Ruth Wilson (‘The Woman in the Wall’): ‘There’s an anarchic quality to me’ when ‘pushing the boundaries and taking risks’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Rob Licuria
·4 min read
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“There’s a part of me that just likes letting rip and there’s an anarchic quality to me, which comes out in some characters,” declares Ruth Wilson about her latest iteration of an unhinged, deeply disturbed woman at the center of Showtime’s dark comedy-drama thriller “The Woman in the Wall.” For our recent webchat she adds about the nuances of portraying a character plagued by chronic sleepwalking that, “one of the things that appeal to me with this show was what she does in her sleep, and the idea of her subconscious coming out in her sleep and her real thoughts and feelings and actions being expressed in her sleep and her having no control over it, and her being scared of sleeping because of what she might do, I thought, that’s such a brilliant premise to set a character up,” she says. “The line between sleep and awake becomes very fine. She’s not sleeping at all, so she becomes mad, and I think that’s such a brilliant premise to hold on to someone trying to hold onto their sanity and everyone else is telling her she’s mad.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

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“The Woman in the Wall” was created by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Joe Murtagh (“Calm With Horses”) in which Wilson stars as off-kilter outcast Lorna Brady, who wakes up one morning and discovers the dead body of a woman in her home in the fictional village of Kilkinure, Ireland. Lorna has no idea who the dead woman is, or even of her own culpability, as she suffers from extreme bouts of sleepwalking. In a series of flashbacks, the Showtime/BBC co-production explores Lorna’s traumatic past from her time incarcerated in one of the infamous Magdalene laundry convents, a church-run institution in Ireland that forced “fallen women” to carry out unpaid laundry work, sewing, cleaning and cooking as penitence for violating so-called moral codes. The six-part thriller co-stars BAFTA nominee Daryl McCormack (“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”), who plays Detective Colman Akande, crosses paths with Lorna when he arrives in town to investigate the murder of a local priest.

Wilson, previously a BAFTA and two-time Tony Award nominee, was keen to dive in to the project, not only because of the compelling story at the heart of the series, but also because of its hybrid tone, which swings from black comedy to harrowing drama and psychological horror. “It’s a story that needs to get out there, an important story that needs to be told. But what was surprising about it was the way it’s being told. And I thought Joe was starting to land on something really interesting about the horrifying nature of this reality, how you can put that through a horror lens,” she explains. “It makes sense to put this as a crime caper and almost Gothic horror story because it was horrifying. And it’s a crime at the center of it, in reality. I thought, that’s really smart. And I think if we can do that successfully, we can try and get it out to a wider audience. It isn’t just a documentary or just a straightforward drama. We are putting it through genre tropes, which helps an audience feel at ease sometimes, or familiar with some of the material. But then, okay, we will suddenly turn it on its head and make them feel very disconcerted. I love the challenge of that. It did mean it was hard as a performer and also producer,” she says, adding that “we’re turning things on its head and we’re pushing the boundaries and taking risks. That did feel quite challenging. And as an actor, I need to create a character that can exist in very naturalistic scenes and social realism, but then I also need to be able to serve the horror elements of it, and also the black comedy elements of it, too. I’ve got to traverse all these different genres and find something that feels believable within all those genres. That was a real challenge, but one that was fun, and really satisfying.”

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