Bel Powley: ‘A Small Light’ Is A “Timely” True Wartime Story About “The Everyday Heroes” Among Us In The Face Of Anti-Semitism

Antonia Blyth
·12 min read
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Behind the tragic story of Anne Frank and her family, there is an oft-unsung hero who risked her life to protect them in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

The limited series A Small Light from National Geographic with Hulu and Disney+ tells the true story of Miep Gies, a Dutch woman who hid the Franks and other members of the Jewish community in a secret apartment above her place of work.

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For Bel Powley (The Morning Show; The King of Staten Island), playing Gies meant telling a story steeped in heart-wrenching tragedy, but also the touching connection Gies had with those she protected, and her role in preserving Anne Frank’s diary for her father Otto (Liev Schreiber), the immediate family’s only survivor.

Here, Powley describes the research and emotional process involved in playing the role and the impact of telling a story that remains so vital today, during a time when anti-semitism remains prevalent.

I binged A Small Light in two sittings. I had thought it would be a really tough watch, but it’s such an inspiring story too.

That’s really what drew me to the project. This is a part of history that’s been covered a lot in film and television, and often it’s very doom and gloom, which of course it was. It’s the Nazi occupation. It’s the Holocaust. But what really excites me about this exploration of this part of history is it was really exploring the humanity rather than the kind of overarching political and historical backdrop.

We’ve learned about this in school. We’ve read Anne’s diary. We know that 6 million Jews were sent like lambs to the slaughter. And I just think that it was important to me if I was going to be in something that was re-exploring this part of history, it was in a way that made people connect.

I think in human nature, the way we deal with difficult situations is trying to find lightness. So that’s why I was like, “Whoa, this is a really interesting take on this story.” Because it still does make you laugh through your tears. I think that’s just how humans are. We all can relate to having been in sad situations. I’m sure we can think about when you’ve been to a funeral or someone’s died, we always find a way to lift each other up. And I think that that’s what this was trying to show. And I think in doing that, hopefully it makes an audience actually connect to these people rather than think, “Oh, I’m watching something about a genocide that happened 80 years ago.”

And the Holocaust is just so horrific I think people can find it almost unimaginable and difficult to process.

Yes. Telling it through Miep’s eyes, this everyday woman, and telling it through this day-to-day lens, I think makes it more relatable. And what we as humans can relate to is young love and marriage or coming-of-age. The Franks were still parenting their kids in the annex, and Anne was 13 to 15. It was the most intense time for a teenager. Miep, even though she was doing all these heroic things, was also navigating her marriage with her husband. And it’s that kind of minutiae that we as people I think can hang onto and connect to. And then you set those that micro against the macro, which is obviously, you’re in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and it’s 1942.

You went to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam before the shoot. I went as a teenager and it had a huge impact on me. I can’t imagine what it was like for you going there before you were about to tell this story.

Maybe this is not the right word, but it was mind-blowing and kind of amazing in one way because it’s rare that you’ll play a real person and you can actually go and sit at the window that she would’ve sat at, at her desk, and walk up the actual stairs to the annex where… Do you know what I mean? I could actually be in the place. So that was kind of incredible. But also, I don’t know if you found this, but it has got a very eerie feeling to it, being in there. And especially when they allowed me to go into Otto’s office, which is not a space in the Anne Frank House that’s open to the public. I think it was probably also because it was quieter and there were no tourists in there, but it had this heavy, thick air in there. And his real desk is still in there. And also, in reality, his office was just below the annex. So with all the tourists walking up and walking around the annex, it made you really aware of how quiet [the occupants] had to be.

It was definitely a strange but necessary, obviously, experience to have that before we actually started filming. Our sets were built as a direct replica of the annex. Our production designer, Marc Homes, is a total genius. It sounds stupid to say, but even filming in our set of the annex with nine actors in a day is claustrophobic. So sometimes Joe [Cole, who plays Miep’s husband Jan] and I would turn to each other and be like, “I don’t know how these people did this.”

Miep was, I think nearly 101 when she died, so was there anyone in her family you could talk to?

Her son Paul died last year. But he was alive when we were filming, but he had Alzheimer’s, so we weren’t able to connect with him. But his daughter, Miep’s granddaughter, she came to set while we were filming. She came to our premiere and it was like obviously such an honor to meet her and so special to meet someone who was related to Miep. I think it was obviously a bizarre experience for her. Because when you think about your grandma, let alone if they were as heroic as Miep, you always think about your grandma as an old person, right? I was playing her grandma when she was in her 20s. So I remember after the premiere and she was like, “Oh, I don’t know if my grandma would’ve jumped in the canal.” But it’s so hard to fathom your grandparents having to go through that. It was a total honor to meet her. There were a couple of characters from the show, the little boy, Alfred, from episode 3 when they hide the kids [in a remote farm village]. [The real Alfred] came to our premiere. Isn’t that amazing?

That’s extraordinary.

Yeah, it was incredible. And since doing this press tour, I’ve done talks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and I’ve met so many incredible Holocaust survivors. And it makes you realize that… And this is what Miep wanted us all to realize, that she wasn’t the only one. There were so many quiet, everyday heroes working underground in not just Amsterdam, but all of the occupied cities in Europe.

I know that you read her book, Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family. And then there was a film made of the book, Anne Frank Remembered.

Yes, it won an Oscar. I focused mainly on the book, because I find it easier to focus on something that I can imagine in my head. I like to create the character even though it’s based on a real person from the ground up, from my own brain. And the book is obviously her first-hand account of the events. And she also covers her life story from when she left Vienna. So it’s very, very useful, and you do really get a sense of her sassy cheekiness. But there isn’t much footage obviously of Miep at the age I was playing her. So it was kind of my version of her.

I found her so relatable. I can’t relate to the situation she was in, but I can relate to being a woman in their early 20s. I can relate to someone newly in love. I can relate to someone with a best friend. So it was those things that I could bring a little bit of myself to it as well. And I was comforted by the fact that Miep’s mantra until the day she died was, “Don’t put me on a pedestal or call me a hero. I’m an everyday woman. I’m an everyday person who just was brave enough to do an extraordinary thing.”

So I think the fact that she wanted us all to see a bit of ourselves in her almost made it easier to play her, rather than to be like, ‘I’m playing this saintly person, how am I going to do that?’ We’re all a bit of Miep, I think.

There’s been a really horrifying resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric. And when you were shooting it, that was in the news quite a lot.

Yeah. It was crazy. I mean, I’m Jewish and I’ve—not a lot, but over the course of my life—experienced anti-semitism a bit in school, but not for a while. To be honest, it was mostly in school a couple of times. In our show, which is a period piece, there’s a lot of Nazi rhetoric. But then, actually towards the end of filming, it was when we were filming Liberation. So we were filming the more happy scene, which was when they’re all out, being like, “Hitler’s dead. Hitler’s dead.”

That was the day that all of the Kanye stuff was at its height. And it was just crazy seeing a man, who loads of my peers really respect and love, spouting really intense anti-semitic, hateful things. And then in LA, it was really horrible. There was that flag over the freeway and the flyers, and it was just a very out-of-body bizarre, sad, scary moment, just about how timely the show was that we are making. It was scary for sure.

I did really enjoy the relationship between Miep and her husband. How did you and Joe build that dynamic?

I was so lucky that it was him. We didn’t know each other before. We have a few mutual friends, but we really were chucked in a bit at the deep end with this show. We were very pushed for time. They added another episode at the last minute, which they kind of squeezed in. So we had to work very quickly. And Joe and I just slotted into this incredible rhythm immediately.

Off-camera, we really get on, we’re really close friends. We joke around with each other. We have a very similar sense of humor. But also on camera, we have a very similar process, which is that we very much get up and go, “Let’s just get it on its feet and do it and feel it out.” We’re not ones to be sitting around over-intellectualizing it before we do it. So that was, I think, really useful and necessary. It wouldn’t have been good if we didn’t have the same process.

Also I think the Jan and Miep scenes for both of us were sometimes a bit of a respite from the intensity of the annex scenes. You don’t feel as much the pressure of the historical and political backdrop when you’re in those scenes. When we are doing those scenes, it’s a couple, it’s navigating a marriage.

So whenever we would know that we were having a week in Miep and Jan’s apartment and we were getting onto into all that stuff, we were both always so excited. Because it was like, “Oh, I can breathe now.” It’s like back to just being us and just the Miep and Jan show.

What’s been some of the most moving feedback you’ve had from people about the show?

I’ve had a lot of people who are like, “I’m a grandson, granddaughter, or son or daughter of Holocaust survivors.” The aim of the show is, “Let’s actually make people think about what it was actually like to go through this rather than just bash people over their heads with the same facts they already know.” And so many friends and colleagues and people I work with, I didn’t really even realize that they were grandkids of Holocaust survivors. So it’s just really beautiful to finally learn about those stories and meet those people.

What’s next for you?

I went straight onto a movie after A Small Light, which was probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done because I was so tired. And I literally, I’d been in Prague for five months [shooting A Small Light] and I went home, packed my bags for two days and went up to New York to shoot another movie. It’s called Turn Me On. Michael Tyburski directed it and it’s kind of in the style of Yorgos Lanthimos. It’s very absurd and I guess it’s kind of like a sci-fi romance, you could call it, but weirder than that sounds. It’s going to be good. It’s quite sexy. But yeah, from the past, straight into the future. It’s set in a dystopian future. So it was definitely a nice departure from being in the ’40s and wearing a corset and having my hair curled every day for five months.

And you have a film at Tribeca?

It’s called Cold Copy and it’s myself and Tracee Ellis Ross. It’s a psychological thriller about a journalism student who becomes obsessed with her professor.

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