‘The flaws are the sexy bits’: Anne-Marie Duff on courage, curiosity and the rare gifts of ageing

Anne-Marie Duff was out for a walk on London’s Hampstead Heath, drinking an oat-milk latte (“Because I’m an actress!”) when suddenly she was surrounded by a group of men. They were red-faced runners in Lycra, “very affluent, very sophisticated middle-aged guys, and they stopped me on the path.” She was startled. Yes, she’s famous, having been familiar to British viewers ever since her breakthrough in Paul Abbott’s Shameless 20 years ago, but even so, hers has never been the “stop you for an autograph” kind of fame, more the discerning nod, the briefly clasped “thank you” hands. They wanted to talk to her, they said, “to ask what I thought about a friend of theirs. They were worried.”

Duff quickly understood. The men had seen the multi-award winning black comedy Bad Sisters, in which Duff’s character, Grace, is a victim of coercive abuse by “the Prick”, her husband, whose death haunts the series. Duff has explored abuse on screen before – she’s worked with Women’s Aid and played a woman escaping violence in Born Equal – but this is the first time, she says, that the work has resonated not just with women, but men, too. Posh men. “Men who were sweating all over me.” They gave examples of their friend’s abusive behaviour to his partner, “and I said, ‘Yeah, to be honest, that doesn’t sound great.’” She gave them some advice and suggested they encourage their wives to support their friend’s wife and went on her way. “Actually I felt sort of flattered, you know? Because it’s like, we nailed it. We did it properly.”

Duff, now 54, has been acting professionally since 1994, having first been encouraged to join a youth theatre by her parents, who thought it might help with her crippling shyness. They were a working-class Irish family in west London and, despite her suspicion that “people like me” didn’t become actors, she went on to study at the prestigious Drama Centre (known colloquially as the “trauma centre”, so rigorous were its methods). Decades of acclaim followed, culminating last year in a Bafta for her role in Bad Sisters.

The new series is typically dark and surprising. “It’s really extraordinary, in fact,” she says, “because, it has such a different smell, doesn’t it?” In the first series Grace was the object – widowed at the start, the story dragged us backwards into the weeds of her abusive marriage. Without giving too much away, in the new series she becomes the subject. Talking to co-star Fiona Shaw about the twist, “She was like, ‘Honey, you’re everywhere in the show…’” Her accent is impeccable. “‘Even when you’re not there, you’re everywhere.’”

She plays Grace with typical Duff-ian nuance and beauty. “Grace was an incredibly difficult part to play,” admits Sharon Horgan, the show’s creator. “But for Anne-Marie it was always about creating a fully believable atmosphere for the character. Then she’ll do anything. She’s incredible.”

“I had never played anybody that opaque before,” says Duff. “You know, that lost. I found it overwhelming, inhabiting that little soul, that lost wisp of a woman for that long. But I’m always up for telling stories about a section of society’s difficult reality. It’s important, isn’t it? Because if you do that well, the effect is profound.”

The only time she’s received a similar depth of response to that of Bad Sisters was when she played Joan of Arc on stage, and got letters from young Christian women battling with their faith. It’s a responsibility she takes seriously. She takes the work seriously. “This is the thing about life, your intentions are what is received. So if you take the issue seriously, people take you seriously. Or if you’re worried about certain things, then those things are what people will focus on. You know, gesture’s bigger than any sentence. That’s what it feels like to me.”

“What makes acting with Anne-Marie so enjoyable,” says Rory Kinnear, who starred opposite her in the National Theatre’s production of Macbeth, “is that, like all great actors, she always seems to exist completely in the moment. As if she’s saying the lines for the first time, as if, in fact, she’s only just thought of them to say.” She’s fearless, he says, with a preparedness to fail that only can come alongside a complete lack of personal vanity. “She is also one of the great laughers, and manages to imbue her work with such tenderness, depth and delicacy while refusing to ever take herself too seriously. She has magic in her.”

When directors approach Duff, what does she think they’re looking for? “I don’t know, pal. I’m not being disingenuous, I promise I’m not.” She thinks for a second. “I suppose I’m quite courageous? And I guess people like to have their shit taken seriously. It’s nice when someone can come in and go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to commit to this.’” She explains what that looks like, the act of taking a story seriously. “Well the flaws are the sexy bits. But I do spend a lot of time worrying about getting into the very truth of something, you know? Because those are the bits that surprise people.”

Does that commitment come from studying in a strict conservatoire environment? “Yes, but I think there has to be an element of the fact of where it came from, too, what’s at stake. Because there wasn’t any other option for me, in terms of falling back on anything. There wasn’t anyone who could help me, you know? You get this extraordinary work ethic if you have a pinch of impostor syndrome. And I think if you’ve got a vagina that can partly be an element of it, too.” There’s no trick to being a good actor, she adds, no trick to being an artist. “Do you think Mark Rylance just tips up? Fuck off! All the brilliant people work their asses off. Good luck,” she says, pointing a gentle finger, “is just working hard.”

Duff herself seems jolly, settled and steely – she brings a low sort of light to the room, yet the characters she leans towards are women in crisis, women at a point of change, “Because who wants to be the one putting Superman’s cape on him and saying, ‘Have a great day, darling?’” Not her. While she’s still seeing a lack of meaty parts for women on screen, “We’re getting there slowly, slowly. The incrementalism feels a bit like we’re taking larger strides now. But it is a curious time when it comes to gender. I think we do still have to be vigilant.”

And not just in terms of art. She co-parents her teenage son with her ex-husband James McAvoy, who she met on the set of Shameless and divorced in 2016. It’s a “scary” time to be a woman, she says, let alone a feminist, let alone a mother of a boy. “I think the rhetoric around it is frustrating sometimes,” she says slowly. “Like, I don’t love the expression ‘toxic masculinity’, because masculinity is a describing noun, isn’t it? Is all masculinity toxic? It’s like saying, ‘pathetic femininity’.” Her face crumples into an expression of pain. “My worry is that there are a lot of young boys who think it’s innate.”

A friend told her a story the other day, “a very sad story” about a 13-year-old boy they knew who was having counselling because he thought there was an inevitability about him becoming a rapist. “We have to be so careful with our young people,” she says, who want to be good, but meet obstacles at every turn. Like her son, who has complained multiple times about racist posts to TikTok, she sighs, but had no response. “Our kids are growing up in a world that makes no sense. People say, but don’t do, a lot of the time.” Not Duff, though.

One afternoon she had just come offstage at the National when she got a call from her GP. Her brother had walked into the surgery and asked for help – he didn’t know where he was. Eddie was around 40, when, Duff says, “I just started noticing funny wee things. All of the classics, it’s always the classics. Trouble making tea, getting on the bus, couldn’t work, pay rent, and me just thinking, what the hell is going on here?” After he walked into the doctor’s surgery, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and Duff’s life suddenly pitched quite sharply to the left.

“It’s heartbreaking. But the gift that it gives you is… it’s very hard to explain.” When you’re with him, she says, “You’re so with him. Everything else kind of evaporates, you know, because you’re so focused on just those moments. We don’t know how long we’ll have with him, because it’s one of those bastards of a disease where the prognosis is a question mark, so you have to really treasure it. And any of the sticky old nonsense you have from the past, any of your minor complex familial crap that you carry around with you, it’s all gone. Because them not remembering it means you don’t have to either.” She’s closer to him than she’s ever been, as is her son, “and that’s beautiful. People call it, don’t they, the long goodbye?”

She’s turned down roles in the past that overlapped with her experience with Eddie, stories about Alzheimer’s, as they felt too close, “and for my mum and dad, I thought it might be overwhelming.” She’d consider, maybe, directing something on the subject. But at the moment, “I’m literally like a dog pulling at the lead, I’m so excited to get back on stage again,” in a production of The Little Foxes at the Young Vic. What excites her about theatre? “Because it’s like this now, it’s just like you and me. And there is nothing as thrilling as the moment you change the temperature in the room. As soon as you say ‘I love you’ to someone on stage, the whole room will gasp. How fucking sexy is that? You feel like a rock star. You want to turn around sometimes and go to the audience, ‘I know, right?’”

She’s known this feeling for decades, ever since those first performances as a kid. The realisation that came with acting, the discovery that, “We’re all interesting, all of us. And that’s what drama does really give you. The notion, actually, everyone’s fucking fascinating.” And acting made her feel safe, too. “I love the security, however unhealthy this sounds, of the fact that it’s not random, like life. It’s the beginning, the middle and the end. And even if you die in act five, you know you’re going to die. So I’ve always felt there was a great comfort in that, and that it made everything dealable with in a way that real life doesn’t.”

Another lovely thing about being an actor, she says, is that, “It keeps you young. Because you have to be curious all the time. You keep working, you keep staying interested. And feeling like you’re not finished yet.” Does she think often about age? “Of course! It’s a bit like people who deny the fact that they’ve got childcare. It’s such a lie. Everyone thinks about age. I have to look at my ageing face on the screen, which,” she laughs hollowly, “is not easy. But I’m trying to see the beauty in it. I’m at this weird little phase where I look at my face and go, ‘Oh, age has brought me a couple of really nice things.’ I don’t like the lines, but I like the shape of my cheekbones now. You have to try, don’t you, and see the little gifts it gives you.”

And beyond appearance, she likes the way age increases her “breadth”, how being around teenagers especially, “keeps you engaged, in the way the tides come in and out, and how things are changing. Even though you hate having to listen to Travis Scott on the drive into school, there’s something about it, too, that makes you go, ‘Oh, really? That’s what people are interested in?’ It’s amazing, it’s curious.”

She sees it as a great privilege, too, to be able to “try on versions of yourself” on stage. “That’s why you never want people to know all your stuff. Because it spoils that energy.” For years after Duff’s split with McAvoy the story of their relationship followed her, generating its own headlines, partly because, perhaps, she refused to discuss it. People “knowing your stuff weakens you – you need that energy to put it into the work.” The energy emerges in unexpected places. She’ll be saying her lines when suddenly, she says, she’ll remember something that happened when she was 25, or she’ll burst into tears.

“Sometimes I go into my kid’s school and help out with young actors. And you can see it happening very clearly, because young people are so translucent, you see it all moving around, coursing through them.” She shivers slightly, at the thrill of it, the danger of connection. There was a moment in 2000, playing the suicidal Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, when she froze on stage – the danger had come too close. “Yes, I had a moment where I worried I was going mad. I went, ‘Oh, my God, is this me? Or is this the character?’” She walked offstage. “But that’s what audiences want. They want you to push yourself. Right to the edge of the cliff.” She opens her blue eyes wide and then wider still.

Sometimes Duff thinks she’d like to pause the acting for a while and write a book. But then she’ll stop, and think, “Or do I just want to play the role of a writer? Maybe…” Does she feel like that then, in other areas of her life? Does she sometimes wonder if, rather than living it, she just wants to play the role of a mother, a friend, a person sitting in an office in town being interviewed for a magazine? “I suppose I do have the conversation, always the internal dialogue, of ‘What should I be doing right now?’ Because life’s full of ‘shoulds’, isn’t it? They’re built into being a middle-aged woman. You’re professional, you’re personal, you’re bloody ‘caring’. You’re parenting, you’re working, you’re loving. It’s like being one of those dog walkers with eight dogs!” She mimes, quickly and accurately, being pulled in eight different directions by a series of leads. And you’re still standing? “Yeah, I think I am? I’m never going to be perfect,” she says a little mournfully, then smiles, “but then, nobody likes perfection, do they?”

Bad Sisters, season two, premieres on Apple TV on 13 November. The Little Foxes will run at the Young Vic theatre, London, from 2 December to 8 February (youngvic.org)

Fashion editor Jo Jones; hair by Ken O’Rourke at C/O Management using Hair by Sam McKnight; makeup by Charlie Duffy using Dior Forever Foundation and Capture Totale Le Serum; nails by Trish Lomax at C/O Management using Manicurist; photographer’s assistant Alfie Bungay; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; shot on location at lordshippark.com