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[title]In her ideal world, Denise Gough would simply have never stopped playing the role of Emma, the booze and drugs-addled protagonist of Duncan Macmillan’s ‘People, Places and Things’.
And indeed, for three years the Irish actress pushed on with the part that saved her career, won her an Olivier and established her as one of the all-time stage greats, from its incendiary debut at the National Theatre in 2015 to an acclaimed off-Broadway run in 2017.
But eventually the realities of an abrupt mid-thirties switch from skint actor to nascent national treasure caught up with her. She was alternating runs of ‘People, Places and Things’ with her next stage role, one of the leads in the National Theatre’s gargantuan revival of Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’. And TV was suddenly interested. Toss in one pandemic, and seven years have gone by.
‘I had hoped that we would go to Broadway,’ she says at the end of a long day of rehearsals for Jeremy Herrin’s production, which is finally returning to blow away a new generation. ‘But then “Angels in America” went to Broadway. And then the pandemic happened. In the pandemic, I was like: maybe we could do it online? When they finally suggested we do it again in London and I was like: yes, I don't care where.’
The appeal to her is both returning to the colossal role of Emma, the capricious, cynical, unreliable narrator actress who reluctantly enters rehab, and working again with Macmillan and director Jeremy Herrin: ‘that rehearsal room is the safest and most joyful room I've ever been in’.
Gruelling as it is to perform – she freely admits to being knackered – it’s clear that this play has been a source of great happiness to her in a career defined by dizzying highs and hard knocks.
Now in her mid-forties, she became a critics’ darling in her early thirties with her turn in the Lyric Hammersmith’s furiously intense revival of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Desire Under the Elms’ – the Theatre Critics’ Circle gave her its best newcomer award in 2012 (about ten years into her career). Not long after that, stage work abruptly dried up: she went back to waitressing, had a terrible time, and was only kept afloat financially after she did the voice for Yennefer, one of the main characters in the enormously successful computer game ‘The Witcher III’.
‘I got a new voice agent,’ she says, ‘and I got this video game and I didn’t know what I was making at all. I haven’t played a video game since “Prince of Persia”. I just knew the people were really nice and it meant that I didn't have to be a waitress. And then every job I did on TV after that it was always the boys from the sound department who would come up to me and go: are you Yennefer? And I’m like, who’s Jennifer?’
TV has been a mixed bag for her (‘I’ve said yes a bit too quickly to certain things that weren’t ready’), but it pays a lot better. Her quality control hasn’t been terrible at all. But as somebody who was virtually destitute ten years ago, she’s delightfully blunt about taking jobs for the money.
‘I wanted financial security,’ she says. ‘And I finally believed I was worthy of having financial security. And so I allowed myself to focus on doing work that was going to allow me to buy a home. It was very important for me to have a home, and now I have it. So every night when I go home from doing this play, I’m going home to the home that this play bought me because it allowed me to earn the TV money that paid for it. Without this play, I wouldn't have that house.’
I’ve said yes a bit too quickly to certain things that weren’t ready
In a different world we might not be having this conversation, because one of those things Gough said yes to was seven seasons of a big budget ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel called ‘Bloodmoon’. She was in the $30m pilot, which was unceremoniously canned by HBO; Gough has previously described the experience of shooting the show as ‘wonderful’ but acknowledged that artistically ‘it did not go well’.
Today she sees its failure as a turning point for her: the idea of committing to seven years of anything ‘feels like a lot. So when the pilot wasn't picked up, I sort of felt like, OK, great.’
In fact, where one door closed, another opened, as escaping from ‘Bloodmoon’ allowed her to enter the Star Wars universe. She plays Dedra Meero, the extremely complicated bureaucrat antagonist of Tony Gilroy’s wildly acclaimed TV show ‘Andor’. Probably the most critically adored entry in the entire Star Wars canon, it’s a serious, provocative adult drama about life under a totalitarian regime that eschews the mysticism of the rest of the Star Wars universe.
She is wholly effusive about the show and Gilroy, who set his sights on casting her after seeing ‘People, Places and Things’.
‘I was asked to meet [him],’ she recalls. ‘And I didn't really know anything about this man but of course I looked him up and he comes from such serious writing: “Michael Clayton” and the Bourne films.
’I was like, I don't really watch “Star Wars”, it’s not my thing. And he was like, That's great. I'm really glad. And then I said, can I read any of it? Now, bear in mind, you're never allowed to read anything. You can’t even read the scripts you're in. It's so insulting because they think you're going to tell everyone. And he sent me the first three scripts without any questions asked. And I thought: this is really good writing, like I don't care where it’s set.’
She says the penny only dropped for her that the finished show was actually incredibly good when she was doing publicity for season one and her interviewers were all incredibly enthusiastic. A bemused Gilroy asked her if she’d actually watched it; she confessed the fiddly streaming access had put her off; Gilroy made her watch it; she got it.
She’s close-mouthed about the second series (which has wrapped), and is content to remain blissfully ignorant about when it’ll actually appear (probably next year FYI). And that’s it for her and franchises for now – ‘Andor’ was originally due to run for five seasons but that got revised to two after Gilroy realised how long it actually took to make.
For now Gough’s life is defined by a return to her happy place, ie this play. She’s conscious that she probably won’t be able to bring it back again – she doesn’t think it works if Emma is aged up beyond her late thirties, which Gough can still carry off, but only for so long.
With no TV shops having a hold on her and the house now bought, she’s simply enjoying being a free agent. She thinks she’ll do more theatre now, having done very little for the last seven years. But mostly she wants to work with people she likes, on stuff she thinks is good: ‘If I could just work with Tony Gilroy and Jeremy Herrin for the rest of my life, that would be great’.