Empire - November 1999
Anna FrielBroadway acclaim, non-stop work and now the lead in feisty feminist comedy Mad Cows, Brookie is long gone.....
Not many actors escape soapland. Probably because most of them aren't much cop. But even those who make it can find the sudsy, small screen shackles difficult to slip. Natalie Imbruglia managed it, and so did Kylie for a while - but they both segued into musical careers. With Guy Pearce heading a very short list of successful crossovers, it's clear that maintaining the acting trajectory is a much trickier prospect.
Especially when the one thing people are fixating on, out of 48 months of hard toil in a small Liverpudlian cul-de-sac, is a spot of spit-swappage with another girl. But, four years after Brookside, Anna Friel has finally put Beth Jordache firmly behind her.
Three-hander The Land Girls - with Catherine McCormack and Rachel Weisz offered the benefit of Brit-femme solidarity, so no individual had to carry the can. Rogue Trader was a smaller project shouldered squarely by Ewan McGregor (although Friel's turn was sympathetic and unshowy), and even the much higher profile A Midsummer Night's Dream in which she shows well and mud-wrestles with Calista Flockhart - offered the security of a serious ensemble cast. Then came that stint on Broadnvay in Closer, Patrick Marber's razor-sharp play about modern relationships, some very fine notices indeed and rumours of a predatory nature involving Jack Nicholson. But with Sara Sugarman's adaptation of Australian author Kathy Lette's best-seller Mad Cows, Friel is centre-stage in a movie for the first time.
`It's the most extraordinary experience I think I've ever had in my life," she enthuses, putting paid to any ideas that, for Friel, this break is less than it's cracked up to be. And, ironically, her soap opera schooling in breakneck schedules and last-minute script changes served her well.
"I wouldn't change it for the world, but it's tiredness like I've never known," she says between takes, flame-haired, heavily made-up and playing with a breast pump (don't ask). "Things are changed at the last minute, there's lots of improvisation, and I'm in every scene of the day - there's no chance of wandering back to your van for an hour. But that's good, it's the first film I've had to carry and that's what I want to do - see whether I can take a character from beginning to end."
She could, frankly, have chosen an easier one. Comic capers are never the easiest to pull off, and Lette's hapless heroine Maddy, a single mum at large in London, is ripe wirh the author's frenzied scattiness, not to mention her nationality. Such is Sugarman's confidence in Friel, however, the antipodean aspect was barely an issue.
"Well, they saw lots of Australian accresses first of all, but I never read a scene," Friel says, wirh a satistied grin. "I was with Sara for two and a half hours and went home, and half an hour later they called me and said, `We really want you to do it. The only thing is, wil you be abie to do an Australian accent?' I said yes, and she said, `Okay, I take your word for it."'
Sugarman agrees . . . "I was having trouble finding a person who was feisty - but very vulnerable and funny," she recalls. "I wanted to go with an Australian, but then Anna walked through the door and I thought, `If she can persuade me that she's an Australian then she's brilliant for it."
She evidently did, and Friel's accent doesn't slip once, whether on camera or requesting a cigarette from the crew.
"I know the character so well, I'm Maddy more than I'm Anna," she grimaces. "Without realising it almost, I've been staying in character all the time - and it pisses me right off, because you've got to be able to swirth it off or you go mad."
Madness seems to be a recurring theme, with a plot containing manhunting misadventures and co-stars ranging from Joanna Lumley to Mohammed Al Fayed. But Friel insists it's more than colourful fluff.
"It looks all silly and frothy, but when I saw the rushes it was much more dark," she says. "There's lots of fish-eye lenses and slow motion and special effects. So it's very bright and funny one minute, and the next minute you really feel for this character ."
In keeping with the aforementioned Anna / Maddy blurring, Friel concludes on an ambiguous note. "I thought I was the maddest," she says,"but I'm the sane one in this whole thing."
DARREN BIGNELL
Mad Cows is released on October 29 and will be reviewed next issue.