Following the screening of "Elsinore" at the Middleburg Film Festival, Olivia Colman and Nadia Stacey sat down with Variety's Jazz Tangcay and sounded like what they are: collaborators who go back to Stacey's first design job, on "Tyrannosaur," and still enjoy teasing each other. Colman, who plays HIV-focused medical pioneer Dr. Margaret Johnson, and Stacey, who received the festival's Distinguished Makeup & Hair Design Award for the film, talked about meeting the real Johnson, turning a dark-haired Andrew Scott blond, a wig nobody wanted except Colman, a ghost who kept a secret, and a January spent in a freezing carpet factory.
In 1989, after Daniel Day-Lewis walked off mid-performance and left the National Theatre's "Hamlet," the role went to "Chariots of Fire" star Ian Charleson (Scott). He was gravely ill with AIDS and took it anyway. Simon Stone directs from Stephen Beresford's script, following Charleson through rehearsals and performances, and the HIV specialist (Colman) trying to keep him well enough to go on. Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Juliet Stevenson, and Peter Mullan co-star, and Focus Features opens the film in U.S. theaters Nov. 20.
Colman had not known Johnson's story before the film. Learning about her meant discovering someone whose work had largely taken place outside the public eye.
"That's the same story with many secret heroes," she said. "‘Not all heroes wear capes,' as they say."
What struck her was Johnson's courage in treating patients amid "that climate of prejudice and suspicion." Colman watched videos of Johnson giving academic talks, but did not meet her until the film's London premiere. Her performance was not an attempt at precise imitation.
"I'm not good at impressions," she said, describing her approach instead as "a feeling of her."
Colman was nervous about Johnson's reaction, admitting she had worried Johnson might say, "I didn't like it." Fortunately, that was not the verdict.
At the London Film Festival, Scott suggested bringing the surviving people represented in the film onto the stage. Colman held Johnson's hand as the audience rose to applaud her.
"She spends her days walking around London, no one knows what she does, but she saves lives, dedicated to it, and then suddenly 2,000 people applauded her," Colman recalled. "And it was very moving, beautiful."
For Stacey, the '80s posed a particular problem.
"I find it the trickiest period because it can fall cliché very quickly," she said. "You just immediately imagine everybody had a perm."
Her guiding principle was restraint.
"My approach every time is that you shouldn't notice hair and makeup unless you actually want to notice hair and makeup," Stacey explained. "For this, I felt like the story told itself."
Scott presented a particular challenge.
"Ian's blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and Andrew is almost jet-black hair and brown eyes, and we all know him as that," Stacey said. "There's that thing where you don't want to push something too far to jar the audience out of it."
She and Scott approached the look the way an actor of the period might have approached a role. That meant "lots and lots and lots of blonde highlights" and contact lenses. The result landed with director Simon Stone.
"As he turned around in the clothes, Simon was like, ‘Oh, my gosh! He's here!'" Stacey recalled. "It was quite an emotional moment, actually."
From there, the work involved tracking Charleson's illness through periods of decline and improvement. Stacey noted that Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) lesions could come and go, but she did not want them to become the audience's constant focus.
"As you've seen, he got ill, he got well again because of the help of Margaret's amazing work," she said, "and then gets sick again."
Asked how they arrived at Johnson's look, Stacey started with a confession.
"Well, no one wanted to put Olivia in a wig!"
"I love a wig!" Colman replied.
For Stacey, the concern was recognizability. An audience familiar with an actor's appearance might notice the wig before seeing the character. But the photographs of Johnson all showed the same blonde bob.
"We tried it, and it was a good wig," Stacey said. "So, yeah, we went with it, and she's always up for a wig."
Colman had practical reasons to welcome the decision.
"My hair's curly, and it's easier to put a wig on than to straighten my hair every day," she said. "And these are extensions, by the way."
"She doesn't like being in the makeup chair for long," Stacey added. "I'll just give you that."
"Yeah, I get a bit annoying," Colman admitted.
Stacey remembered watching "Tyrannosaur" for the first time at Sundance while holding Colman's hand; "The Favourite" marked another major moment for both. On "Elsinore," Colman again found that Stacey's work helped her into the performance.
"I put it on, and I felt like Nadia had done the work for me," she said. "It was great. She always does. She does two-thirds of my job."
Many of the people who had known Charleson took part in telling his story, including two of his close friends, who appear in the scene where Johnson shows donors around the hospital. For Colman, their recollections made clear that an account of his illness could not be the whole story.
"One thing that Andrew says about it is it's never meant to be glorifying his death," she explained. "The most interesting thing about finding out about Ian is every single person he spoke to said Ian was hilarious, Ian was funny."
That humor had to come through, she said, "even when he's at his illest."
Stacey recalled an unusual degree of enthusiasm from the actors who joined the production.
"I don't think I've ever seen that, actually, before, that everybody was so up for doing it," she said. "It was kind of a no-brainer for everybody to do it and to tell the story."
Some of the history arrived with the cast.
"Juliet Stevenson, she was there, so every day would be another story about being at the National at that time," Stacey said.
For Stacey, filming there also meant returning to the place where she had first worked after coming to London.
Other connections emerged more gradually. Colman recalled that David Rintoul, who plays the Ghost, had been Charleson's best friend, but had not immediately told Scott.
"He didn't tell Andrew for weeks," she said, "and finally it came out, and Andrew went, ‘Why didn't you tell me?'"
"There were so many of those little kind of stories," Stacey said.
Asked which scene had been hardest, Colman admitted, "I'm not very good at not crying."
"I was just thinking," Stacey interjected, "like every scene!"
Colman has learned to give crews fair warning.
"Whenever I play a character who's strong, I do have to warn everyone that I'm afraid you're going to have to cut around this," she said.
In the scene in which Charleson asks Johnson to read, she spent considerable time side-on to the camera.
"I did cry, and they managed to cut around it."
Another sequence found Johnson watching Charleson perform. Scott's side had already been filmed, and the day was only on Colman.
"He insisted on a very long, exhausting shoot on his day off, he came in and said, absolutely, ‘No, I'll do it for you,'" Colman recalled, "so he was performing bits of ‘Hamlet' for me. It was amazing."
Stacey questioned whether Scott had taken a day off at all.
"I actually don't think he had a day off when I think about it."
"'Cause that was his only day off," Colman confirmed.
Stacey had nothing but praise for Scott.
"If I could just choose a handful of people to work for for the rest of my career, he would absolutely be one of them," she said.
At that point, Colman cleared her throat.
"And Olivia would be at the top of the list!" Stacey quickly added.
"Glad you added that in!"
"If I'd have actually named about five people and you weren't on it..." Stacey said.
"Now you're getting the British sense of humour!" Tangcay told the audience.
Neither Colman nor Stacey described the production as an exercise in sustained misery. The difficult material made laughter more necessary, not less.
"Andrew is hilarious and naughty and constantly up for a giggle," Colman said. "I'm not, obviously. I'm very serious."
She expressed admiration for actors who could remain immersed in a character between scenes, but knew her own limits.
"I don't think I could cope with that. I need to giggle."
Stacey remembered similar questions after "Tyrannosaur," when interviewers assumed that making such a difficult film must have been an equally difficult experience.
"We actually had a really fun time, we had a lovely time!"
On "Elsinore," she found a receptive director and a set where her ideas were heard.
"Every actor that came into it wanted to be there," she said. "Wanted to do this film. Nobody was there under duress."
Colman counts Stone among her favorite directors.
"He's so very smart, very emotionally intelligent and intuitive, and gives you space to do your thing," she said.
Then came the practical part.
"He also doesn't do endless takes, which... I get fidgety."
None of it was luxurious. Stacey recalled spending much of a January in a disused carpet factory in North London, huddled around a heater because it was freezing.
"You don't get a lot of money to make these kind of films, and it's because everyone poured their heart into it and because of Ian Charleson and the story and wanting to tell that."
"Elsinore" panel at Middleburg Film Festival featured actor Olivia Colman (center) and makeup artist Nadia Stacey (right) and moderated by Jazz Tangcay of Variety. (Photo credit: Stuart Shave)
