Interview: Kate Beckinsale on Corsets and Love & Friendship

Kate Beckinsale has spent the day talking to American journalists about her new film, Love & Friendship in which she plays the Lady Susan. The film is based on the novella by Jane Austen, and is like Mean Girls in corsets. Love & Friendship sees the actress dressed in gowns of brocade and embroidery, playing a widowed socialite. The film reunites her with director Whit Stillman and Chloe Sevigny.

We bond over a marmite joke and which part of London we come from. Beckinsale grew up in Hammersmith and is originally from West London. She mentions how hard it is to get a “cab” in Tooting which is in South London.

Awards Daily: Congratulations on the film. It’s such a relief to see a film like this. One thing I love is the relationship you have with Chloe Sevigny. One of my favorite lines is when she says to your character, “Nobody deserves you.” It’s such a nice and rare female relationship.

Kate Beckinsale: Her character says that quite a lot. I’ve actually been saying recently that I know Whit changed the title, and a few people have asked me what does love and friendship means to me. Certainly for this movie, I feel that Love & Friendship actually refers very much to the relationship between my character and Chloe’s more than anything else.

I love the fact that the female relationship is free and mutually supportive. The two women are able to be candid and approve of each other.

AD: What was it like being reunited with Chloe on screen after all these years?

KB: It was lovely and very familiar in a lovely way. Last Days of Disco was a turning point for me. It was a very different world when we shot that. One was much more into living in England and being highly suspicious of LA and America. I’d only ever been to America once, and that was to go to Disneyland. So, at 22, in my mind, America housed Disneyland and was just far away. When I was doing Last Days of Disco, it was a very particular social group that I was not familiar with, and Chloe was. She was my Virgil in a way during that period of time. I had arrived this very English, West London person. She was goofy, quirky and comfortable with herself, and very not English, and yet an Anglophile. She took me around and gently led me around, this twat from Chiswick (West London).

This time around we were both two million years older. I was in a British movie. I wasn’t this Alice in Wonderland thinking, “What’s that?” I was a bit more on my territory so she didn’t have to be a tour guide. She was there was less than half of the movie. I would have loved for her to be there more.
It’s such a treat to be in a movie with another woman, because most of the time, it’s me on my own. So, it was lovely to have another chick around.

AD: When I saw the film, my first thought was that your character, Lady Susan Vernon is a quite like Mean Girls but in a corset. You love to hate her, but you love her. What was it like when you first read the script ?

KB: I didn’t believe Jane Austen had written it. I honestly thought Whit had written the movie in the style of Jane Austen. Because she’s so unexpected for a Jane Austen heroine, it just took me a second.
The longer I sat with it, and researched it, and thought about it, on the surface she seems like a ghastly and manipulative person, but on a completely different level, as a woman in that time period, what’s she’s doing is rejecting the notion that any forms of freedom, whether they’re social, financial and intellectual are denied to her. That was rather pioneering. So, the fact that she’s unapologetically ruthless about her right to having money and a secure future and her choice of sexual partners, none of which are mutually exclusive, there’s something about that, that one cheers about her, she is a woman struggling about an awful lot of stuff. She glides over it in a wealthy way, I really like her.

AD: She’s very likable in a way.

KB: I’ve always been attracted to those characters that aren’t necessarily the nicest person. They’re the most fun to play. I like that Jane Austen wrote a character that ideally you like despite yourself.

AD: What was it like working with Whit again after all these years?

KB: I did a Q&A with him the other day and someone asked, “When did you start working on this?” and he said something insane like 1999. I thought, blimey, I was just getting ready to give birth.

He was such a game changing moment for me. I remember I had this wonderful play that I had workshopped in London with the writer, it was a brilliant play that ended up being immensely successful and great. At the same time I was offered that role. I was really torn and part of me was so terrified about going to New York and playing this part, feeling not equipped. It scared me more than the play. I like going to things that frighten me a bit work wise. It was a difficult decision at the time. I’m really glad that I did. I spent a lot of the time in the hotel initially, almost scared to leave the hotel. I didn’t know anyone and felt unfamiliar. You can feel so out of place in a city like New York when you don’t know anyone. I did at first.

The movie was a much longer shoot. I made life long friendships. Coming back, I hadn’t seen Whit at all. I didn’t know what he was doing, he’s such an interesting creature. It was so familiar with all this time, life and everything that had happened in between. It was comforting. Chloe is still really cool. Whit is still really interesting and elegant. Everybody is an oddball but it works.

AD: You shot this in 27 days.

KB: It was 26. Whit told me to say that it was because I’d learned my lines properly that we ended up finishing a day early [laughs]. That was such a nice thing to hear.

AD: What was the challenge of having to shoot in that timescale?

KB: I think the challenge on all departments was that everybody was so thrilled to be doing this movie. Whit had to do all sorts of convoluted financing things. Everybody was aware of wanting to do their absolute best job and do it justice. We were the first cast members to put these characters of a Jane Austen piece on screen which was such an unusual and amazing privilege to have. Nobody wanted to be that person to capsize this incredible piece of luck that we were all involved in. This was a lot of dialogue.

She does a lot of pontificating and manipulating and talking. The other person maybe gets one sentence out, before she starts again. I said to Whit, “I went to Oxford. I like to be prepared and do my homework, and do my PhD of a novella and get everything in order.”

I was a brownie, I don’t want to be the one to let it down. Whit was wonderful because he’d ask me for my notes on the script and would use them. So, it was a really nice collaboration. I find directors who have also written the script are open to that sort of thing.

I forgot that Whit’s great strength as a director is that he is a thousand percent in the moment, so it’s all very meticulously planned and structured, but then he will see something he likes, and change it day of.

One thing was that terrifying was that I’d quite often be sitting in hair and make up in the morning having spent three hours the night before, and he would elegantly appear in a suit, pop his head in the trailer, give me some pages, and say, “It’s only a few changes,” and he’d have moved a huge bit of this speech around. It was like a mental agility test. [laughs]

I just didn’t want to be that thing where everyone was bringing their A-game and have people say, “Oh, Kate can’t remember her lines.” [laughs]. The most basic thing you can do as an actor is really know what you’re saying.

AD: And thanks to you everybody got off work one day early.

KS: I know. That worked out. [laughs].

AD: How was wardrobe because you know you must be so used getting into corsets by now?

KS: It’s like a fetish. I never seem to get away without a corset, it seems very unusual. They were a lot. I was very surprised because my early career was a lot of costume dramas. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Jenny Beavan and the most amazing people. You can be on a bigger budget movie and they’ll make your clothes, but as you know there are a lot of fantastic costume house in England. You find you’re wearing Kate Winslet’s shoes, or you’ve got a necklace from some other movie. Things pass around.

What was really surprising was that I turned up on this movie with a very modest budget, and all my costumes, and Chloe’s were completely designed and made from scratch. So that was really surprising. Also, a real treat because my character doesn’t half like her clothes.

It was a really big part of the character. She starts off a widow, gradually with a respectable period of time, eases into a mauve, and ends up in red dresses.

They are quite a lot. Hair and make-up was fairly swift because we were mostly in wigs. Costuming took the longest time. At lunch time, we only had half hour lunches which goes by incredibly quickly. Every single day, my priority would be getting my corset off for at least ten minutes, which is a terrible idea. It’s like when you’re at a party and your shoes are too small, the worst thing you can do is take it off because then getting it back on really hurts, and it was a bit like that with the corset. I just did it every day for that gasp of air.

AD: What about the accent and you had to go super posh for this. Where did you go for inspiration?

KS: I’m fairly posh to begin with. It is an interesting thing because when I did Emma, I went to Joan Washington who is the most gifted and wonderful dialect coach. The producer of that said by going there it would iron out any hint of London in my accent. It was incredibly helpful and fascinating in terms of the nuances of how accents change. So, for this, I went back to see her. I love accents and have one long meeting and go through the script, and that’s what I did here, and it was just wonderful. .

AD: The scenes with Tom Bennett were wonderful to watch. Did you have fun shooting that because those scenes were hysterical?

KS: What was so amazing about him because he was one of the few cast members who wasn’t able to be present for the table read, and joined us through Skype. Very often that means a person doesn’t feel they’re connected to the table read. He arrived with this very complete character who was hilarious. The table read was derailed, everybody was so thrilled and astonished by this hilarious performance. Whit was so tickled, I think he ended up with more scenes than he originally had because it was such a fun character. Also, he’s the nicest person in the whole world.

AD: Up next, you’ve got three movies coming out this year?

KS: I’m not sure if The Disappointment Rooms will come out this year, or next. At the moment, I’m writing. There’s a British writer, Emma Forrest who is a baby journalist. She wrote this brilliant book, Your Voice in My Head. She and I went to the same school. We’re writing this script together and that’s a process that I’m enjoying a lot.

With my daughter being a little bit older, it’s given me the freedom to do that. That’s what I’m in the middle of right now.

AD: You don’t drive. I remember moving here, losing my license and having to walk everywhere. It was a nightmare. What’s that like for you living in LA?

KS: I think because I’ve never driven anywhere, I don’t know any better. I live with a degree of frustration of captivity that I think is normal, but isn’t. Lucky they also invented Uber quite recently. That’s helped me out. I’m happy they thought of me when they were thinking that up. [laughs].
Also, what’s deeply embarrassing and shaming, is that my daughter has actually learned how to drive and got her licenses. [laughs] I’ve been saying, I can go and take my test, in the meantime this baby I had says, “I can drop you off.”

AD: I’m sure she would.

KS: Ha. I’m sure she’s dying to become my chauffeur. It’s quite a novelty at the moment, but I’m sure I could overuse that. [laughs]

Love & Friendship is on release