Riseborough Rising

Before I interviewed Andrea Riseborough I was chatting to a journalist who found her performance as the young Margaret Thatcher in BBC 4’s The Long Walk to Finchley quite disturbing. Why? Because she made Thatcher quite sexy. Well, at least it’s a testament to the rising star’s onscreen presence. And indeed she is a ‘rising star’, in fact, everyone I talk to won’t shut up about how she will be the ‘next big thing’. Riseborough was born in Newcastle and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. To date she has worked on several TV projects (Party Animals, The Devil’s Whore and of course Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley) but her foray into film has been less significant, although this could be set to change with the projects she has in the pipeline.

Riseborough can be seen this month in Mad, Sad and Bad, a somewhat slight drama about three siblings and their relationships with their needy mother, their partners and each other. The cast includes a host of TV names (including Meera Syal and Nitin Ganatra) and while there’s a sense that perhaps this is a film more suited to TV than the cinema, Riseborough’s performance is strong and the film touches on some interesting issues about inter-racial relationships and mental illness. The film doesn’t make the issue of race its central concern although the two couples that struggle the most in the film are those whose relationship crosses cultures, including Riseborough's character Julia and her boyfriend Atul. Does she think the film is trying to make a comment about the challenges of such relationships? “I think when any relationship breaks down you can go looking for the reason for the lack of connection between a couple in all sorts of different areas." says the actress, "but it [culture] is not what makes the relationships.”

One of the more unique projects that Riseborough has worked on is the short film Love you More by Sam Taylor-Wood. Conceptual artist Taylor-Wood, known for her involvement in the YBA scene, was nominated for a Palme D'Or at Cannes for the short which has since been shown at numerous festivals and Future Shorts’ regular screenings across the country. Set in the summer of 1978 it’s a stylish throw back to punk (with a Buzzcocks' song being the focal point of the film) experienced by two school uniform clad teenagers. One is Riseborough, the other is Harry Treadaway, soon to be seen in Andrea Arnold’s excellent Fish Tank. While the two main actors look far too old to realistically be portraying high school students the film exudes coolness like nothing else. “It was a whole different world” says Riseborough, “it was blissful really because it was a week of imagining you’re in love for the first time and that this whole revolution is just on the cusp of happening. And also imagining it was July when it was actually December and sucking ice cubes so there was no breath on the camera! It was a really valuable experience and I’ve never known a short to be so well received!”

The actress also had a small role in Mike Leigh’s well received Happy-Go-Lucky. Leigh’s approach to rehearsal and character development (which is something his actors are not allowed to talk about) was an experience which she calls “a privileged process”. Riseborough will be working with Sally Hawkins (who played the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky) again in the upcoming We Want Sex, a film about the 1968 protest by female workers at the Ford Dagenham plant in Essex. The cast list looks particularly impressive and includes Rosamund Pike, Miranda Richardson and Bob Hoskins. Perhaps this will be the project where Riseborough will stop being referred to as a rising star and become a star in her own right.