Empire Magazine - October 1998

Northern Exposure

There was that “kiss” and that much discussed “break-up” but now Anna Friel, star of The Land Girls, only wants to be known as a movie actress. Okay?. Treading carefully: Ian Nathan. Photographs: Julian Broad.

Down on an ancient Devon farmyard humming with the natural scent of “the great outdoors”, Anna Friel is sharing a private giggle with fellow Land Girl Rachel Weisz and throwing Empire suspicious glances. Empire , in turn, wonders if it has had the word “journo” tattooed on its forehead.

After a morning of schlepping ankle deep through wellie-tugging mud and watching the wartime romantic shenanigans of three land girls – the city girls sent to rural communities to work the land in lieu of absent sons – at the behest of director David Leland, the time for introductions finally arrives. Friel is polite and reserved, while looking sheepishly at her mud-stippled galoshes. She plays Prue, the sexually uninhibited member of the trio (alongside Wesiz and Catherine McCormack) but heading for the emotional biteback only a wartime romance could deliver.

“It’s a great, a great script, I’m really enjoying it”, she allows, after granting leave to enter her trailer for a chat. There was a moment of journalistic panic as Empire opened the door to gauge entry, and Friel appeared to be standing in the limited confines stark naked and totally unperturbed. A second to focus and it is obvious she is wearing the skin-coloured body-wrap to keep out a night shoots chill.

The conversation is initially stilted, Friel uncomfortable in the to-ing and fro-ing of chatter about the movie. Then – boom! – she sets her stall out.

How does Anna Friel feel about the press and about this whole interview process ?, we enquire innocently. She looks Empire dead in the eye.

“I feel like you want me to prove myself”, she says intently.

Gulp. Well, no. We really just want you to be honest with us.

Anna Friel – it is evident – is unwilling to take any more crap.

Over a year later, as the movie calendar would have it, and the air of a swish London restaurant is clear of overpowering aromas. Flush from the photo shoot, Friel is a treasure trove of smiles, much more at ease away from the workzone atmos of a busy set, happily aware of the ground we are both now sat upon. Star and journalist. Conversation is easier. Once you have earned Friel’s trust, she sticks by you.

The new world of Anna Friel, post-Brooky limelight, tabloid victim and proto UK babe, features regular trips to Los Angeles to meet the key players, hot directors and casting agents who’ll point her in the direction of the acting career she dearly desires. And it has been going well. She has played wife to Ewan McGregor’s Nick Leeson in Rogue Trader; upped the corset-profile (and garnered goof notices) in realism-dunked Dickens’ serial Our Mutual Friend, and seen her long-gestating (and overwrought) sect and sex drama The Tribe (including the tattle-charge of frontal) finally turn up on the Beeb. There’s the Moscow-set The Stringer and Irish-set St Ives also in the can, and after a week of The Land Girls press, she will hotfoot it back to Tuscany to complete shooting on a glamorous new production of A Midsummer Nights Dream with Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline. All that, and the much tabloidised split from dayglo TV rumbody Darren Day and a romantic dalliance with pop supernova and reformed wild boy Robbie Williams.

The 22-year-old girl from Rochdale is successfully fighting her way free of an unfortunate littoral zone; where to get the work, to do the stuff that counts, to act – this ready-wrapped celebrity-icon thing has to go. Not that she asked for it. It just sort of happened, a curious twist in the scriptwriters’ musings, and she was p[laying a lesbian and the chattering classes couldn’t get enough. Anna Friel had been transformed from attractive cast member to poster-girl for the savvy generation. Despite a regular flirtation with the gossip-mongers of Fleet Street, the one label she cannot stomach is “former soap star”. Brookside ? Lesbian snogging ? Come now, things have moved on. She took her leave from the Scouser soap three years ago, having joined from RADA at the age of 16, and after relocating to London, taking some time out for R and R, put the movie career on the fast-track. And off it went. Powered by a motherlode of grit and determination, Anna Friel is in control, heeding not the delicate measures of PR restraint, but the calls of her own Northern lass value system.

The future, she knows, ain’t waiting for no one. And she’s just got back from a reading with David Fincher and Brad Pitt in LA.

“Now it’s down to me and Helena Bonham-Carter”, she says, unable to bridle the sheer excitement of the idea. “It’s called The Fight Club, and it’s basically gong to be down to whether he wants a younger version of the character or an older one. I spent the day working with Brad Pitt”.

She certainly seems to have upped the ante on her career

”Yeah. It’s my time, I might as well strike while the iron’s hot. And if it means me doing lots of work and not having very much break, fine. As long as I’ve got the energy for it; as long as I pace myself.”

The new Anna Friel is a formidable enterprise. She edits her own website, replying personally – when she gets a moment – to some of the thousands of electronic callers. She casually drops names into the conversation – Robbie, Noel, Brad. She likes to call the shots on the people who work with her on photo shoots. Yet the shrewd honesty that was so evident back in gloomy Devon is still on show. There are still details and questions Friel will pull you up on. Ask her if she’s going to Hollywood and she’ll verbally wrap you r wrists over the shortcomings of the query.

“You don’t go to Hollywood”, she chides. “As an actress, you work in as many different countries as possible and play as many different characters. Something that I want to do are some of the bigger movies, which are gonna be more commercial. It means I can break free from being a nationally successful actress to become an internationally successful one. Unfortunately, because of all the moneybackers and things, you need to do films that are commercially successful and they’re not always the best scripts”.

In Hollywood, though, the reality is that you have to be a commodity of some sort. The next Winona Ryder, the next Kate Winslet, and, then, if it works, a few years down the line there will come the next Anna Friel.

“Yeah, and they also want people to go and do the screen test. I’m always asked by directors to go and do a screen-test. And you have to be there in order for them to see you and to know you. But this time, going back to America was so different from the last time because everybody knows what I’ve done and they’re excited about me. So, it means I am getting to meet higher people and getting taken a lot more seriously.”

However, Friel doesn’t buy into the fraught narcissistic lifestyle of LA. There is an air of wariness to her whole approach to the “place you have to be”.

“It can be the loneliest place ever,” she says, thoughtfully. “And I love culture and I love history and it’s not the right place for that, it doesn’t offer any culture or history”.

Warmed up on the subject she begins to free-form an LA critique. Chastising the back-to-front ethics (“It’s all about money – money, money, money, money. It’s like acting comes third or fourth in the list”), smirking about the body obsession…

“In Rome, where we’re shooting, the Americans all go to the gym. All the time. People don’t drink, they’re very calorie conscious”. She adopts an exaggerated Californian squeal. “ ‘Oh my God, you’re eating carbohydrates and it’s like nine o’clock at night!’. I don’t want to have my life enforced by these rules and there are so many games that are played there – about what you can say and can’t say”.

She pauses for a beat.

“But it’s a place where everything happens”.

And even though her agent berates her to set up home in the smog-bound supercity, Friel remains tied to her homeland. Is it that deep down she loves England too much?

“I love the familiarity of it. I do love my security. Whenever I land back in England I go “Oh my God, there we go, I feel all safe now’.”

Sadly, it will turn out that Fincher opts for the older leading lady and signs up the increasingly ubiquitous Bonham Carter. Still, for Friel there is no question of taking a break; after completing Midsummer, she will instead go onto Mad Cows, based on the renowned Kathy Lette book.

“I’m happiest when I am working”, she says in all earnestness. “I think while I have got the energy, I can do three or four films a year. I’m reading scripts all the time”.

Is she not worried about overkill ?

“You should only be wary of it if you can’t deliver the same standard of performances. I would know if I was getting too tired and then I would take a break. Or the other reason I would take a break is if there wasn’t a script I was passionate about; I won’t work for the sake of working”.

This is the new Anna Friel ethic. She is determined whatever fame may come, it is due payment for work rendered.. We are to know her as Anna the actress, not (ex) soap queen or (ex) victim of some tawdry media-centric love triangle. The time is right, the future is now and, scorners be damned, she’ll do it. What, though, could be the worst decision she could make right now ?

“The obvious things are other lesbian parts. Or things that they only want me to do because people will watch it if I’m in it – things that you’re naked in all the time. I’ll tell you what the worst thing is – the girl on the arm, when you’re just there for the man. Now that bores me.”

She leans forward for emphasis.

“I’ve been offered the chance now actually, it’s really funny. I’ve been talking to Rachel (Weisz) about it, to set up my own film company. You know how Ewan (McGregor) has Natural Nylon, but it’s all for men, all the parts are for guys. I want something that’s for women but feminism, not Girl Power.”

Fired by enthusiasm Friel describes a perfect state in which she develops projects for everyone here and in America. In TV and film. Everything. It sounds, to be honest, a little fanciful. But then this lady is not for turning.