Marisa Abela Doesn’t See Amy Winehouse as a Victim

For me, the most visceral part of the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black starring Marisa Abela was her shoes. The image of the real Winehouse walking down the streets of London in those tiny, flimsy ballet slippers, staring mournfully at the paparazzi that harassed her until her death, is one of those indelible moments from ’00s pop culture that are forever imprinted on my brain. I don’t think there’s a former Perez Hilton reader alive who could watch Abela, playing Amy, strut down the street in a facsimile of those same shoes and not feel a sad queasiness of guilt for participating in the singer’s trauma, no matter if it was just through the screen.

During her lifetime Amy Winehouse was a controversial figure, one who it seems the mainstream media didn’t know what to do with. To them it felt incongruous that someone who could pen the soulful, beautiful songs on her debut album Frank and the multi-Grammy-winning breakthrough Back to Black could also be, well, a complicated person, struggling with demons and addictions. After she became well-known for her music, Winehouse began to be relentlessly stalked by the tabloids, who called her cruel names and mocked her viciously. Then, after her 2011 death from alcohol poisoning, we began to reexamine our behavior, as we have for similarly “messy” women from the ‘90s and ’00s. The culture quickly started to decry her treatment, calling her a victim.

But Winehouse was something much more poignant than either of these portrayals. Simply put, she was a nuanced woman, the kind that our society struggles to digest. But Abela is hoping that her film, which is released in the US on Friday, will start to change that.

“What we’ve done with our film, I really think, is give Amy some semblance of her power back,” Abela says. “She was such a ferocious artist and a fiery woman. She was so alive and present and capable and talented, and the discourse for so long has been one of a victim. And she was a victim of addiction, and she was a victim of a culture that was obsessed with her, but she was a powerful artist. I think adding that back into the conversation is important.”

Not long after beginning work on the film, Abela began to get a small taste of what Winehouse had gone through. After photos emerged of her filming on the streets of London, the internet had a field day, picking apart the movie before they’d even seen a scene. For Abela, the reaction and attention were only reminders of how big of a talent Winehouse was.

“I can completely understand that the thing about musicians is that people have such personal relationships with them,” she says. “It’s why biopics do well at the cinema, because people are interested, but there’s also just a lot of emotion wrapped around it. That doesn’t really have anything to do with me as a person. It’s more to do with the individual’s personal relationship to Amy. And that’s completely understandable.”

Ahead of the film’s debut in the States, Abela chatted with Glamour about whether celebrity gossip culture is really any better today, how we treat nuanced women in the public eye, and her favorite Winehouse song.

Glamour: One of the most poignant parts of the film for me was how rapidly Amy went from living a normal life to being stalked by paparazzi after her career exploded with Back to Black. I’m curious if you’ve related to that as you’ve started doing tons of press for your first big role.

Marisa Abela: Definitely. While I was working, I had to put myself in that place imaginatively and think about what it would be like to offer yourself up artistically and give yourself so authentically through your music that then people feel like you owe them something. Like, “I know you so well because my favorite song is ‘Love Is a Losing Game,’ so where do you buy your groceries?” It’s such a weird appetite. I think that for Amy, especially someone that is a vulnerable person, it pushes you into a very isolated space. So exploring that as an actor was hard and sad. But the difference as an actor is when I’m doing these interviews, I’m talking about my process and if I want to talk about myself I can, and if I want to draw comparisons between Amy’s life and mine, I can, but that’s also my choice because I’m not writing a song that is incredibly personal to me.

You’re not opening yourself up emotionally in the same way.

The thing about musicians is that it's so intensely personal, so she laid out all of her life for people to consume it artistically in Back to Black, but it wasn’t enough. Sam [Taylor-Johnson, the director] did a really good job of showing that sort of insatiable appetite for who Amy was in the more mundane personal way rather than artistically.

I remember reading about Amy in the tabloids and on Perez Hilton, especially, when the events in the film were occurring. I knew the way she was treated was disgusting, but seeing it on camera really hits home. What was it like to reenact that ’00s tabloid culture is such a visceral way?

It’s really interesting. I think that we have this moral superiority of ourselves 20 years ago. You look at headlines about Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse or Princess Diana and you think like, Oh my God, that would never get said now. In a headline, you are probably right. There was a newspaper feature about Amy that was called “Wino Watch,” that was just like, “How drunk did Amy get this week?” But that still exists. They’re slightly different now, but the sort of exploitative nature of people’s reality will always be intense as a culture.

Oh, totally. What people say about celebrities on TikTok now is often so much worse.

I think the difference now is that tabloids understand what they can and can’t get away with. It’s social media and the individual that has no responsibility to anyone. You can create a fake account and say whatever the hell you want, and there’d be no repercussions, delete it and make another one the next day. So rather than having an institution label you as crazy, an addict, toxic, whatever, you have thousands of individuals doing it online. I don’t know if that’s any better at all. There doesn’t seem to be any intention to limit that on these platforms. So I think people that are public are still vulnerable to that hate.

What do you think young people today should take away from Amy’s story about how we treat celebrities?

I think it’s difficult because it’s the only job where it’s not—you have no control over how people are going to respond and how much people are going to want from you. I think we are seeing more and more from a younger generation, the ability to set boundaries. Boundaries in Amy’s time weren’t cool. Mental health wasn’t understood in the same way…I think people are not afraid to set boundaries for themselves and say to people, “I’m not doing that. I’m really sorry, but I’m here with my family” or whatever it is. I think not feeling like you owe it to people to constantly be available to them. That’s not healthy for anyone. I feel like any normal person that went to a therapist, a therapist would say create boundaries. Create time for yourself, space for yourself. I don’t understand why people in the public eye need to be on and available and public property forever.

Amy is a beloved icon to so many, and there was a lot of chatter on social media about the film, especially once set photos were released. How did you block out these opinions on set?

It is within your control to lean in and read those things and become obsessed by them or not. If you break up with someone, you are either the person that spends all of your time on their Instagram seeing if they’ve posted a new story or if they’re liking anyone’s pictures, or you just turn it off and you are like, “I’m not going to look.” You mute them and it’s done. And I think that that is within your control. Also, I think it was more difficult before the film came out because there were all of these opinions and it wasn’t based on anything. And as an actor that didn’t make any sense to me. I was like, “But surely the point is the work.” I’m really all about the work. And thankfully since the film has come out, the discourse around the film has definitely become more varied.

I think the other thing is that some people believe that you shouldn’t make art about artists that they care about, which is kind of strange to me.

Especially women. I think they’re more ready to accept stories about men. There’s something that happens to women, especially when they pass away. There’s a sort of sanctity around women in death that it becomes too fragile for people to deal with, which I understand for people that have a genuine relationship to Amy and her music, that it’s a very sensitive situation. But I think that I say the culture was so ready to criticize Amy while she was alive, and the moment a woman dies, it’s like she was perfect. No one can touch her. She’s an angel and a saint. Leave it alone. And it’s so interesting. I think it’s something about we’re horrible to women, famous women when they’re alive, we hold them to such an incredibly high standard, and if they can’t live up to that impossible standard, then we’re just brutal to them. And the second something terrible happens…it’s the same with Diana.

Obviously it’s different, but I’m now imagining if they did a Taylor Swift biopic, how horrible the discourse would be.

I know. It’s funny. There’s a Bob Dylan biopic coming out, and the Bruce Springsteen biopic is about to start, and so clearly there’s an appetite. Otherwise it would stop making these films. But that’s the weird thing about social media is, you never know what way it’s going to go, but then people do end up going to see the films, so who knows?

You did your own singing in the film and had never sung professionally before this, which is incredible. What was your favorite Amy song to sing, and what is your favorite song of hers overall, if they are different?

My favorite song to sing in the film was “What Is It About Men,” which is actually the first of her own songs that you see her write on the guitar in her bedroom. Because it just felt like a really important moment to connect the audience to what this film is really about, which is, where did these songs come from? And watching the magic that we all know happened in real time. It’s interesting. Some of my favorite Amy songs are ones that we didn’t do in the movie probably because whenever I hear the ones that we did, now I can’t help but think about where we were on that day and what happened. I love “Wake Up Alone.” I think “Wake Up Alone” and “Love Is a Losing Game,” I think it is a completely beautiful song.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Originally Appeared on Glamour