A: Graham has had a field day with this story! [Laughs] He makes it sound like I barraged my way in and beat up security to get in the room! What happened was I had heard about the script, I knew there would be a wave of women interested in it, so I got in there early and asked him to give me a go. All I did was pitch it, "This is why I think I can play her," and then he gave me the part.
Q: What was the pitch?
A: Well, I had a non-existent knowledge of Queen Victoria's early years. Like everyone else, I thought of her as an old lady dressed in black. My mom had told me about her, though, that she had a very loving relationship with Albert, that they had lots of kids, and that he died young. So the mourning, that wasn't who she really was. My take on her was that she was a young girl who was very in love for the first time, and she was in a job where she felt way over her head. So I said to Graham, "She's rebellious. She's a survivor." I didn't want to approach her as the English rose, but as a young girl who was fighting.
Q: What sort of access did you get to royal documents and diaries?
A: I got to go to Windsor Castle to see everything, from her paintings, to the letters that she and Albert wrote to each other, and music he wrote for her, and the diaries were wonderful to see. Couldn't touch them, but I did see them through a glass case. I could hear her voice a bit in how she was writing, and she turned out to be the antithesis of what I thought.
Q: How? And how did that help you find the character?
A: She was so passionate, even how she wrote who she loved or hated and why, pages of it. She'd dance all night until four in the morning, she'd ride all day, and she would laugh and laugh. People would talk about how she would laugh so hard at dinner that food would fall out of her mouth. But you couldn't quite read her from her public persona. So that was a good starting point, the suppression of everything. But once you got her in private, she'd loosen the corset and let it rip. I liked that, the dual existence she had in her life. She was a really joyous person.
Q: Until Albert died...
A: I think she lost her vitality then. When he died, she said, "How am I supposed to go on with half of my soul missing?" I think what the film offers is, if you have this image of her as the widow in black for all those years, what she was actually mourning. She was an absolute person who dealt in extremes, and so that was the only way to mourn him, to her. And I understand her inability to recover.
Q: What did you think about Judi Dench's take on Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown?
A: I saw it, but I didn't want to emulate what Judi Dench had done. But I was just talking to Billy Connolly [who played John Brown] about this while we were working on Gulliver's Travels, how he spoke to her like she was a real person. He called her "woman": "For god sake's, woman!" He had that forthrightness. And she needed it, to shock her out of her grief. He got her outside again, and pulled her out of the grave, essentially. And she was buried with something of Albert's, and something of John Brown's. No one really knows what happened between them, that's murky waters there!
Check out what actors Jeff Bridges, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Plummer, Jeremy Renner, Carey Mulligan, and Anna Kendrick have to say about Awards Season 2010.
