Bel Powley (‘A Small Light’): ‘We want people to self-reflect and ask, ‘What would I do?” [Complete Interview Transcript]
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During a recent Gold Derby video interview, news and features editor Ray Richmond spoke in-depth with Bel Powley about her starring role in the eight-part, Holocaust-themed limited series “A Small Light” from National Geographic, which is eligible at the 2023 Emmy Awards. Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.
“I don’t think many people know the story of Miep (Gies),” believes Bel Powley, the British-born actress who portrays her in the eight-part Nat Geo limited series “A Small Light” that has now premiered on the channel and the following day on Disney+ and Hulu. “In terms of our industry, in terms of film and television, I think one of the reasons for it is that pre-#MeToo, people weren’t making shows or spending money on projects with stories about women. I’ve been searching for a role like this my entire career. Post-#MeToo, there are suddenly all of these kind of incredible female heroes coming out of the woodwork. So it’s a really exciting moment and I can’t wait to share Miep’s story with the world.”
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That story is one the public knows well, and yet perhaps at the same time not at all. It’s the one about Anne Frank, but it’s told from the perspective of Gies, the courageous woman who hid Frank and the extended family (also including her father) in an Amsterdam dwelling that came to be known as the Secret Annex. In “A Small Light,” Powley is Gies, a twentysomething Austrian secretary whose Jewish boss Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) asks her to shelter him and his family from the Nazis as persecution of the Jews continued to intensify in 1942.
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The full transcript of the interview follows.
Ray Richmond: “Hi everyone. I’m Ray Richmond, the news and features editor here at Gold Derby, and I’m here today with Bel Powley, who portrays Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank and her extended family from the Nazis in the Nat Geo Disney+ Hulu eight-part limited series “A Small Light” that premiered May 1. Bel, one thing that struck me about this story as it’s told here is that Miep isn’t portrayed as any kind of saint, but just as a real human being doing what humans do. And I know that’s what the real life Miep believed too.”
Bel Powley: “Yeah, that really was her kind of mantra until she died at 101, actually. She lived a long, long life and her mantra really was, ‘Don’t put me on a pedestal. Don’t call me a hero. No one should ever think that they have to be special in order to help others.’ And it’s where the title of our show comes from, The ‘Small Light’ is from a quote that Miep used to end her talks with, which was ‘Anyone, even a ordinary secretary or teenager or housewife, can turn on a small light in a dark room.’ She really wanted us to be able to see ourselves in her and us to recognize that everyone has that good inside of them and anyone can do the right thing.”
RR: “And we saw in the first part of ‘A Small Light’ that you’re a regular young woman in late 1930s, Amsterdam, drinking and partying and enjoying life and not some studious, heroic, dusty figure.”
BP: “Yeah. And that’s what makes her so relatable. That’s what I related to it. I can relate to going out with my mates and feeling a bit directionless in your early twenties and falling in love for the first time and partying too much. Those are the things that make her a kind of everywoman. And I think it’s really important that if we’re going to rehash this part of history and to tell the story of Anne Frank, that people know all too well, that we do it in this kind of relatable way to make people connect. And Miep is a really good way into that.”
RR: “It’s such an easy thing to try to make it contemporary, make it today, yet I’ve never seemingly seen that in a period piece. And it’s fascinating to see. It makes it that much more powerful, not less powerful.”
BP: “Yeah, absolutely. And really that’s what drew me to the project in the first place is, I often have shied away from period pieces because I find it hard to connect to them. Maybe because of the language or sometimes you are in these costumes, you can feel a bit trussed up, you feel distanced from it. Whereas with this, and with Tony (Phelan) and Joan (Rater), our creator’s choice of having everyone speak in kind of modern-day speak, it closed that kind of gap and you just immediately feel connected to it.”
RR: “The thing is, everyone, particularly Jews like myself, felt like they know. And I knew the story of Anne and the Secret Annex up, down and sideways, but the Miep Gies part has largely fallen through the cracks, even though she did a documentary in the past and I know there was a book. Somehow that story has not resonated down through recent history like Anne Frank’s story itself. So it seems like you’re kind of setting a little bit of a tone in putting that out there in a way that it hasn’t been done for the last couple of decades.”
BP: “Absolutely. And I think in terms of our industry, in terms of film and television, I think one of the reasons is that post-#MeToo, people weren’t making shows or spending money on making shows with stories about women. I’ve been searching for a role like this my entire career. But for most of my career, people didn’t make shows about people like Miep and post-#MeToo, there are all of these incredible female heroes coming out of the woodwork that people are finally wanting to write about. So it’s a really exciting moment and I can’t wait to share Miep’s story with the world.”
RR: “What else can we learn about this story that we didn’t already know? And why do you think it deserves this sort of ongoing attention?”
BP: “Well, I don’t think people know about Miep. And also I don’t think people know much about what was going on in Amsterdam and about the Dutch resistance. Miep and her husband Jan ended up working for the Dutch resistance, and viewers will see as they watch a show that they ended up helping many other Jews and saving kids and saving babies. They did some pretty heroic and incredible things. And I do think it’s important that people know the story of Anne Frank and she’s kind of been immortalized in the diary and people will just think about it kind of as a book. And what we’re trying to do here is humanize the family and humanize Anne and humanize these characters again, to make people connect and also make people think about what would I do? Because that part of history, the forties, there are many parallels to what’s going on in the world today. So if we’re going to rehash this part of history, I think it’s important that it’s relatable and make people connect it to what’s going on right now.”
RR: “That’s the thing that makes it even more contemporary I think, Bel, is that there are so many relatable elements to this to today, and it’s far more relevant than we probably even want it to be.”
BP: “Absolutely. Anti-Semitism is massively on the rise. There are more displaced people in the world now than there ever have been before. We’re living through a huge refugee crisis, the war in Ukraine, authoritarian regimes popping up all over the world. There are so many parallels. So I guess in some ways, maybe our show is a bit of a cautionary tale about how quickly society can fall into the same horrible patterns.”
RR: “Even as a Jew growing up, I never really quite understood what was behind anti-Semitism or you would think it’s just some kind of phase, but it always comes back.”
BP: “Yeah, I mean… Yeah.”
RR: “And why? You wonder what did the Jews do to these different segments of society to deserve this kind of persecution. It’s baffling. It doesn’t make sense.”
BP: “I’m Jewish as well, and I was raised Jewish, and I’ve asked myself the same questions. I don’t know, man. It is baffling, it’s not nice.”
RR: “It seems like we get a different sort of Anne Frank here too, much more precocious and teen-like and non-victimy, which I think is also more relatable than we’re used to.”
BP: “Totally. Yeah, I mean, the years that Anne was in the Annex, she was 13 to 15. I was a teenage girl once, and I can only tell you that’s a really intense time for a young woman. And so in some ways our story for Miep in a different way, but also for Anne, is like it’s a bit of a coming-of-age story. And I think Billie Boullet, our Anne, her playing of Anne is just so grounded and natural and relatable and I think she’s done a really fantastic job. And she’s made it her own, but also I think it’s really great.”
RR: “I’ve often wondered if she would’ve written her diary, maybe a dumb question or observation, if she would have written her diary at all differently if she’d known it was going to become so world-famous in such a…”
BP: “Well you know that she did. And we do include this in our show, she’d actually already written her… she’d written the diary and about I think a couple of months before D-Day, a couple of months before they got discovered, they heard on the radio the Queen saying, ‘You preserve your diaries and preserve letters and stuff because when this war is over, we need to use them.’ So Anne actually went back to the beginning of her diary and started rewriting it because she was like, ‘The queen wants my diary and this is going to be…’ She was like, ‘I want this to be something.’ So that’s why there were actually all of these loose pages that when Miep went to find the diary in the Annex after… well, she went to collect up their valuables after they were taken. And there was the diary and then all of these loose pages because Anne had been rewriting it from the beginning already. She wanted it to be a famous book.”
RR: “Right, but that’s the thing.”
BP: “And she knew it was good. She knew she was a good writer.”
RR: “Indeed, she was. And that’s the thing that’s particularly interesting here, Bel, is I mean, no Miep, no diary. If Miep hadn’t preserved this thing, this story would’ve died and there would’ve been no record of this.”
BP: “Absolutely. And she wasn’t preserving it because she was like, ‘This is going to be a famous book,’ obviously. She just went upstairs as soon as the Nazis left, when they took everyone out of the Annex, the first thing that Miep and Jan did was go upstairs and just collect up all the valuables. Because what the Nazis would do is come and ransack the place and send all of the valuables to Germany. So they collected Otto’s briefcase and watches and jewelry and stuff, and she saw Anne’s diary on the ground and she thought, ‘That’s really important to her. She’s a young woman. I know this diary’s important to her. It’s been her kind of lifeline for the last two years.’ So she just saved it because she was like, I’ll give it to her when she comes back. And Miep had so much hope that the girls were going to come back. And then when very sadly they found out that the girls had died at Bergen-Belsen, she took the diary out of her desk drawer and she handed it to Otto and she said, ‘This is your daughter’s legacy.’ And so we have her to thank for it, I guess.
RR: “I imagine you became a Miep Gies expert throughout this process. It’s such an honor to play this woman.”
BP: “Yeah, absolutely. She’s really incredible.”
RR: “Talk about the ‘Small Light’ production itself. How long was the shoot? It seemed like, from what I’ve read and what I’ve seen of your interviews, everyone got on very well.”
BP: “Yeah, it was about a five-month shoot. We shot it in blocks. So we did episodes one, two, three together, then four and five, then six, seven, eight in the middle. We shot in Prague on soundstages, our production designer Mark Holmes literally built the entire Annex and Opekta offices like a complete duplicate in these soundstages in Prague. The sets were absolutely incredible. And then we shot a lot of the exteriors in Amsterdam. We were lucky enough and it was completely invaluable to us, we were able to go there and we shot all of the canal stuff and the cycling, and we shot outside the Frank’s original apartment, Merwedeplein in Amsterdam, and it was very special day. And it was a long shoot and we were very pushed for time. Sometimes I was working kind of 14 hours a day every day for five months. And obviously the subject matter, it’s heavy and we’re doing heavy stuff a lot.
“So I think that really brought the cast and crew together. And I mean, sometimes when you are doing something this intense, you’re forced to have a good time. We had a good time on the weekends basically because you need a release and it really did bring everyone together. So we really were this kind of ensemble and we went out for loads of nice dinners and we had a fun karaoke night once. I don’t know, we blew off steam together and really looked after each other. Because I think that is the only kind of way to get through it, otherwise you really do kind of drive yourself into the ground, I guess.”
RR: “So you really do take this material to heart while you’re doing it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, you know, you leave it at the office and you’re just a performer.’ The heaviness of the material stays with you.”
BP: “It’s hard not to with the heaviness and also because of the tone we were going for, this kind of modern tone, what I was saying before, I didn’t feel distance from it. I really felt like I was in it a lot all the time. So by the time we got to shooting episodes six, seven, eight, which was later on in the shoot, once I really knew Billie and Ashley so well who played Anne and Margot Frank. Once we got to the scene in episode eight, when I find out that the girls have died and they’re not coming back, it felt incredibly emotional for me because I knew these… it just felt very real. I could really empathize with the character and there were certain scenes that were just really difficult to film. And that for me was one of them.”
RR: “How often during production did you think to yourself, ‘I wonder if I would’ve had the courage to do this?’
BP: “Honestly, all the time. I still think it, and I keep saying I obviously… but that’s what we want audiences to think. We want people to self-reflect and ask, ‘What would I do?’ And I’m still asking myself that same question. I mean, I like to say, I think I’ll do the right thing. And I do think that Miep’s message, if there is one, is that we all do have that good inside of us. We are hardwired to know inherently what the right thing to do is. It’s just about whether you execute that or not, I guess.”
RR: “It’s really interesting though, Bel, at the beginning Miep certainly isn’t presented as someone who would have this inside her to be able to do this.”
BP: “Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. But she had a pretty intense upbringing herself that I think is what feeds into her courage. She was an immigrant herself in Amsterdam. She was actually born in Vienna and after the First World War, she was a starving child along with a lot of kids in Vienna. And she was sent away, there was an initiative to send these starving kids to other European countries to be adopted and essentially have their lives saved. And she was sent away at nine years old with a number around her neck on a train and adopted into a Dutch family, a language that she couldn’t even speak. And I think that experiencing the selflessness probably of her birth mother sending her away to save her life. And her adoptive parents are taking in this kid when they already had three other kids and teaching her the language and just because they were good people. I think you take that selflessness with you into the rest of your life. And then also I think you grow an incredibly thick skin from those experiences. I think that it made her tough. Yeah.”
RR: “Did you meet any other Holocaust survivors? Anyone who knew Miep? I hear you met her granddaughter, right?”
BP: “Yeah, we met her granddaughter. Miep’s son died last year, but her granddaughter, Janine, she came to visit us on set actually during a really intense day of filming. The one I was just talking about in episode eight at the train station. She was with us for two days and she also came to our premiere in Amsterdam, which was really very special.”
RR: “It’s just a beautifully done series. Just incredibly powerful and beautifully presented and I know you believe that too, because otherwise you wouldn’t be promoting it this hard.”
BP: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
RR: “But probably I would imagine you’re done with Holocaust projects for the moment. What else have you got coming up?”
BP: “Actually straight after we wrapped in November, I hopped on a plane and went upstate New York to Rochester and I filmed an indie with a director called Michael Tyburski, which was very different and very fun. It was kind of an absurd, quite like Yorgos Lanthimos in tone and kind of dystopian romance. So it was nice to go onto something completely different. So that’s in the edit now and we’ll see what happens with it this year. But right now I’m just focused on promoting this show, which as you said, I do believe in a lot and I want everyone to watch it.”
RR: “But by the same token, you needed a little bit of an exhale with your next project.”
BP: “Yeah.”
RR: “It helps, I’m sure, in terms of your acting career that you have this sort of ageless look, you could be 16 or 35.”
BP: “Wow, thank you. I think 16 maybe is a bit of a push now, but I appreciate that.”
RR: “With the right makeup I could see you still being a late teenager.”
BP: “Thank you.”
RR: “Well, with that, we’re out of time. Bel Powley, thank you so much for this time. Bel can be seen in ‘A Small Light’ beginning May 1st on Nat Geo, and the next day streaming over at Disney+ and Hulu. Thanks so much for the time and the best of luck to you.”
BP: “Thank you so much. Cheers, thanks. Nice to meet you.”
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