From The Archive: Olivia Colman

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1:07Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios. The films of Olivia Colman have the power to move us to tears, make us laugh, and inspire us to try something new. They can also make us feel really, really hungry. In the favourite, playing Queen Anne, Olivia Colman conveys her authority by insisting on a cup of over-rich hot chocolate. And there are tables laden with roasted venison, lamb, cakes, desserts, the symbols of wealth and privilege. None for the Queen. What? What, you cannot have hot chocolate. Your stomach, the sugar inflames it. Abigail, hand me that cup.

1:48Do not. I'm sorry, I do not know what to do. Oh, fine, give it to her. and then you can get a bucket and a mop for the aftermath. I met Olivia over food one night in the River Cafe. She was with my friend Maggie Gillanall and they'd just wrapped filming for their movie The Lost Daughter in Greece. It is not an exaggeration to say they pretty much ordered everything on the menu. We immediately got into talking about feeding our kids, cooking and inflicted distance from family when working. This was a conversation that could have lasted for hours but I had to go back to the kitchen, and she needed to finish her lemon pasta before it cooled down.

2:27Today, we're here in the River Cafe, and she is the one who's been cooking the lemon pasta. Now, we're going to pick up where we left off, conversation with a woman I admire, I respect, and I adore. Lucky me. Oh, that was the best introduction. Thanks, Rosie. That's true. It's true. So, you're in the River Cafe kitchen. Yeah. with Alex, who's on the section called Hots 2, which does pastas. So what was it like? What did you think? Just lovely. You chose for your recipe tagliatelle with lemon, cream and parsley. And I wonder if you would like to read it. 400 grams tagliatelle, mulled and salt and coarsely ground black pepper, 300 mils double cream, 120 grams unsalted butter, softened, zest and juice of four juicy lemons six tablespoons roughly chopped flat leaf parsley 150 grams of grated parmesan This is one you chose I mean it is absolutely lovely and classic and I think sort of as you start at the beginning of this time of year it's starting to be a bit more light in some way but still when it's slightly miserable women Have I picked something too easy for you?

3:43No, no, this is great, this is fantastic What we want to do is we basically just get everything in the pan that we need. So we're going to have a bit of butter, a bit of cream. In a large, thick-bottomed saucepan, gently heat the cream. When warm, add the butter, lemon juice and zest. Stir briefly together, then remove from the heat. Cook the taglitelli in a generous amount of boiling salted water until al dente, and then drain. Stir into the warm cream and season. Add half the parsley and toss together. I was going to say, actually, do you want to, like, toss it at all? Can I... Have a go? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

4:21Yeah, go on. Yeah, because I feel like, sorry, that's a bit premature, you know. We've still got a bit of, you know. There you go. Thank you. Can you just sort of give it a good old... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, there we go. Sorry, I've made naturally enough of your floor. No, no, it's great. Serve immediately on warm plates with the remainder of the parsley and the parmesan. As it cools, it will sort of thicken up a little bit and then a little bit of parmesan on top and that's sort of what we're looking for. Lovely, it looks pretty. Oh, my God. Well done. Thank you. What did you observe?

5:00Just, yeah, just amazing. He said you cooked it, you actually did the... Well, I think he's lying. No, he did. I definitely watched him do it. It's not easy to go into a kitchen. He let me do that. Oh, he did, the tossing. Yes. Did you catch it? Yeah. Well, I did make a bit of a mess of your floor. I'm terribly sorry. Oh, dear. Sorry. We'll go. I'm only kidding. I did say I cleared it up, but I just clearly wanted it off. No, I didn't want to.

5:27Do you see food and your ability to eat well as a kind of measure of your success? People very often see that, that we've talked to, would say that as their success increased, they measured it by being able to go to a good restaurant, have a better bottle of wine, even not have to look at the right-hand side for the prices before they looked at what they wanted to eat. Yeah, the difference is how is that measured in your career? I remember we've got a close group of actor friends that we all were at drama school together, and we've all stayed very close. But when we first left drama school, sometimes we'd go to a pub for someone's birthday to eat, and it was very much sort of how about should we share that all of us were you know really there wasn't lots of money going around and and renting terrible places and um trying to share something between us or uh if we club together and buy one bottle and then we could always get something from the offy on the way home and have more to drink because it's cheaper at home um and then cut to you know years later I could say let's all go out for dinner my shout or you know What did you eat after you had the Oscar?

6:37Was that celebrated with food? No, I think that was entirely booze. How was that? You could do another program called, you know... Booze. Yeah, what was that like? I think I was so out of it, sort of, I couldn't believe what had happened. You did seem very shocked by that. Yes. Why were you so surprised? I didn't think I'd get it. The first time I'd been nominated, and we were so proud of the film and everything, but I just thought, that's never going to happen. Oh, that makes me feel emotional. It was such a ridiculous thing to have happened, in a way. I still can't quite believe that happened.

7:19Oh, it did. So I just couldn't eat it afterwards. Are you an emotional eater? Do you eat when you're happy or sad? Both. Yeah, both. I do love the comfort foods or hot buttered toast. Butter plays a big part. I love butter too. I love butter. Toast is basically just a vehicle for butter. I agree. My mother-in-law used to say that butter is the best cheese. She treated it like cheese. You just have a piece of slab of butter until she decided that it would kill you. So then I was never allowed to cook with butter after that. But it is really, yeah, I like it. And when you make a film, like, for instance, going to Greece, when you made The Lost Order.

8:04With Maggie, or Maggie loves you. All of the cast were in the same hotel. Maggie had a little house separately, because she had to do grown-up things I think about the next day. And we were all quite badly behaved. Who were you with? So me, Jessie, Dakota, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Paul Meskell, Ollie Jackson-Cohen, Dagmara, Domenchik. Who else? I feel awful if I'm missing anyone else out. But we were all together and quite badly behaved. Good. And eating. We knew exactly the menu because we'd all been in the same hotel for, I think, six weeks. We knew the menu back to front.

8:43And they were very sweet and would do very... But I remember they had a deconstructed feta, you know, Greek salad. So it was a really different feta, not a solid one, but quite a soft one, laid out sort of prettily rather than, you know, what I remember from childhood holidays to Greece, which is great big chunks of everything in a bowl. Oh, I've even got pictures of the food. And they did a ceviche, something with mango and mmm, lovely things. This was when you were in Greece. In Greece, sorry, in the hotel in the Poseidonian. And your parents had taken you to Greece as well. Yes, we did go to Greece as kids.

9:21And I remember then eating octopus. I couldn't eat octopus now because I'm my octopus teacher and learning so much about how clever they are, I can't do it anymore. But you eat it straight out of the sea, so fresh and squid. So did your parents travel with you when you were a kid? Did you go on trips? No, they weren't really travellers. But my dad's best friend moved to Naples when I was 12. I don't think they'd ever been to Italy. And we decided to go and we stayed with them. was it in the summer? yes in the summer we went to Ischia in the Bay of Naples and just had because they lived there and he'd married an Italian woman we had incredible food, we went to amazing restaurants and we didn't know what we were doing so he went, trust me and he would order something of everything and try these beautiful things we went to little restaurants in people's houses in the hills what year was this?

10:17when I was 12, I was born in 74 and I can't do maths Yeah, so that's 82. Well done. No, 12. No, I can't do maths either. 74, 84, 85, 86. How long did it take us to add 12 to 74? Okay, so 86. 86. Yeah, that's just a year before we started here. And it's interesting that, you know, your first introduction to Italian cooking was Southern, you know. Yeah. And it's so regional, isn't it? Yeah. That the difference, had you gone to Venice, you would have had completely different food. Yeah. I love the food of southern Italy. I did that last year. I went sailing in that area. Oh, did you? And it's lemons and basil and, you know, fish.

10:57Fresh. Yeah, fresh. Really good. So let's go back to the beginning. Yes. Born in Norfolk. Yes. Not really a family of foodies. Food was always love. We'd always sit together and eat. So you had dinners every night. Yeah. I mean, a lot of, my mum was a nurse. Often she'd come in. It would be quick. We might sit on the sofa. watch telly with food on our laps and you know doctor who all those things um but when people came around it was an excuse for my dad to open a bottle of wine and entertain and and who did the cooking then would he ever cook he my mum did the cooking she never really loved cooking and her mum I remember my granny sort of dreaded people coming around and we'd always have salmon slightly overcooked salmon, new potatoes and green beans.

11:47I think that was it. Every time I went to my granny's house. And then my mum, whenever anyone came for a dinner party, I can just remember Cod mornay. That's with cheese and kind of creamy sauce. And spinach, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And new potatoes. As simple as possible. She really didn't want to spend much time. And then After that trip to Italy, my dad decided he wanted to get involved and started to particularly past us and things. That's nice. What did he do? He was a surveyor, charter surveyor, but he quite liked the glass of wine, cooking, feeding everybody. He wasn't great, but he was enthusiastic.

12:26I think it is hard for a woman who was a nurse to think about... Did she work nights? By the time I came along, she wasn't doing nights because she wasn't working in the hospital. She was working on the district. So I can't even remember. She must have been on call if someone needed her at nighttime. But she worked Christmas Day. She always took the shifts that she knew other people didn't really want to do, I think. And your grandmother lived near you? Often I'd go and stay there if mum and dad were very busy. I'd go and stay with my granny. And she always had orange club biscuits in her cupboard.

13:00I was going to say, what are your memories of your grandmother? My granny, orange club biscuits. Ribena, hilariously. By my bed. Yeah. So that's sugar all night. Well, probably they didn't think about that much. No. No, not at all. Your teeth look pretty okay. Thanks. So the memories, what about your father's mother? She was an amazing baker. Ah, there we go. We found someone in the... Yeah, what did she make? Just, there was always, she had a little larder, and she'd always go, go on, have a little look in the cupboard there. Go on. and there would always be a little bit of cake. I made you a little bit of something, or shortbreads fruitcake, which I'd ever liked, so she'd always make me a little chocolate cake.

13:45We were always allowed to go in and help ourselves. So growing up, Norfolk is in the sea, well, near and only places in Britain in life. Incredible seafood. We used to, also our holidays were also camping in Norfolk, just a few miles away from where we actually lived, but on the coast, and we'd camp in a campsite and pick sanfor. In Norfolk we'd call it sanfor, and when I first saw it written down on a menu in London it said Samphire. I had no idea what that was. That's how I thought it was pronounced. Samphire. I thought it was spelt as a kid, S-A-N-F-E-R, Samphire. I think that's just the Norfolk way of saying it.

14:18But the way we ate it as well was, so shake off the mud in the seawater and it's sort of blanched but it's still, you keep the roots on it. It's witty kind of thing. And you just dip it in butter and pull it like that You get the meat off the meat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and we'd always just have it like that. You'd never have it with something else. You'd eat it. Yeah. That's how we ate it. We'd take that little twig off at the bottom, and then we'd blanch it, but we always put it with a fish. We'd do it with turbot and sea bass. It's great. It's a short season, though, isn't it? Yeah. You don't have it for very long.

14:52I think you're not allowed to pick it anymore. We used to go and pick it, just go to the beach, pick it off the marshes. Nice. And fish? And fish. Yes, we used to go cockling as well, and mussels. I have always loved mussels. Oh, and that creamy, garlicky dunk bread in it. Yeah. Mmm.

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16:11Every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. I did my first school play when I was 16, and suddenly I'd always been so rubbish at everything at school, and then suddenly did a play and went, a light went on, and I went, I love this. I wonder if I could do this. But I didn't know anyone who did it. I assumed you had to come from that place in order to do it. So sort of had a secret yearning but never said it. And then I went to Homerton, which I think still is, a teacher training college in Cambridge. But I left after a term or so.

16:54So I never, they call it matriculation when you become part of the university, but I never did that. So I was never part of the university and I left because I just couldn't do it. And then went off to the town of Cambridge and ended up working as a cleaner there for years. And I had a bicycle. I was the same age as everyone else. Nobody questioned me and I went, cycled around and went to lectures to other people. So I went to an architecture lecture. Went to an EU law lecture when I was totally and desperately in love with Ed and just trying to... You were being an actor. Yeah. Nigella Lawson, a friend of mine, you know, she worked as a cleaner in hotels in Florence for a few years.

17:36No way! And she said it was the most revealing job you could have, particularly in a hotel. Yeah. I forget the way people left their rooms or things they brought with them. So you did that for how long? Yeah, a couple of years. And then did a secretarial course. That was my mum's suggestion that if you're going to be an actor, you need something to fall back on. So you knew then that this is what you did. By then, yeah, I'd done... In Cambridge, there's about 30 drama societies, and I would just cycle around all day. I'd do my shift, cycle around, auditioning for things, doing plays, learning lines, going back, cleaning all the loos, and chasing Ed around.

18:12Yeah, Ed, Ed, yeah. So Ed was just... Your husband to me was a student at Cambridge. Yes, he was proper clever, and he was there doing it properly. What does he do? He was doing law then, but he's a writer. and then we went off to Bristol Old Vic Drama School together and then we sort of, you know, the food is love thing we went to Thai restaurants and discovered new food together and there's a Thai restaurant in Cambridge and it was so delicious we took it back with us it's the first ever time I've asked for a doggy bag and I didn't want to leave any of it and we left it on his windowsill outside putting arms out the window and going, oh my god, it's amazing the lemongrass and the coconut milk.

18:56So Cambridge, and then you started acting more and more, and you went to Bristol. Yeah. And when you actually then started working in the theatre, that must have sort of changed your way of eating. Did it give you a routine, or did it give you restrictions on what you could have? Well, once we left Bristol and we were working, you know, trying to earn our keep as actors, I did my first few plays and things, I think I ate quite late after the show because I was sort of on a high. I certainly wanted to have a drink afterwards. When I worked at the Noel Coward Theatre right next to Sheiky's with Amy Morgan and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the three of us would sort of go to Sheiky's afterwards and sit outside.

19:41And I think we all smoked then. And we would order the little croquettes and the scallop burgers. Oh! And that was a treat. And just drink. Remember, what year was this? This would have been after Iron Lady, because that's when I first met Phoebe, which was Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher. So a couple of years after that, three years after that, I don't know, I'm so bad with dates. But you can remember what you ate at Shiki's at midnight. Phoebe loves food, doesn't she? Oh, she does. She's a good eater. Yeah, and it's really annoying that she's so tall and lean and she loves eating. It's annoying.

20:21It's annoying. No. I will agree. But so you were eating out. Because it's interesting. We'd also get picnics. Would you eat before? If you were in a matinee, would you eat before? Matinee, we'd sometimes have a picnic on the floor of one of our dressing rooms. So go to get sort of little cheeses and meats and pretend we were having a normal life and not going back on stage in 45 minutes. Were there men involved as well? Was it mostly the females? It was mostly just the three of us. The girls. Yeah, and we'd have a kip. We'd sort of put, we had some roll-out mattresses that we could put on the floor and we'd have a snooze and eat nice food.

20:57And then do the matinee. Do you think that it binds you together, food? When you go on a set and you know that you're meeting, you know, I don't know if all the other actors were friends of yours before. Yeah. But does it, is it something that holds you all together? Before COVID happened, everyone would eat together on the dining bus. Right. And I loved that. And you were eating with the crew. And what did you go for? What did you go for? And having a lovely time together. so social and then time to sort of all be equal and to let your hair down and then now the dining bus hasn't really come back yeah and so people sort of eat separately and that's such a shame yeah and I you sort of sit on your own in your little van and um I miss that very much hopefully it'll come back but also sometimes you know some actors are having to have a particularly strict diet because they've got to look a certain way and that's sort of awful and you try and hide the the pudding option that you went for yeah how does weight and physical appearance with food how does that affect your work i was just talking to someone who's coming to london to be in a movie and his assistant said to me that he has a nutritionist and a trainer because he's on a very special diet for the film and i thought wow that'd be interesting i'd like to know about that because maybe I could go on that without the nutritionist.

22:19And it turned out that he was actually eating 8 ,000 calories a day because he had to gain so much weight. It was completely diverse. Oh, wow. And I just was wondering how that, you know, when you were, for instance, when you were in the crown. Okay, Queen Anne. Queen Anne I had to put on weight. You had to put on weight. So I put on about two stone. Did you? And how did you do that? I mean, that's easy. Yeah. You didn't need a nutritionist in the trainer. I don't need anyone to tell me how to do that. I can do that in my sleep. But, you know, Rachel and Emily, Emma, are very healthy, clean eaters anyway.

22:55They love food, but it's sort of clean food. So while they had their healthy options, I would say I'll have one of everything and all of the puddings. Yeah. And if you don't want that, I'll have that. Yeah. It started actually to be a little bit quite gloomy. I thought, oh, God, what fun being told to put on weight. But I can put on quite quickly. And so it starts to feel, oh, I don't actually want another pizza. I'm going to have to take it all off at the end. And how did you take it off? Just the old-fashioned eating a lot less and trying to move more. But it was boring and hard. And she loved to eat, Queen Anne.

23:37She was an eater, wasn't she? Yeah, she was, I mean, was it 15 pregnancies she'd had? 17. Was it 17? Or maybe, when I watched the film again, she'd lost 17 babies. That's right, yeah. Her eldest one had got to 10 years old, so they had varying degrees of ages, but I think food for her was... Yeah. She was apparently clinically obese and... Oh, was she? And, yeah, you know, eat comfort food. And what about playing the Queen and the Crown? Playing the Queen was she... Very different, yeah? And she was tiny, so I did have to... She had a tiny waist, and I don't have a tiny waist. So I did... They were very sweet.

24:18They got me a trainer before I started. And then thankfully by my second season, she was a bit older and didn't have such tiny waist, so I was allowed to let go a little bit. Did you feel playing her and the research into the life post-war so completely restrictive and different from what, the voluptuousness and the time of Queen Anne. So what was that like? What was your sense of food in the palace and food in the monarchy and food for being queen? Well, I think when they had, I mean, this is the only stuff I remember from what we did, but whenever there were people coming to visit, sort of big must entertain the heads of state things, it was all beautiful, lovely food.

24:59But because she'd remembered rations and everything, She was never irresponsible about too much food. She ate quite sort of circumspect? Frugally. Frugally. And she did maintain, and she was very healthy and outdoorsy, and she maintained a sort of neat little figure, which doesn't come from copious amounts of food. So I think she was quite conservative about food. Pleasure. I mean, yeah, it's interesting that you wonder what pleasure there was in, You know, you could see the kings of France and the Chinese, and you wonder whether the British aristocracy had, I could probably, probably did, you know, those country houses.

25:41Yeah. You just wonder about the palace, whether eating and food was fun. I hope so. Yeah. I hope they enjoy it. I hope they enjoy it now. I think with King Charles, I think that that family probably is more interested in food, gardening, vegetables. Yes, the lovely organic vegetables. Yeah. And for Miller's son, Tom Barker Bowles, is a foodie. Of course, yeah, foodie. He writes about food. Yeah, yeah. He goes to cookbooks. Hopefully they have great people. I wonder if they go to restaurants, though. I don't know. Yeah, I just think that's probably a quite hard thing to do, isn't it? Maybe.

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27:08If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Do you cook at home? Is this passion for food? Something that you love to eat, but not necessarily? I love eating. Yeah, that's fair enough. I'm a very good guest. When I first left home, my mum gave me a Delia Smith, a sort of complete cookbook, which was amazing. Do you know, I think she's good. She was in the restaurant that long ago. Oh, really? And I thought she really taught a generation to cook.

27:48All those lovely sort of staples, I learnt that from her recipe book. So your mum gave you this book and? Yeah, and so I loved cooking for my two flatmates, Debbie and Olivia. Yeah. And that was the only cookbook we had. And I loved it also. I started to really enjoy going to the shop and going to buy. And because we were on such a tight budget, we'd picture meals and buy for the meals, not just, you know, anything off the shelf, fancy that. And I really enjoyed that. And I enjoyed, and sometimes it was just a jack of potato with loads of butter and cheese. but I really enjoyed us all eating together and feeding each other So you have three children and you work and sometimes you don't you can be home or you do have to shop so what is like you told us what food was like in your parents and your grandparents if I were to knock on the door what is food like in your home?