Bel Powley on How an Ordinary Person Can Do the Extraordinary for ‘A Small Light’

Bel Powley gives one of the best performances of the year as Miep Gies in NatGeo’s A Small Light. We must be reminded of the atrocities of the Holocaust, especially as Nazi flags are being flown outside Disney World and a Columbus drag brunch just in the last few weeks. A Small Light feels ever present, and it never feels like it’s in our rearview mirror. With every twist and turn, we stand beside Powley as she navigates how to do good in a world fraught with hatred.

When a series is based on a true story, we are used to imagining how the writers have taken creative license to make the story more dramatic. A Small Light doesn’t have to do that because of the historical context. When Miep negotiates with a Nazi in one of the final episodes, I had assumed that that was made up. It’s all true.

“Honestly, there were so many moments when we’d receive scripts, and I’d call up Tony Phelan, our showrunner, to say, ‘Surely, this bit was made up,'” Powley says at the beginning of our chat. “It happened over and over again. It feels like it was done for dramatic purposes, but ninety-five percent of A Small Light is based on fact. The only thing that was definitely made up was the character of Tess. I thought they were so right to show someone who started at the same place as Miep before the war but went down the other route. Under the occupation, you are either doing something about it to help people or you’re a passive bystander. They wanted to show the choice of becoming that bystander without showing why. We aren’t meant to sympathize with her, but it’s in the vein of the show. Every step of the way, we are trying to show the humanity of the situation and how they connect to these characters. Instead of banging people over the head with facts we might already know.”

Powley never plays Miep as a saint. She remains so grounded in the moment, and she faces each decision with such certainty that it makes us, the viewers, question if we would have the courage to do the same thing. There are times when Miep cannot show her emotions because it will give her away or she has to act casual when she is trying to obtain food for everyone hiding in the Annex. We never see her sweat, but we also know that it’s affecting her. Did Miep’s upbringing make her naturally empathize?

“I’ve thought this myself every day since I read the pilot…what would I do,” she says. “She just this innate sense of right and wrong, and this strong moral compass. She was confidence but selfless with no ego. I don’t know where she got it from. Maybe it was her upbringing and how her mother sent her away from her birth country because she was starving to death to live with another family. They took her in with open arms when she didn’t speak the language. I like to think that she gained positive things from those experiences. The selflessness of her of letting her child go and the family that took Miep in infused something within her since she was nine years old. I also think those experiences gave her an incredibly thick skin. Miep has no ego, but, at the same time, she’s tough. Sometimes I think of egoless people are shyer or meek. She’s front-footed, confident, and resilient. She was such an incredible human being. That speech at the end, after everything has happened, she says something like, ‘I thought that was why I had been saved.’ It made sense in her head. Miep is referring to being saved by that Nazi on the day that the families were taken, but I think that refers to her whole life.”

Powley knew that to pay respect for the residents of the Annex she had to live in each moment. If she allowed her knowledge to seep into the characterization of Miep Gies, it might be obvious and staid. Powley relies on the tension of individual moments to guide her, and that allows us to wonder that, maybe, the outcome will be different. These actors are living so deeply in the moment that I genuinely thought the Frank and van Pels families were going to escape.

“Our writers, showrunners, and directors reminded us to not play the history,” Powley muses. “These people didn’t know the end, so why would we do that? They lived in such hope every day, and they thought it was going to work. It would’ve been so wrong if we acknowledged anything but the present. They didn’t know what was going to happen. We also have to remember that they were this close to being okay. They were on the last train out of Amsterdam. It was after D-Day.”

Despite the circumstances and despite what we know of what happened to the Frank family, A Small Light chooses to show a lot of joy. Anne flirts with Peter van Pels, and they celebrate Hanukkah. Showing that joy is key to keeping that hope alive.

“We’ve seen the films about the men in the trenches and we know the facts about the murder of six million Jews,” Powley admits. “In real life and part of the real human experience, humans naturally try to find light–that’s how we get through things. It’s so clever with how they show it through a day-to-day lens. Miep can laugh at a joke that Jan tells her at the end of the day when they are fully aware that they are hiding eight Jewish people in the Annex and they are living under Nazi occupation. In order to survive, we have to find lightness otherwise we’d drive ourselves into the group. That’s why I think it’s resonated with audiences. It’s not a sepia-toned, dusty period piece where we feel like it’s the old days. It feels like now because it’s how people were and are.”

In episode seven, the Nazis invade the Annex, and it’s one of the most thrilling episodes of television you will ever see. Told in real-time, we never see what is going on upstairs as officers force Miep to sit at her desk. Powley uses her magnificent face to transmit fear, anger, and hatred for these men all without saying a word. Miep gets one glance of the family through a hazy office door window, and it’s as devastating even if we can’t see their faces.

“Seeing them through the glass was hell,” Powley says after a brief pause. “One thing about filming that episode was that Tony Phelan, our director, had us come in on an off day, and we rehearsed it like a play since it was done in real time. Even when Kugler is rummaging in the background and I am not in the shot, Tony had me sitting in that chair to listen to what was happening. We needed to see it from beginning to end. We shot it over, I think, three days, and it was absolutely horrific. Sometimes you can do an emotional scene and you have to maybe cry on cue, but sometimes it just feels really, really real. That was one of those moments. It felt very emotional and horrible.”

The scenes that Miep shares with Otto Frank (beautifully rendered by Liev Schreiber) are some of A Small Light‘s best. He is her employer and he is so intelligent, but he puts every ounce of trust in Miep. When she begins to work for him, she is frustrated because of his lack of communication while she makes jam–he literally expects her to do her job before letting her in on what they are doing. A lot is left unsaid in those scenes, but the bond between these two people is so strong, even if they don’t talk about it.

“Those scenes are so great because of him,” she says with a laugh. “He’s honestly probably the best actor that I have ever worked with, and we work in a very similar way. He’s very fluid and organic and we will do a take ten different ways, and we could really play off each other. I didn’t think of this when I was in it, but, when I was watching it, the performances really compliment each other. He is so stoic and quiet, but it’s very arresting. Miep is outspoken and mouthy and kind of chaotic. They are some of my favorite scenes in the whole show. It’s also just a special relationship. None of us were there, so we can only speculate. My interpretation was that they were best mates, and there is something so contemporary about that–a woman in the 1940’s who is so close with a man twenty years her senior.”

Miep Gies passed away in 2010, and one of her most famous quotes is shown at the end of the series Miep also said, “Any action is better than inaction.” What would Powley say to Miep if she had the chance?

“Where did you get the chutzpah to do this,” she says simply, as if the question has been on her mind all along. “We all do have that good inside of us. Deep down, we know what the right thing to do is. It’s about whether you act on it or not. Remember her manta for the rest of her life was don’t call me special and don’t call me a hero. Anyone can do this. It’s about small acts of kindness–don’t put me on a pedestal.”

A Small Light is streaming now through Disney+.