Andrea Riseborough Interview: Love, Mess, and Alice & Jack
British actor Andrea Riseborough stars in the mesmerizing new love story Alice & Jack as high-flying financial whiz Alice—a performance that led The Wall Street Journal to call her “perhaps the most gifted and perceptive actor alive.” Upon Alice & Jack’s premiere on MASTERPIECE, she revealed the personal reason why this was the right story for her at the right time, and shared insights about the roller coaster of emotions Alice & Jack will inspire, her character Alice, and love, with all its attendant confusion, connection, and mess.
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Photo: Rahoul Ghose/PBSAlice & Jack is by no means a conventional love story. What makes it so unique?
I think perhaps the best way to describe the quality that makes Alice & Jack quite unique might be that when I’m watching something, especially episodically, I so want to see those same stupid mistakes that I make in life reflected on screen. And I crave being on a journey with a protagonist who is not in any way morally superior or even close to perfect. There’s something about this piece that captures a very ordinary, earnest, and completely understandable confusion about love.
You go through so many different relationships with the main protagonists. There are moments where you are so angry with them—not in a way that is brief or scintillating or in a cliffhanger sense, but more in a way where you’re deeply frustrated with what you can see to be their inability to let intimacy into their lives, for all different reasons that become apparent when you watch it.
It’s something that creeps up on you. I think you let the first one or two chapters sit in you, and you can’t help but need to know how everything’s going to unfold. Even though it might not be easy, it might be really funny, you’re taken through a roller coaster, a myriad of different emotions, as you travel with Alice and Jack through this piece.
Can you talk about that roller coaster, and the imperative to be together and not waste what time they have together?
I think there’s an intuition from both of them that every moment they have together is precious. And I think all of us in love feel that way when it’s that kind of soul connection—every second feels so precious and irreplaceable. You can only look back on your life and give the reasons of why that might have been, but you can’t at the time know why it feels so important to spend time together.
Life is not always rosy, which we’re all keenly aware of, and I understand wanting, through storytelling, to create characters whose lives do pan out perfectly, in order to have a sense of hope. But I think the hope that you get from what [writer and creator] Vic Levin has created in Alice & Jack is the reflection that many beautiful love stories do not look even like the two people are in a relationship. And that happens so often in life. I’ve had so many conversations after having made this where people have shared how wonderful it was to see it reflected that love can look like so many things, and a lot of the time a real mess.
What I also like about the series is that Vic doesn’t shy away from the fallout of the love, either. So Alice and Jack are in the center, and then these incredible characters moving slowly away from them—especially Aisling Bea’s character, Lynn. There’s a catastrophic fallout because of their love, and that’s not shied away from. We take a journey with her, in feeling how very difficult it is to realize the love that you thought was, is not, and the heartbreak of that and the betrayal that this kind of soul connection can cause around two people.
Alice is fascinating in her bravery, her directness and her honesty with Jack, the way she looks him straight in the eyes. Can you speak about her honesty?
I think Alice has nothing left to lose. So much has been taken away from her, and for that reason, she occupies a space in the world that’s a direct and candid one because she’s really unafraid. She’s quite unafraid of things that terrify a lot of people. And she’s terrified of things that soothe many people. So she’s having a very different experience of the world in that sense—or perhaps not different, but she’s having a specific experience in the world that I don’t often see reflected on screen. And so I think for that reason, it’s really, really interesting as well to have two protagonists to do absolutely everything wrong, with the intention of doing everything right.
Life is to be eaten up—immediate connections, people, experiences, they’re all to be consumed by Alice, until she meets Jack. And when she meets Jack and takes him in and shares that same candor that she does with everybody else, she sees how deeply she’s received by him. He’s not dismissive of her. He’s certainly offended [laughs], but he feels held hostage by that at first. She just puts every card on the table in an arresting way. But he’s compelled to want to know her, compelled to know how this happened, how this incredible, unique person came to life. So I think her honesty is a weapon until she meets Jack. And then once she meets Jack, it perhaps becomes a most honorable tool.
Alice and Jack are deeply connected and meant to be together, but there are long periods of time when they aren’t. What keeps that connection intact, and what is its relationship with the passage of time?
I think that Alice constructed an adult life for herself that was based on passion prizes, wins, achieved goals, not because those meant anything to her, and not because they were filling any sort of void, but because again, she was unafraid to take ginormous risks with huge amounts of money that most of us would be terrified to take. But when you have nothing to lose, there’s this courageous lion’s spirit that Alice has that comes out.
So for so much of her life without Jack, I think she spends her days, for want of a better word, conquering. She busies herself in life by setting herself completely unachievable goals that she then manages to achieve over and over and over. But what she so deeply admires about Jack is that his goals are all to help humanity, to help their admirable goals—they’re meaningful to him. And one of the things that she loves so deeply about him is witnessing his drive to help. That’s reflected in their relationship and it’s reflected in his work. And so for so much of the time when Alice is not with Jack, I think she really is passing time. And to me, it seems like Jack is making full use of that time. He manages to have a sort of moral and spiritual connection to his work that is very fulfilling and satisfying.
It’s not something that she’s found in life. The thing that she’s found fulfilling and satisfying and any kind of proof of existing morality is all in Jack. He’s the person who gives her hope in humanity. He gives her faith in men, in goodness, in being honorable. But the wonderful thing about the piece is that as we see, again, that the fallout doesn’t always look honorable because so many people are hurt along the way.
What was it like to play Alice, and is there some of her character in you?
Parts of Alice are, or were perhaps at one point, mine. So creatively, I found it then very confusing, and psychologically, I found it very confusing. It was a very psychologically confusing experience to play somebody who held qualities so close to my own, and so far away from myself—to play somebody who came from geographically somewhere, in my mind, not where I grew up, but it’s not far down the road. That’s quite rare for me because I often play parts that seem externally so very far away from me. I always feel really close to them internally, but they perhaps feel externally quite far away in terms of country or age or physicality, whatever. And there was something in this, borrowed in a sense from my own experience, but also that was being mixed with some real trauma. So that became a very odd experience to shoulder, and really that Alice shoulders.
You and your costar Domhnall Gleeson [Jack] have worked together before, and you’re both executive producers on Alice & Jack. How did it come to be made?
In the beginning, Domhnall was sent the script and I was sent the script, and I think we both met Vic. I came on board, and I came on board at a time when I had just met my love, my soulmate, the love of my life. I think that the script was sent to me perhaps three weeks after that happened, so it was really right on time. And the thing that Vic was expressing was being so beautifully explored in the pages of what this was that not only did it feel in line with the experience that I was having in my own life, but I felt compelled to explore it creatively because it felt like in every way the right time. And so I came on board with Vic and Michael London, one of our producers, and we were together as a team working on the project.
We were really on it for about a year. And Vic had also clearly ferreted his way under Domhnall’s skin to the same extent that he had under mine, because really unexpectedly, Domhnall came back to the project and said, “I can’t stop thinking about this project.” He didn’t know that I had also been sent the script, and Domhnall and I are old friends. This is the third piece that we’ve made together, and we’ve actually known each other for the same amount of time that Alice and Jack would’ve known each other over their long journey. So that was really incredible and fortuitous and synchronistic and strange, and all of those other words that you might attach to that.
And once that happened, as soon as Domhnall and I then united over it with Vic and Michael, it tumbled into existence quite rapidly. I think that’s because of its center—it needed the right two components. Alice and Jack needed to be there more than anything to spring to life.
