S8, Ep9: Monica Dolan, actor

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Hi there listener, Grace here. Before we get started we wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains some themes which aren't appropriate for little ears. I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled up on the sofa. Each week I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:55hello friends now you find me curled up in a crumpled very jet lagged ball in my kitchen chair and this jet lag is making me feel most extraordinary i am completely incapable i cannot find anything i can't work out what day it is i have tried to put a wash on and found that i cannot sort clothes even into piles so I've just given up I'm just gonna lie here for a bit now why the jet lag I've been in Hong Kong on a work trip for the telly speaking of telly I've got a BAFTA award-winning actress coming over here Monica Dolan she is so much part of my tv watching life I cannot believe she's going to be on my doorstep any minute Monica's work spans television film and stage.

1:50Most recently you might have seen Monica playing Joe Hamilton in Mr. Bates versus the post office but she's done loads of comedy like the brilliant BBC spoof W1A. She's been in the period drama Wolf Hall. She's been in Inside Number 9 and Black Mirror. She's been in films like Steve Coogan's Alpha Papa and The Dig. Her prodigious work ethic has translated into an incredible body of work. In many of her roles she's playing cardigan wearing villains, women that look cosy but underneath are anything but such as serial killer Rose West in Appropriate Adult or Hugh Grant's wife Marion Thorpe in A Very English Scandal.

2:38The point about her is that in all this time it's been her work and not her private life that's been in the papers so she's a bit of an enigma to me. now the actor Eddie Marzen very much a friend of the podcast with whom she starred in The Thief His Wife and The Canoe said about her personally I think she's one of the greatest actresses of our generation I cannot wait to get her in here and find out what it's like being Monica Dolan and what she's eating to fuel her acting muscles so that she can look about that big old BAFTA that you on.

3:23Monica Dullivan, welcome to Comfort Eating. Thank you so much for having me. I have seen you on my television for so many years. The one thing that always wows me, it's your accents. You're always sporting a very believable regional accent, different ones every time you've pulled off west country that's rosemary west inappropriate adult sing song welsh tracy w1a he even done a hartley pool accent which is i think the most difficult because it can slip easily into geordie then you're going to upset the whole of newcastle if your agent called you and they've got this really really meaty part what is the accent that you'd go, you know, I just can't do it.

4:15I'd have the audacity to throw myself at any of them as long as there was the proviso that I had a really good accent coach. Could you do the accent of a woman with a Welsh father and a Spanish mother who grew up in Glasgow? With the right preparation, possibly. Do you feel under some? I'm not going to attempt it now. This is the podcast Comfort Eating. could you do a Russian person being excited about butterscotch angel delight? I think they'd... Oh, angel delight. Yay! That's all I'm going to say. That probably wasn't very excited though. But anyway, there we go. That's my attempt.

5:04Every week I ask my guests to bring me their comfort food. This is the food that allows them to wake up every morning and put on a different regional accent. Monica Dolan, what do you have under this tea towel for me today? I don't know what's under that. Shall I lift the tea towel? Reveal yours now, please. I love the tea towel, by the way. This is our first. Can't be eating with Grace Dent. This is our first foray into merch. Well, it's a great success as far as I'm concerned. Okay, I'll lift it now. Lift the tea towel. oh wow top five already top five do you know why because this is a selection of things that every single part of it is brown please explain in loving detail what is on this delicious plate of happiness okay so it's mainly sort of pork snacks really and first of all i want to say that i don't i don't recommend this particularly because it's very much full of saturated fat I've got some cocktail sausages very oily sausages well you know you need your energy for sitting in front of the television and I've got picnic eggs granary bread with thick butter I like the fact that the bread is so thickly spread with butter that I can see my face in it already then it will work with the sausage I've also got a palette of different sauces so I think I've got some barbecue sauce and some HP sauce and some ketchup.

6:38What I might have as well is some onion marmalade. As you can see from those beautifully cut pieces of bread, those cocktail sausages fit exactly on the bread to make sandwiches. You know, I like variety. I love buffets because you don't have to choose and you can just have the variety. So I would actually cut even that half sandwich in half and maybe put some barbecue sauce on half of it and some onion marmalade on the other half. One of the things that I'm quite interested in, actually, about this program is like, if I'm talking to a friend on the phone, and they're eating, I absolutely can't stand it.

7:16It's got a name. It's called misophonia. I always say, because people do complain, you are right, people do complain. Do they? They complain and say, I do not want to hear you masticating. And I say that if you don't like listening to me eat there is nothing for you on this podcast keep going just keep going I don't think people that were on television under scrutiny were ever allowed to eat this amount of beige processed food when do you sit down and lie down and eat I'm sensing lie down and eat this yeah it would probably be in front of the television I'm sort of trying not to do it too often did we mention the picnic eggs you know it's like a scotch egg that's already been chewed for you isn't it i mean but yeah i'd probably i'd probably lie in front of the television maybe watching dogs behaving badly australia or something like that yeah you know yeah i like the fact that you think that it's for it's a self-chewed egg it's for people that aren't they haven't got enough energy to even tackle a real scotch egg yeah also with a real scotch egg in every bite you don't know if you're going to get everything you want so i think i think with a picnic, you know it's all going to be there in every bite.

8:29It's one of the most profound things anyone's ever said on this podcast.

8:39Monica, you play a really convincing villain. Upwards of five villains so far. Stalkers, fraudsters, and of course, the serial killer, Rosemary West. Why do you think you play so many villains? Well, I think it's empathy, actually. Quite often we can see morality as a human feature, a feature of humanity, you know, in who we are. And I actually think that it gives you more choice of characters if you see that as a character trait. If you don't presume that everyone is necessarily moral, then you can just look at the character on the page and think, oh what what do they do in quite a clinical way and you don't judge it at all then you can just see what they're after or what what their sort of makes them tick you can just sort of go for that without without any judgment of yourself and I think that's maybe that's when the audience looks at it and thinks oh my god look at what they do and they don't see anything wrong with it you know is that really satisfying to play that I really I really really love playing very very different people.

9:49Just lately, I actually overlapped with Joe Hamilton, the sub postmaster, who's absolutely lovely, and Anne Branson, who's very much not. So, you know, doing those at the same time, you can only really know people by trying to be in their shoes. And I think in a way, if you're in as many shoes as possible, it teaches you about humanity. And I think it maybe even stretches you as a person. When a script comes in, and it's someone that's just really really really nice is that quite dull do you know what it's not because if the drama's good and the person's nice usually they've got an awful lot to contend with and and sometimes nice people or good people they're struggling an awful lot more than maybe people that aren't so nice and And so in a way, sometimes there can be more to play.

10:47I've been thinking about this a lot in the days leading up to meeting you. So you are drawn to playing complicated, layered characters. Rosemary West, along with her husband, Fred, played by Dominic West, is one of the 21st century's biggest serial killers. This was in the 70s and the 80s. And this woman's still alive. This was a massive role to undertake. So it's not a baddie. It's a villain on a different level and still alive and so alive in the public's imagination, consciousness. How does that feel when you're offered that? when I was offered the audition for it I I think I was about to do some teaching actually at Mount View and I think it was going to clash so I've got this wonderful excuse immediately I thought to not engage with this character I think even even way back to when it came on the news initially I think in 1994 I was so repulsed by it I just found it really really horrible and I actually thought I never want anything to do with that and so then when my agent got in touch and said have a look at this script and inappropriate adult it mainly focuses on um the appropriate adult a um Emily Watson's character and uh Fred West and their relationship that's an appropriate adult who is a sort of confident that anyone is entitled to when they are under a police interview.

12:23The Rose West figure, she's sort of quite shadowy and on the outside, which in some ways is great because she could be lit in a very frightening way and she was a sort of frightening presence. But because it wasn't a large role, I think I looked at it and I thought, this is going to be very harrowing to engage with and to research properly for something that actually in terms of her presence on the screen, it won't appear that much. So yes, at the beginning, I just thought, no, I don't want to do that. Also, I think there were some things that I didn't really agree within the script at the time.

13:10And then my agent very cleverly said, well, why don't you go and talk? Maybe the director thinks that as well. Why don't you go and talk to them at least? So then I met them and before I met them, I started to, I mean, I've got this really lovely, mild mannered friend who lives around the corner, who has all of the books about the Wests and, you know, for some reason takes them on holiday. That is not holiday reading, is it? It's not like very hard going. Yeah, so he had amongst others, he had a book called She Must Have Known, which was by Brian Masters. His argument in the book was that there's no evidence that she even met seven of the people that Rose West even met seven of the people.

13:56so I went into the audition you know very much from her point of view and I think they were quite surprised and at some of the things that I was saying which when I did more research I thought I wish I hadn't said that in the audition yeah you've really thought about her you've really thought about and actually thought about a case that she's maybe done fewer of the crimes than she's been yes I was I was in the audition doing see you know having read that book and then read a few scenes and then my agent you know he said they I think they'd like you to do it and I was like oh no and um he said that Dominic West was playing Fred and Emily Watson was playing the appropriate adult and then that made me think I don't know I suppose it's it's it's really always about balance and the team and how it's going to be done.

14:51Did you know that food was going to be a part of this role? I think I knew that I'd have to gain weight. The thing about it is that actually in terms of weight, in terms of her body, there are sort of two timeframes with it. Because once she was on remand, I think you can see in one of the scenes, it's a very small scene, but the only time that she appears with her husband in the program, she's gained an awful lot of weight. At the beginning, I mean, you know, she's sort of larger than me for the first half, so I had to put on weight for that. Actually, they fitted me with the fat suit at the beginning of the process, and then I started to put on weight.

15:33Then when I tried on the fat suit, the fat suit didn't fit. Yeah, I'd put on too much weight. What were you eating? Ice cream. I remember at one point having like a box of fajitas and I was talking about old El Paso here I think there was something that I didn't have to assemble myself so you're probably seeing a picture of your cooking yeah at the big certainly at the beginning of the process if I can call it a process of um putting on weight it was something that I that I thought I was going to enjoy more than I did because then it just becomes a bit a bit of a task and a little bit sickly and you know all all the foods that you think oh I'm gonna have that that you might look forward to you're not you're not looking forward to them because they become every day and also just physically I really don't recommend it because you just don't feel you just don't feel very good at the end of a job like that how do you reclaim yourself I think it's you know sort of all was there I found myself I had to be very careful of my personal interactions at the time because my temper was near the surface because she uh a temper and quite a long time after I remember going back to my flat and um the guy upstairs from me said I'm Monica you're on telly and um so I went up to his flat and his girlfriend and and it was I walked into a scene that I wasn't even in actually that was um in the police station and um in a police interview with with fred west and they used the actual um tapes from from that uh for the program and i just remember feeling really icy cold under my skin yeah it just it just yeah i was sort of right back there yeah

17:38I'm going to talk about Sherwood. I read a review of Anne Branson in Sherwood, and it says, Monica Dolan is menacing even when delivering a line about steaming vegetables. How do you make steaming vegetables menacing? I think that's one of the ways that she's menacing, actually, is she'll say something cruel and awful right to somebody's face and then, you know, just change the subject and go, what are you going to put with that, Daphne? a bit of parsnip with a bit of honor i mean it's ostensibly making someone feel at ease but it's absolutely the opposite it's usually when she's trying to think of something else that's horrible to do i think i think she sort of gives herself thinking time but i also think talking about the food has the same emotional weight for her as talking about you know anything sort of cruel i think it's just it's just another part of her life there's a scene i think in the car as well when they're on their way to, hopefully people have seen it because this is a spoiler, but they're on their way to look for the people that they want to kill.

18:44You know, she's just in the front of the car going, anyone want a mint? You said that when you were 35, you were already playing women who were 50. Oh, yeah. And your niece noted that you do a lot of cardigan roles. Well, that's true. Yeah, they said, both my nieces were saying, when are you going to do something glamorous? Can't you do something glamorous, Monica? You always play. I think I've sort of graduated to fleeces a bit. Do you ever get scripts where it says this character is a stone cold glamorous fox with an entire wardrobe full of Chanel? Funnily enough, I don't. In fact, I had a director once.

19:28I think it was after I'd played Maria Marchese. The director said to me, oh I really want to work with you again you know even if she's really glamorous and even if the character's like that and I thought hang on a minute hold up give us a chance there's a compliment in there somewhere somewhere although you although you've played all these incredibly weighty characters with great stories and sinister stories is it frustrating that you're never cast as the ditzy love interest? I beg to differ. I did, I was in the Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa. I don't know if she was particularly ditzy. I think she was very sensitive, actually.

20:10It was really, really exciting to do. The writers, I remember them coming in my dressing room and saying, we can see that you've brought in this book for the first scene or as a prop. and they kind of build on what scenes you've shot and then, you know, it's quite a dynamic creative process really because you're feeding into them and they're feeding into you. It feels like you really take yourself to hell and back a little bit with these roles, even if it's a comedy. Well, it's because I'm nosy. It's, I just have this. have you spent your entire acting life with people saying that you take it too seriously and you think too much and you should oh my whole life people say I think too much yeah but you know they don't really say that to men do they no I always just think whenever anyone says that to me I think well you clearly don't think enough totally and think you know well why did this people why does that person do that or in this scene they've said that but they're also saying this so sometimes you get really really good answers like that i can't not think about everything all the time i drive myself absolutely mad i've like i've been experimenting as i've been getting older with trying to not give shit about things it's going very badly yeah i i do yoga actually and for that hour or hour and a half i can you know not be too bothered about things but you not worry about going to yoga though because i worry about actually going there and then that's That's why I do it on Zoom.

21:58There's this very dark character that we often see you playing on screen, very dark characters, and they're very different from a very smiley person that I see in front of me now. An armchair psychologist could argue that dark character traits have to be rooted in experiences. We're talking about childhood. Is that the case for you? I passionately disagree with that. I think that an awful lot of bad acting comes out of that presupposition. I think that experience is vastly overrated. And I think that imagination is hugely underrated. I think that our imaginations and our empathy are far more important than our experience.

22:47I mean, just because if something's happened to you doesn't mean that you can recreate it. Yes. And also it's sort of, this might sound a bit sick, but it also stops making it fun. And it has to be fun to do. You have to be playing. Your childhood was spent in Wilkin? Yeah. Irish parents? Yeah. You're the youngest of four. I know, yes, by a long way. So being the youngest of four with Irish parents, do you end up being, so if you are the youngest, are you very, very coddled and looked after or are you the youngest one that just wears everybody else's hand-me-downs and never has anything new? And is always to blame for everything.

23:33Yeah. Yeah, it sort of depends who the dynamic is with. I think that with my mum, I was very much coddled by her. You know, she'd say the line was, oh, Monica doesn't understand. She doesn't understand. So that was great. You know, you're not understanding anything. I could use that one a lot. You wouldn't do. I think my other siblings would probably think she does understand. And, you know, they might have done something, but they'd find a way to make me take the blame for it, I think. Was there a point where you all sit around a table together? Yeah, we did, definitely. Yeah, we did. And we had a round table.

24:10I went to a restaurant the other night and it was a round table. And I thought, I love a round table. You don't necessarily have to pass so much. And also there's something, I don't know if you think this, but there's something quite sort of community about a round table I like. So we had a round table, yeah. So you're all sitting around there. Now, I've heard that your mother was a researcher in botany and biochemistry. Does this translate in the kitchen? What is she cooking? Do you know what? I think my sister, my other sister ended up working at my dad's firm. And he, somebody at the firm said to my sister, what does your mom do?

24:49And my sister said she was a biochemist. And then this man just fell about laughing. And my sister said, well, why are you laughing? And he said that apparently my dad had told him once that cooking is applied biochemistry. So yeah, it definitely translated to the kitchen. On a Monday night, we would always have sausages and spaghetti and they would be the hot dog sausages in a tin and spaghetti would be in tomato sauce in a tin. My mum didn't like dirtying a pot. so she would put cold water in a pot open both of the tins put the tins in to to the pan and then by convection which is the correct scientific term I think the water would heat up and it would heat up the water around the hot dogs in the tin did she ever just put the actual tinned food into the pan.

25:54I think I tried to do that once. I think I got told off. No, I mean, you know, why would you do that? It means that you can just pour the water out and then you can dry the pan and put it back. Do you know, I think that says a lot about her as a person. It feels to me that she's clearly an incredibly intelligent woman. But also, you know, I don't, I actually don't really think she knew really how to cook. Yeah. So she would have probably worked it out as she was going along. and that was what she came up with with sausages and spaghetti. Was it always tender food? We'd have stew, so they did Irish stew.

26:28The other thing that I really remember having, which some people might remember, is curries that you add water to. That was our Tuesday. We had Vesta curries and, you know, I mean, I thought that was what curry was. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They used to have little bits of dehydrated onion on it. That was the best part. And shaped sort of meat. Yeah. Your dad was from Dublin. Yeah. Your mom was from a town in County Wexford. That's right. And they brought their Irish culinary heritage into the kitchen with this stew. Does the stew hold a special place in your family's memory? I was going to say I'm not sure I actually liked it, but it wasn't that I didn't like it.

27:18It was that if you wanted to rebel, but you didn't really have the power, you could just, you could say, I don't want that tonight, or I'm not, I'm not having the stew, you know. And my, my dad absolutely loved it. So he passed away in 2014. And my mum's just actually, she's still with us, but she's sold the family house. So I've been going through it, not as bad an experience for me as most people, because as I said before, I'm so nosy. And And I got to his, he had like five-year plans and kept lots of diaries. And every week, every single week, you know, there might be other entries in his diary, like come back from Tripoli or, you know, who's an engineer.

28:05Every week it said Stu and it would say it maybe on a Wednesday or Thursday. and one of the things that's sort of a mystery to me is whether he wrote it because that was when we were going to have our stew that week or you know yeah whether he was paying tribute to the stew he'd eaten and it was a beautiful memory I don't know why I find that so moving it is moving it is yeah definitely because it's like him appreciating my mum yeah and the regularity of it yeah yeah he loved it are you one of those people that thinks of childhood as a happy time oh i think it's i think it's a complicated time i remember i mean talk about food one one of the things that i used to do was come home from school and um we'd have monster munch or i'd have monster munch my mum would get those in the beef ones which you don't get so much for some reason they do the pickled onion ones now so i'd watch i'd watch hong kong phooey so yeah still still television related yeah yeah um i loved hong kong phooey oh yeah it's great i said i see i don't think that many people remember hong kong phooey it's about a little dog that had a that that did um he did karate didn't he yeah he was a janitor he was he was a janitor henry the mild mannered janitor he was the lady that did the phones rosemary the telephone operator writer yeah in fact I remember coming downstairs I think it was one time when I'd had an argument with my dad and I had a red dressing gown and um this was would have been when I was very small and I came down in my red dressing gown and went through the through through the door to the living room um and pretended to be Hong Kong fooey and that actually that made everyone laugh and it kind of diffuse the atmosphere so maybe if i was on the psychiatrist couch they might say that that was one of my seeds of becoming an actor i don't know yeah that's very began you say it was complicated why do you why why do you think it was complicated when you were little oh being the youngest you're sort of negotiating the older ones a lot yeah certainly my my sister who was seven years older than me passed away in 2008 she had cancer was very very academic and she um she actually ended up uh teaching maths at imperial college she's actually got an award named after her my sister that's so a maths award so um yeah and and my and my brother was as well he became a chemical engineer and I'll tell you what I did find my what I naturally gravitated towards was English and stories and arts.

30:57And although my dad loved poetry, they came from Ireland. So it was all about, you know, making a living and surviving. There wasn't any work there. They really very much wanted us to do some kind of job where we could make, properly make a living. So in a way, I think that it's quite fortunate for me that I came that far down in the family because maybe they weren't quite as worried about it by the time I came along. The immigrant mindset where all they want is for their children to never experience scarcity. Exactly. Yeah, exactly that. When they moved around an awful lot before I came along for his job, he'd sort of go wherever they wanted him to.

31:43One of the things that I noticed was that often it was people at his firm who helped him to get somewhere to live. And I remember just, you know, looking at this line in his autobiographical notes saying that he'd been trying for three weeks, but it was the time of no blacks, no Irish and no dogs. And then I think eventually somebody at the firm said, such and such a person's house has fallen through, so you could probably rent accommodation there.

32:29If they ever were worried about you going into a job where you wouldn't work, They couldn't have been more wrong because when you look at your IMDB page, it's like you don't seem to have any downtime as an actor. And then COVID happens. How was that for you work-wise? Work-wise, it was incredibly lucky. I mean, I was working at a time when a lot of people weren't. And actually, I think probably the nature of the work really suited me as well. Of that year, Nicholas Heitner was asked to do the Alan or redo the Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. I did one that hadn't yet been done. And so did Sarah Lancashire, actually.

33:18Apparently, the head of drama at the BBC sort of went to Nicholas Heitner and said, can you sort of curate some directors to do these talking heads with some actors? And then I think the BBC said to him, oh, can you ask Alan Bennett if he can write two more? Nicholas Heitner said, well, no, I mean, you know, you don't, you don't commission Alan Bennett. And also he can't write, well, I'm not going to ask Alan Bennett to write two of these things in three weeks. But what ended up happening was Nicholas Heitner was out on a walk and he remembered that Alan Bennett had brought him around a new talking head a few years before and he thought oh I'll dig that out and maybe we could use that so he found that and it was the one that Sarah Lancashire did and underneath that one was another one and that was the one that I did so I suppose something something that I do feel is is quite extraordinary is that that might not have ever been done if it went for covid that that yeah it would have those particular pieces because sat on a desk well that's the thing did covid affect you were you were you one of the people that went and got a huge trolley full of toilet papers and hot dogs i found that very i found that very difficult my my brother died of covid and pneumonia i found i found that out when i was actually just starting to learn the Alan Bennett.

34:47Was he one of the first at the beginning of the whole thing? I don't think he was one of the first. One thing that I will say is that because the message that everyone was very strongly getting was to stay at home and don't overload the NHS, I think probably there were a lot of people dying at home. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, I remember not long after that or around that time going shopping and there being nothing you know that all the pastor had gone the toilet paper gone and I just remember this there was an old man shouting and saying um it's all gone you haven't left any for us you greedy bastards you know yeah and yeah it was it was really horrible and when my brother died, I've got some friends who live nearby.

35:43They said to me, they sort of said, what can we do? And I said, well, I don't think there's anything. And they said, no, no, no, we must be able to do something. We must be able to help. And I said, well, actually, I'm quite scared of going shopping. And what were you scared of? I think that when there's been a shock like that, that you're sort of, well, you feel very vulnerable. I think, you know, yeah, exactly. And I think that shopping had become so highly competitive. Yeah. Yeah, I was just on their online shop and they... But then you had to tell them what you wanted. You had to tell, what did you put on the list?

36:23Well, I mean, this was the funny thing as well, because they've got two boys. So the boys would look on the online shop list and go, oh my God, great, we've got pizza, you've got Pepsi. Because also when you've had a shock, you lose a lot of weight. So that was my excuse for putting a whole chocolate cake on my first online shop with them, you know. So anyway, I think the family ended up writing me a song about it, actually. I think the last line of it was, we do judge you for the Pepsi. But yeah, so they were looking at the online shop. But then also that became quite fun because then I started deliberately putting things in the online shop.

37:04to make their sons laugh or to make them go, my God, Monica's eating that. I read something lovely that you said about it. I don't know actually, I don't know if the word's lovely. It really struck with me though when you said that like losing your brother, you lost him at a time where, so you're processing your grief, but it's at a point where nationally everybody's, so many other people are processing grief. Yeah. But it's almost as if something's happened and you almost can't have it individually because I lost my mom around the same time and she didn't die of COVID but it was due to that because she had cancer and she didn't get the proper treatment.