Dan Barnes chats with Daisy Ridley about her new film Magpie…
Directed by Sam Yates (The Hope Rooms, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cymbeline), Magpie received its world premiere at the South by Southwest festival in March 2024. The film follows Anette (Daisy Ridley), an isolated wife and mother who finds herself tested when her husband, Ben (Shazad Latif), grows close to Alicia (Matilda Lutz), an actress, while chaperoning their daughter on a film set. Inspired by an original idea from Ridley herself, then developed into a screenplay by her husband and fellow actor Tom Bateman, this passion project is a modern and fresh take on classic noir tropes.
This film is based on your own original idea. How did that come about and how did Tom [Bateman] come to develop it into a screenplay?
The idea originally came from a film I was working on where I had a little girl [The Marsh King’s Daughter, 2023] and I was thinking about the relationships that are formed very quickly on sets – working 12-14 hours, oftentimes seeing people on a film set more than your own family, being in another country or another city, and how destabilising that might be.
The original idea was actually about an actress falling so in love with the girl playing her child that she infiltrates the family. I told Tom [Bateman] and he started working on that – I’d read his scripts previously and he’s a beautiful writer – and not long into the writing process he said he was more drawn to the woman at home who doesn’t get to be on set and doesn’t get to experience the filming life, that almost feels like the ‘other woman’ in a maternal sort of way, when she loves her daughter so much and knows she’s calling someone else ‘Mummy’ at work, and what that might do to a person who also has difficulties in her marriage, and also isn’t sleeping very well because of a baby that won’t sleep well; what all those things might do to a person who is on the outside and not even really able to look in.
Sam Yates is very experienced in both theatre and television, and has obviously directed some short films as well and worked with some phenomenal actors. How did it come about that Magpie would be his feature debut? Did you approach him, or had he heard about the project elsewhere?
We had Kate Solomon come on fairly early to produce this with us, and we met maybe five directors, all great, all different. But with Sam, there was just something about how he connected emotionally with the material that was genre-driven. He had the same point-of-view in terms of wanting to make something fun and with a real tone and feeling that was noir, but he also had such a connection to the emotional toll that Anette is under, and what Ben’s experience might be like and what Alicia’s experience might be like – he had such an amazingly rounded view of that. After having spoken to him, he got off the Zoom and we all said, ‘he’s our guy.’ He was just amazing.
We got Laura Bellingham to be our DP. Tom and I had watched a film she’d done and been blown away. It evoked so much in how it was shot, so Sam and Laura together were this unbelievable combo. So much of that creeping unease is in how the film is captured, and that’s really down to them.
It’s a film that almost flips noir on its head, particularly in terms of the femme fatale, both with Anette and Alicia, and in having Anette be the protagonist. She’s very quiet, and we’re not really supposed to fully understand her angle or how we should feel, so I imagine it was quite a complicated part to play? How did you approaching bringing her character to life?
We assumed that a lot of people’s own personal feelings would work potentially as projections onto the character. When everyone goes to watch a film, everyone has their own lived experience in how they’re perceiving what they’re watching. But we knew there would always be a feeling of, is Anette’s point-of-view reliable? And the things that we learn about her, or that we hear her husband describe her as, paint a picture that might not be the full truth.
We always knew where Anette was and what she was doing, in comparison to where Ben was and what he was doing. But so much of that was built on, are we seeing everything? And the things that we’re seeing, are they true? Is that the full truth? And then, when the perspective shifts slightly, the audience learns that everything hasn’t quite been how it might’ve looked.
But coming into it, I think so much of it was just there in Tom’s writing. Particularly in the first half of the film, Anette is so responsive to what’s going on around her and she’s trying to establish her own identity again outside of the home, and each time she tries, the rug is just pulled from under her. And when she sees Richard, her old boss, she’s trying to present as something she used to be, and she’s floundering as to how to present now – particularly because it’s quite clear that she is very cut off and has made a lot of concessions for her husband (they’ve moved to the countryside to allow him his creative freedom), and what that does to someone when they have a child, a small baby and they’re isolated.
So, going in, there was so much withholding, because I feel like she’s the sort of person that if she ‘broke’, as it were, who knows where that would end? And she has to maintain stability for her children because they’re the most important people to her, so it did feel like playing someone who’s just constantly on the edge. She’s trying not to cry, she’s trying not to shout, there’s so many things she’s trying not to do. And meanwhile, there’s just a pile of suppression on top of her.
We have this scene in the middle of the film where there’s an element to Anette that she can sort of lie to herself in as much as she can withstand so much, and at least other people aren’t talking about her. But when she learns that other people are talking about her, and suddenly her children are involved in a way they haven’t been involved before, that’s the turn.
And then getting to play Anette for the second half of the film was just really fun. It was sort of delicious as someone who’s strength is coming back to her; the strength that never fully disappeared but has been pushed down.
How did you and Tom approach the character of Ben? Because he’s not the most forgivable of people, but he does still feel very human – we understand at least why he’s behaving the way he’s behaving, even if we don’t necessarily agree. He must’ve been a tricky character to get right?
That was the thing, because he’s not a pantomime villain. In Ben’s way, he’s just trying to do what’s right for him, and as a creative who doesn’t feel very inspired, he does feel trapped, he does feel very unfulfilled. And he’s someone who’s behaviour has been forgiven before – infidelity has occurred but the relationship continued, so in his mind ‘it’s happened before, it’ll happen again.’ What Alicia presents to him is another world. She’s someone who makes him believe that everything is possible, and that all the things he’s contending with can be pushed aside.
And he’s not meaning to be horrible. He just ignores his wife. He doesn’t pay attention to her needs, and he literally doesn’t pay attention to what she’s saying. It was always a conversation about ‘indifference’ as opposed to straight-up ‘hate’ towards Anette. He’s just indifferent towards her, and that in many ways is more painful.
For large portions of the film you’re acting alongside young children, especially Hiba [Ahmed, who plays Anette and Ben’s daughter, Tilly]. Did that present any challenges at all?
You know what, it wasn’t difficult at all. Hiba’s a child, she’s innocent, and she can’t know too much about what’s going on. But she’s so smart, she literally turned to me during the shoot and said, ‘Ben is not the hero of this story’. It was just brilliant. She’s so open, and really curious. Performance-wise, it was so easy with her.
It was wonderful because so much of the tension that Anette is holding happens when Tilly isn’t there. So, when she is, we really wanted the house to feel warm, the environment to feel warm, and Anette to feel warm. Anette is a good Mum. She’s struggling, but she is a good Mum, and those scenes are so important just to establish that she loves her kids so much.
And because I love Hiba and we got on so well, in the later scenes with Ben where he’s saying things that are awful, it made it so much more painful. I’m not a Mum, but having that experience with a little girl who is that awesome, I was picturing her in those moments and thinking ‘this innocent little child.’ We honestly couldn’t have lucked out more with Hiba. Amazing, amazing child.
I really love the modern, digital undercurrent in the film. Ben spends so much time just sitting on his phone, ignoring Anette, and it really grates, which I’m guessing was the intention?
Yes, because so much happens on phones, and it is sort of an interesting moral conversation of, where does cheating begin and end? And emotional cheating vs. physical cheating.
But we also wanted to make sure we didn’t just have an image of a phone, so Laura and Sam came up with this brilliant idea of how to extend the digital world until it became its own thing. So instead of watching the text come up, we’re actually watching these scenes play out as they’re perceived.
A lot of that was down to sound design. They put the ‘clickety click-click’ when he was texting, because even that sound is so grating – like when people have their phones on loud on the tube!
But particularly with the digital world, we wanted it to evoke its own feeling. We wanted it to be as rooted in the reality of those situations as it could be.
Many thanks to Daisy Ridley for taking the time for this interview. Read our ★★★★ review of Magpie here.
Dan Barnes
