Anderson has gone remarkable places, playing characters far-flung in time, location, and temperament. Beyond lighting up adaptations of novels by Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, and Wharton, the feminist actor, activist, and author has most recently played a sex therapist on the comic drama Sex Education and riveted us on The Crown as the controversial British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. There’s often a steely elegance to Anderson’s characters; Fiona Apple was so struck by the self-possessed way she delivered one seemingly throwaway line as a lead detective in BBC2’s psychological thriller The Fall that she borrowed it for the title of her latest album. Upon discovering a serial killer’s hiding place and anticipating horrors inside, Anderson coolly directs a burly male police officer to “fetch the bolt cutters.”
There have been some far reaches in her career, Anderson concedes. “Blanche DuBois certainly took me to a psychological precipice,” she says of 2014’s Young Vic coproduction of A Streetcar Named Desire. But she felt that even a part of DuBois resided inside her. (Asked which part, she demurs: “Now you’re getting into Daily Mail territory.”) Portraying Thatcher, she says, was the most technically difficult performance of her career, not that that stopped her: “When you take risks, there is a possibility that you will humiliate yourself and fall flat on your face. I knew I was going to throw everything at it, and if people reacted by saying what a car crash it is, I would just have to deal with that and maybe go to bed for a month.”
Anderson knew the series as both a viewer and the then partner of The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan. But after immersing herself in Thatcher’s life, she was slightly disappointed to see that the scripts did not devote more time to it. “Even though I knew the show is not really about the prime minister—it’s about the queen and the other royals and the crown—there was still a moment of, Oh, it’s just these bits? The challenge was to make sure that enough of what I felt were important elements of her whole self were able to come through.”
Finding the Iron Lady’s deep, distinctive timbre was only one hurdle. Anderson read avidly about Thatcher’s upbringing, listened to endless recordings, and contorted herself into Thatcher’s peculiar posture. “She had quite a wide stance and her weight was very much on the balls of her feet, with one foot slightly pigeon-toed,” she says. “She took very short steps, walked quite quickly and ahead of people, including presidents of other countries. She led the way with her chin or forehead. But she was also slightly slumped in the middle—her shoulders back, her breasts close to her navel, and her pelvis tilted up. It’s one thing to get that right,” Anderson concludes with a laugh, “but then it’s another to be able to remember all of that with the voice.” Thatcher, she says, “took a breath midsentence rather than at the end of a false stop, because if she did that, someone could come in and cut her off.”
Anderson has already won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for playing Thatcher, and the late P.M.’s own biographer, Charles Moore, has described the portrayal as “the only convincing” depiction he’s seen. After closing out her season-long arc on The Crown, she returned to Sex Education—and found her inner Thatcher still fighting for dominance. “There were definitely a couple of scenes where I had to say to the director, ‘Maggie showed up a few lines there. You may not have been able to tell, but I could tell, and I need to do another take.’ ”
Photos and text: Vanity Fair