LIA WILLIAMS INTERVIEW: ‘PAULA VENNELLS IS NOT IMAGINATIVE ENOUGH TO BE EVIL’
When Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive, gave evidence last month during the ongoing inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal, among those paying particular attention was the actress Lia Williams. “I was keen to see if Paula’s tears were genuine,” she tells me. “And I do think they were. But so was her sense of denial. My assessment is that she is not imaginative enough to be evil. I think she is more shallow than malicious – and if she chose to dig deeper, she would probably fall apart.”
Williams has never met Vennells, but – having played the beleaguered executive in the recent ITV sensation Mr Bates vs the Post Office – she has spent more time than most imagining what it might be like to be her. The four-part series dramatised the staggering miscarriage of justice that saw hundreds of postmasters wrongly prosecuted under Vennells’s watch because of failures with the Post Office’s computerised accounting system, Horizon. It was watched by more than 13 million people and brought about actual change: the week after the final episode was broadcast, Rishi Sunak announced new legislation to exonerate those with wrongful convictions.
For Williams, the response to the drama shows that “it’s gone to the heart of Britishness… We feel about the Post Office the way we do the NHS. It’s a real community: it’s where we take the dog, have a chat. And then Vennells is given the job of turning it into a multimillion-pound business.”
All the same, finding her way into Vennells, who was CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, and is also an Anglican priest, was a challenge. “Because Vennells is so protected, surrounded by very powerful lawyers, the show’s writer, Gwyneth Hughes, was only able to base her dialogue on her emails and texts, although in the end that seemed to fit with Vennells’s corporate way of thinking. But I was also very keen not to play her as a hate figure. I don’t like witch-hunts.”
Williams and I are sitting in a rather funky flat above a recording studio in east London, where afterwards she will help record the soundscape for her slippery new play, Alma Mater, by the upcoming writer Kendall Feaver. An Oleanna for the 21st century, it examines a sexual-assault case in an unnamed Oxbridge-type college through multiple points of view, including, pivotally, that of Williams’s character, Jo Mulligan, the feminist firebrand college head. Jo’s politics have been shaped by the battles of the 1980s for equal pay and rights, and she instinctively dislikes the social media-engendered groupthink of much of today’s online feminism, which inevitably brings her into collision with the college’s student activists.
It’s a classic Williams role – a flawed, brilliant, morally ambiguous woman brought down by her own arrogance, even if the play takes pains to give equal weight to each side of the argument it presents. “Jo believes we are living in an age of victimhood,” says Williams – and I suspect Williams, who has a beguiling gentleness about her, does too, though she stops short of admitting it.
“I would love to have her courage. But to express that sort of conviction these days can be dangerous. Jo has failed to grasp that universities are run much more like businesses. The students are the clients, and teachers are struggling to find their footing. Jo didn’t get that quick enough and it brings her down.” She flashes an impish grin. “I’ve never taken to roles where women are put on a pedestal.”
She certainly hasn’t. One of Williams’s more intriguing television roles was that of the American socialite Wallis Simpson, whose scandalous love affair with Edward VIII forced the abdication crisis of 1936, and whom she played in the first and second series of The Crown, opposite Alex Jennings. “Both Alex and I believed in the love between them wholeheartedly,” she says. “I refuse to believe anyone who said Wallis was a monster. The Royal family were absolutely horrible to her, they completely cut her off, and she died terribly alone.” And while she says she doesn’t really follow “the Harry-Meghan thing”, she sees obvious parallels. “There has been a terrible racist, anti-American quality in the treatment of her,” she says. “I think we’ve behaved very badly towards her. But no one really likes an outsider, or someone a bit different. Particularly when they are a woman.”
If Williams, 59, lacks the public profile of peers such as Helena Bonham Carter or Gillian Anderson, it’s not for want of talent. Over the past three decades, she has built a formidable stage career on the back of intensely wrought performances, from Ibsen to Aeschylus via Muriel Spark’s immortal Jean Brodie – who is, as she points out, “another brilliant woman brought down by a student”. In 2016, she received some of the greatest reviews of her career for Robert Icke’s production of Mary Stuart, in which she and Juliet Stevenson alternated the roles of Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. Earlier in her career, she was mentored by a formidable succession of playwrights: Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter, with whom she worked nine times, and David Mamet.
“I come from a time when writers were gods,” she says. “My whole career is down to these writers. If I am to step into their imaginations, then I want to do it fully. For me, acting has always been about disappearing utterly into a role. And then disappearing back out of it. I am not interested in celebrity.”
In 1993, Williams originated the role of Carol in the British production of Mamet’s Oleanna, a two-hander about a sexual-harassment accusation on an American university campus that brilliantly anticipated today’s culture wars. Yet she says she was drawn to the play because, in the acting profession, “on a subconscious level, I was aware something wasn’t right. The industry was rife with misogyny. And as a young actress, you are in a world you don’t yet fully understand. I’m sure every actress on the planet can tell you about uncomfortable situations that you have to manage.”
She has a respectable career on television, too, picking up a 2005 TV Bafta nomination for the BBC film May 33rd, written by her ex-husband Guy Hibbert, and has just finished filming Sky’s adaptation of The Day of the Jackal, opposite Eddie Redmayne. A film career, though, has largely eluded her. “Film is harder to penetrate. But the problem is I’ve never taken to LA. I’ve never wanted to play that game. Anyway, to be honest, I think I’ve never been beautiful enough to play the leading role.”
This is obviously bananas: she has an elfin, fine-boned beauty. Not that Williams cares what people think of how she looks. “I enjoy my face getting older. Women are made to feel that ageing is awful, that you become invisible and look terrible. I don’t think it’s true. Honestly, I think we have been lied to by the patriarchy.”
These days, Williams lives in London with the actor Angus Wright, whom she met when they both appeared in Icke’s production of Oresteia in 2015. Joshua James, her son from a previous marriage, studied at Rada and has followed in his mother’s footsteps to become a fine actor in his own right. For Williams, the route to becoming a performer was less straightforward. She grew up in Birkenhead, “crashed her way” through her O-levels, then, at the age of 17, determined to be an actress, took herself off to London, where she signed up for a few acting classes. While there, she saw an advert for auditions at the Pineapple Studios in Covent Garden for a dance troupe in Benidorm.
“I thought, I’ll go for that,” she says. “I’d been stuck in an institution at boarding school. I wanted to dare myself to do something crazy.” So she auditioned for Paco, the guy who ran the troupe, “And he said, ‘You’re a bit flat-chested, but you’ll do.’ So I did six months in Benidorm. We were 50 dancing girls and five gay guys in a row, we had pineapples on our heads, all that sort of stuff. But I got my Equity card, and when I came back to London, I got asked to understudy in [the 1920s-set boarding-school comedy] Daisy Pulls It Off, in the West End.”
It’s an extraordinary story, I tell her. “It is – although for years I had a chip on my shoulder about having never gone to university or drama school. But Alan [Ayckbourn, with whom she first worked on The Revengers’ Comedies in 1991] said to me, ‘Comedy takes a certain kind of intelligence.’ So I’ve held onto that.”
Nevertheless, as if to compensate for the frivolity of her Benidorm beginnings, throughout her career she has tended towards an almost masochistic approach to choosing roles, opting for those parts most likely “to take bite-sized chunks” out of her. Recently, however, she’s begun thinking she could do with a bit more light relief, after all; if not quite a return to pineapples, then at least a step in that direction. “As I approach 60, I do wonder whether I need to keep taking on such complicated roles, particularly in the theatre,” she says. “I absolutely love comedy. And increasingly there is a voice in me saying, ‘Come on, relax, have some fun!’”
Alma Mater is at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (almeida.co.uk), until July 20
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