Anna Maxwell Martin: in the habit of a fundamentalist

The Times
Published: February 10, 2010
Author: Lucy Powell 

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Anna Maxwell Martin strides into the office of the Almeida Theatre and stops short, her expressive face momentarily frozen. “Ahhhhh!” she exclaims, one long, comically plaintive note. “I’m going to have a nervous breakdown in this interview. How embarrassing.” She’s staring at the Almeida’s array of theatre awards, which decorate every available inch of wall in the office.

But the 31-year-old actress, fizzing with energy, lollipop thin in her black and white stripy top and outsize baggy jeans, has little reason to be daunted. While still at Lamda she was cast in a renowned production of The Little Foxes at the Donmar. Then she spearheaded Nicholas Hytner’s brave new National, playing the 12-year-old Lyra in a landmark 2004 production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. But to most, Maxwell Martin remains Esther Summerson, the sad, secretive soul at the heart of the BBC’s lavish series of Bleak House, a role that won her a Bafta in 2005.

Now she’s to play Isabella, Shakespeare’s feistiest nun, who in Measure for Measure is given an Elizabethan indecent proposal. She’s asked to sleep with Angelo (Rory Kinnear), a deceptive deputy standing in for the Duke of Vienna, to save the life of her beloved, condemned brother. Given the choice, she’d rather see him hanged.

“I slightly panicked beforehand,” Maxwell Martin says, “thinking, oh shit, oh Shakespeare, I can’t do it! But the play is so endlessly fascinating, and I just love Isabella. She’s desperately trying to be all calm and measured and nun-like, but she can’t stop these incredible outbursts. She goes completely nuts.”

It’s not, then, the pure-hearted, long-suffering Esther of Bleak House that Maxwell Martin will draw on for this, her first proper Shakespeare part. It’s the elusive, deeply troubled N, from Poppy Shakespeare. “I had more fun doing that than anything else I’ve ever done,” she says, of Channel 4’s kooky adaptation of Clare Allan’s novel about her experiences as a psychiatric patient, which won Maxwell Martin her second Bafta last year. “I loved the fact that N was such an enigma: was she good or evil, was she mentally ill or not? My best friend called me up and said: ‘That’s the nearest you’ve ever been to playing yourself.’ ”

She’s entertaining if slightly nervy company, but she says that growing up in Beverly, East Yorkshire, the child of two “ridiculously intelligent” scientists, she felt like a misfit. “I’ve always been the ugly, funny one. It makes me massively uncomfortable to sit in a trailer while someone attempts to make me look beautiful. I always think, ‘oh God, will they manage it?’”

She alternates between stage and screen work, though she says she’s a surer hit on telly. “I’ve had some hideous press in theatre, for Cabaret”(Rufus Norris’s 2006 West End revival, which thoroughly divided the critics). She can now laugh at the memory, “I used to be obsessive and intense about my work,” she says, “but I’ve calmed down since I had my daughter.”

Maggie, now nine months, is her first child with 53-year-old Roger Michell, who first directed her in Honour at the National in 2003, and with whom she lives in North London. For most of the pregnancy Michell was in America, directing a £35 million comedy starring Diane Keaton, Harrison Ford and 50 Cent. When her waters broke, she called Michell, sure that he would miss the birth. “Luckily, I had a three-day labour, so he got back in loads of time. Then he had to go again. I made him do it, I was like: ‘Go! Have your freedom! Make your huge film in America!’ it was like something out of Braveheart.”

Once he’d gone, it was less Hollywood, more Mike Leigh. “Horrible horrible,” she says of the solitary early days, “but then I got a grip. We’ve been blessed with an amazing baby. Maggie sleeps perfectly, though I did train her to do that to within an inch of her life. It was a bit like Hitler Youth in our house for a while there.”

Now, it’s as close to bliss as Maxwell Martin’s constant irony is capable of conveying. She quips in flatcap Yorkshire brogue that she’d want to get married in a church, though she can’t say she will since, “you gotta let the man ask, love”. She’s keen, though, to get Maggie christened, and deeply sad that her father, who died of cancer in 2003, never met her.

“I’m having a bit of a funny time, thinking about religion and spiritual things at the moment,” she says. It’s about “trying to work out what you believe and what that actually means. I don’t think I’ll ever settle on one thing definitively”. Should the acting dry up, she says she’d very happily do a masters in theology. “It’s just incredibly, incredibly fascinating to me.” The more she talks, the more tantalising is the prospect of her playing Isabella, Shakespeare’s most spiritually confused, emotionally volatile, odd and brittle heroine.