t it? And to see sex and sexuality through a female gaze – female producers, writers, directors – as opposed to it coming through a male gaze. So for me, for that reason alone, it’s refreshing.
“But it’s still just, at its core, great storytelling, and should interest either gender or any of the sexualities or whatever your preferences in life are.
“I think we’re in an evolution at the moment where hopefully, in ten years’ time, this will all be so much more irrelevant, because it will naturally be happening – the parity or the quality of what stories we see in gender, in front of and behind the camera.
“Sexuality, ethnicity – hopefully we won’t need to talk about it so much in the future.”
Dormer – who plays Hester Appleyard, the enigmatic Headmistress of Appleyard College, in Picnic at Hanging Rock – insisted that “good storytelling is genderless”.
“It’s [just] good storytelling. It’s about humanity,” she said. “So, whatever you are.
“I wouldn’t want to say anything that ostracises a male audience. Because, if I can sit down and watch a hardcore Vietnam War film and enjoy it, then I expect my brother or best male friends to be able to sit down and enjoy Picnic.”
Picnic at Hanging Rock was originally published in 1967, with its surprising climax (no spoilers here!) sparking much discussion and analysis. The story, according to Dormer, “refuses, almost, to be contained as one genre”.
“Larysa [Kondracki, directors of episodes 1-3] calls it an enchanted chiller,” she said. “It has elements of psychological thriller, verging maybe on horror in some places. There’s really strong comedy in places.
“There’s romance in there. There’s adventure. There is a mystery that fundamentally is the anchor of the story. And that is what I appreciate of it, and hopefully different demographics will respond to that. It has this ability to morph as you watch it, which again, I think is just a testament to very strong writing.”
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