Tuppence Middleton on MeToo, nudity and playing Downton Abbey’s new love interest

“I  have tended to play the slightly naughty femme fatale,” says Tuppence Middleton, innocently, as she talks about the contrast between her usual roles and her latest, as demure Mary Edison, wife of the great US inventor Thomas Edison, in her new film, The Current War.

Many will remember her as the scandalous Hélène Kuragina in Andrew Davies’s acclaimed adaptation of War and Peace – she lit up two of the series’ most talked-about scenes, enjoying incestuous sex with her brother Anatole (Callum Turner), then setting the crockery rattling in an adulterous tryst over a dining table. How was the furore for her?

“It was fun, actually,” she says, “you never know how people are going to respond to it, especially the Tolstoy purists … it’s all part of it, isn’t it?”

We’re in a quiet room in an office on a summer’s day. Middleton is a vivid presence, raven-haired, with striking eyes, full of playfulness and wit. The Current War is the first time she’s played a mother – to the couple’s three children.

She got a shock shooting one scene, in which she had to faint in a cornfield while taking the eldest two for a walk. The director, she says, was trying to gently encourage Mary’s son Dash (child actor Woody Norman) not to smile so much when he comes back to find his stricken mother, “And [Woody] said, ‘it’s really funny, though, I just run over and there’s this weird old lady lying on the ground’ – and I thought, ‘I’m 30! Oh God, this is the start of it’.” She’s 32 now.

The Current War has taken a while to make its way to cinemas – it was re-edited after its first cut was rushed out by original producer Harvey Weinstein. It’s a fascinating tale, that also stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison and Michael Shannon as entrepreneur George Westinghouse, who locked horns at the end of the 19th century over who would dominate the distribution of electricity in the US.

Middleton’s career to date has been strangely poised between sci-fi and period drama: she was in Netflix’s thoroughly weird Sense8, the 2015 blockbuster Jupiter Ascending, and Black Mirror, as well as Dickensian and The Lady Vanishes. Last year, she was one of the newcomers joining the ensemble cast at Highclere to shoot the Downton Abbey film in which King George V and Queen Mary visit the Granthams. (It’s released in September).

The read-through, she says, was surreal. “It was the biggest table read I’d ever been to, this huge table in a warehouse studio. I’m really short sighted anyway, but you could barely see anyone across the room, all of these iconic faces.” So, what can she tell us about her character, Lucy? “She arrives with the party who are coming with the royal party,” Middleton says. “I feel like it’s a little hush-hush, but she’s the lady’s maid to Imelda Staunton’s character Mrs Bagshawe, so she’s technically downstairs but she’s used to being around the upper classes – she’s very comfortable with them but doesn’t quite feel at home there.”

Did she have a scene with Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham? “I did have a scene with Maggie,” she says, excitedly. “It was lovely … you think, am I going to be on the end of a very witty quip? But actually, no, she was so gentle and easy to be around. It was me, Imelda and Maggie in a scene where we’re all sort of pursing our lips and looking over our shoulders at each other.” She continues. “Lucy’s slightly lost at the point when she comes to Downton and then meets someone who she falls for a little bit … maybe …” – she’s wondering what she is allowed to say – “ … so there’s a little bit of a love story.”

So, she’s the love interest? “I’m the love interest, yes, for one of the characters, I’m sure you can guess which … the one who I think the fans will feel deserves a love interest.” It’s not too much of a leap to arrive at Branson, the former chauffeur, who married into the Crawleys then lost his wife Lady Sybil in childbirth. Middleton laughs at herself trying to say things cryptically.

Despite being downstairs in Downton, Middleton accepts that she is thought of as a posh actor, though she says it probably has more to do with her voice – “quite neutral and posh-sounding” – than her independent education. She grew up in Bristol. “I think I just lost the accent when I went to school, but I definitely had it when I was younger.”

On stage last year she appeared in The One, a role that was originally written for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Middleton wades happily into the Fleabag debate. “I certainly didn’t feel it was just for posh girls, so much of the humour is universal.” One thing about being called Tuppence, she says, is that it “makes people think my parents are crazy hippies, and they’re really not. They’re nice, ordinary people. My mum’s a hairdresser, my dad works for an investment company.”

Her elder sister, Angel, is a social worker who recently had twins, making Middleton an auntie for the first time. Their younger brother Josh is lead guitarist with successful heavy metal band Architects, and the only sibling to escape their parents’ penchant for naming their children after terms of endearment (he was nearly Bubba). Was he always blasting out guitar in his room as a kid? She laughs. “He didn’t even do it in his room – he’ll hate me for saying this – he used to go and sit on the lavatory and lock the bathroom door, because he said the acoustics were really good, and me and my sister would be hammering at the door, ‘Josh! You’ve been in there for hours!’”

She was “very dreamy as a child”, she says. “I got lost in books and films and was a bit sad when real life wasn’t as adventurous or romantic.” That feeling wasn’t present as she flew back and forth to St Petersburg and its palaces in winter to film War and Peace. It was one of the last major projects to be produced by Weinstein before he was engulfed by multiple accusations ranging from sexual coercion to rape. “I did meet him,” she says, “but he was always dashing in and out of set. I was never one on one with him for an extended period of time.”

Had she been warned about him? “No one was explicitly warned, I think there was always an implication. It would be unrealistic to say that you’d never heard anything of that nature. I didn’t really get enough of an experience of him [to say] but I certainly know people who did.”

She has noticed changes since the MeToo moment happened, especially in roles she’s played that require sex scenes. She suggests they’re “more policed” now, then decides that’s too clinical, but certainly she has noticed a “specificity” about potentially tricky scenes when contracts are drawn up.

She talks about finding a middle ground – “pre- or post-MeToo, if someone’s comfortable with doing those scenes then that’s their prerogative. I think some actors will never be OK with nudity. I’ve never really had a problem with it. I mean, of course, there’s this nightmare thing now where people can isolate a shot and put it on an online porn site, which is very hard to prevent … [but] I think sex is a massive part of most people’s lives, it’s how we physically connect with people that we’re in love with – or not in love with – so why not show that. People get shot on screen every day and that doesn’t happen nearly as much as people having sex.”

The Current War is released in cinemas on Friday