Lucy Powell wrote for the TimesOnline on March 27, 2010 wrote:From The Times
March 27, 2010
Jodhi May on losing herself in Mark Haddon's debut play, Polar Bears
Jodhi May is losing herself in the celebrated author’s debut play
Lucy Powell
Jodhi May is squirming in discomfort, minutes after we’ve met. She’s attempting, without giving away its secrets, to describe her part in the first play from Mark Haddon, who shot to fame with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a startlingly original novel told through the eyes of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome.
Polar Bears stalks similar terrain. It’s the story of Kay, a woman with a mental health disorder, possibly bi-polar (“You can’t say that,” May yelps), who either disappears of her own volition or is murdered (“You definitely can’t say that,” she insists). In non-chronological order, seasoned with off-kilter comedy, Haddon’s play charts the events leading up to her disappearance.
I learnt none of this from May herself but from her director, the much-lauded Jamie Lloyd, and from Haddon himself. May, Haddon says, “is the most extraordinary actress. She physically turns into other people when she acts. There’s this limitless plasticity to her.” Lloyd adds: “I don’t know how she does it but she’s able to turn on any emotional thought you want, instantly; she mines the grubbier aspects of the psyche brilliantly.”
This last has been proved time and again. Aged 18, she starred with Joely Richardson in Nancy Meckler’s Sister my Sister as the incestuous, murderous Papin siblings in 1930s France. In 2005 she was in the premiere of David Harrower’s Blackbird, a deeply disturbing two-hander in which her adult character revisits a man she had a sexual relationship with when she was 12. And in a new BBC drama out this month from Guy Hibbert, Blood and Oil, she plays Claire Unwin, the wildly distressed wife of an oil company employee taken hostage in the Niger Delta.
So how does she do it? “I don’t know,” 34-year-old May says simply. “I get myopically obsessed in this strange little world that I disappear into. It is a mystery and I think it should stay a mystery, to yourself as well. I never went to drama school, so I never analysed how any of it works and I really don’t want to. You just have to plunge in and if it works, good. If not, try again.”
So far, in a 22-year career, she’s worked with the auteur-directors Peters Stein and Brook, cinematic icon Peter Greenaway and TV guru Stephen Poliakoff. It was Poliakoff who finally persuaded her to buy a television in 2007. And if she still doesn’t watch it much, she’s on it constantly. Last year she played a velvet-voiced Miss Taylor to Romola Garai’s eponymous Emma in the flagship BBC production.
Yet however ubiquitous she might be, May is one of those actors you would walk past on the street. She’s dressed top-to-toe in washed-out denim when we meet, her long, light brown hair in a scruffy pony tail, her intent, concentrated face scrubbed clean of make-up. She’s breezy, down-to-earth good company. But ask why she’s drawn to such dark, disturbing material and she bristles: “I think those films and plays raise important issues. I am perhaps in a minority, but I’m not going to apologise for it. I’m proud of it.” She adds tartly: “I didn’t start out doing Disney, the first film I did was serious drama.”
That was Chris Menges’ A World Apart, in which May played the South African daughter of an ostracised anti-apartheid campaigner. With no prior interest in acting, she was spotted by the casting director Susie Figgis, plucked from state school obscurity in Camden, North London, and transported to Zimbabwe, where she lived for three months with an African family and attended a local school. The role won her the coveted Cannes Best Actress award when she was 12, and she remains its youngest recipient.
May’s mother was a French art teacher who had separated from her German father and had no further contact with him. Her main childhood influence was her godfather, the French film producer Alain Poiré, who produced Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. The bilingual May “grew up surrounded by his extraordinary library, films like The World of Apu and all these Fellinis. My godfather gave me my passion for film.”
Acting proved a revelation. “I don’t come from a financially privileged background,” she says, “we had very little money,” and suddenly a touch of cockney is audible in her RP accent. “I’ve been in state school education my whole life. Acting gave me the confidence to step outside, out of all the labels people give you because of what you sound like and where you come from.”
Her next film was Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis, which she filmed during school holidays. Giving up acting completely during her A levels, May then read English at Oxford: “It was very important to me that I do that,” she says. “It wasn’t expected of me at all and it was an extremely hard-won achievement.
“We have a tendency in this country to put people in little boxes and, you know, I just can’t bear that. I don’t want to be in any kind of box, ever. I don’t want people to know too much about me, because I never want them to say, ‘She’s that kind of person, from that kind of background, she’ll play that kind of part’.”
This explains her reputation for being a fierce defender of her privacy. “Acting is all about imagination,” she says. “I’m not channelling my own experiences. That would be mind-numbing to watch.”
Today, May is happy to be thought of as an outsider, “desperately old-fashioned and boring”, completely uninterested in self-analysis or self-promotion and, thanks to her European cinematic heritage, entirely immune to the lure of Hollywood. “America has never been some kind of holy grail for me,” she says, “it’s very, very commercial there; there just isn’t the same degree of freedom to carve your own path.”
She grudgingly admits to a long cherished desire to direct films, like her godfather, citing the German film-maker Michael Haneke as her chief inspiration. Her first directorial attempt was in 2002, a short based on a Raymond Carver story. Her debut feature is “not quite in process” yet. She still lives in North London and ... “Yes! All right, I have a f***ing boyfriend” — not in the arts — “and I’m ecstatic, OK?” She laughs. “God. I can’t believe you got that out of me.”
May tucks her long legs underneath her, sits on her hands and hangs her head in dismay. However hard you argue to the contrary, she remains convinced that the mysterious, transformative magic of acting, which she’s been artlessly, unthinkingly conjuring since she was 12, might abandon her if she probes too hard or reveals too much: “I can be this ordinary, working-class woman one minute in Blood and Oil, and then this huge enigma of Kay in Polar Bears the next. If I want to keep doing that, I have to stay out of those boxes in people’s minds. If that makes me seem difficult, so be it.” She adds: “I don’t want to be famous. I never did. I want to be good. When I act I want to disappear completely, leaving no discernible traces behind, every single time.”
Polar Bears, Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (http://www.donmarwarehouse.com 0844 8717624
I would think people might have some comments about this one.
Katy
I was all set to post this article. I enjoyed JM's comments about how she 'inhabits' the characters she plays. Of course, those of us who've followed her career have pretty much known for some time how she approaches each role. It was nice to see her vocalize it again, but outside of that, the article covered a lot of ground that we've come to know well over the years.
*That* quickly shut down any further discussion on that subject! 
