Academy Award-winning actor Olivia Colman loves a good swear.
"I've always found it rather affectionate … a sort of seasoning of language," she tells ABC RN's The Screen Show.
"My mum, who's the sweetest woman in the world [and] was a nurse for 40 years at the NHS, she'll go, 'Oh, fuck it, let's have a cup of tea' — that sort of thing. It's nice."
She's particularly fond of the C-word. "I really enjoy its power," she says.
"It's not a new word — it's in Chaucer and Shakespeare."
Colman gets to indulge her love of swearing in her latest movie Wicked Little Letters. She plays Edith, a highly religious single woman in her 40s who is prone to occasional obscene outbursts.
The movie is loosely based on the real-life case of the Littlehampton Letters, which saw an English village scandalised by profane poison-pen letters in the 1920s.
"It wasn't alarming to me to swear — it was really fun," Colman says.
Swearing on screen is nothing new for Colman, whose Oscar-winning turn as Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018) featured plenty of spicy language.
However, Colman points to a crucial difference in the use of profanity in the two films.
"The Favourite was full of people with money and power and agency — they can do whatever the fuck they like," she says.
"But this is women with no clout, no power, and their use of these words is very different."
For the buttoned-up Edith, swearing is cathartic.
"It's a release, it's necessary," Colman says.
"She's a woman who is incredibly repressed … and she has no agency, no power. She lives … under the thumb of her father, and something has to blow."
A longstanding friendship
Colman appears in Wicked Little Letters alongside Irish actor Jessie Buckley, who plays Rose, an unmarried mother and Edith's neighbour.
Rose shocks the townspeople with her blatant disregard for the morals of the day, living out of wedlock with a man who is not the father of her child.
Unsurprisingly, she becomes a target of suspicion in the hunt for the author of the poison-pen letters.
While Buckley's character was English in the real-life case of the Littlehampton Letters, Rose is Irish in the film.
"There used to be in boarding houses [signs that read]: 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs,'" Colman says.
"The Irish were treated appallingly, and so it works that Jessie's using her own accent in this, because it really pinpoints and highlights the fact that she's looked at with such disdain."
For the modern viewer, Rose is an appealing character whose liberation serves as a counterpoint to the repressed Edith.
"[She's] proud of who she is; she's having a good time. She wants to love someone — she loves them," Colman says.
Colman and Buckley appeared together in Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2021 film, The Lost Daughter — although, as they played the same character, they never shared the screen — and both earned Academy Award nominations for their performances.
But their friendship began years earlier, when they met at a festival and immediately hit it off.
"You know when you meet someone and there's a twinkle — oh, we're going to get on," Colman says.
"We ended up that first time we met doing karaoke in a tent or caravan until the wee hours of the morning."
Colman was thrilled to have the chance to work with Buckley again.
"I wanted to go to work every day with one of my best friends, Jessie — that was my main reason for wanting to do [the film]," she says.
The two actors share an intuitive approach to the craft of acting. "We read it, we feel it, we turn up, we do it," Colman says.
"When we did Lost Daughter, we spoke to each other on the phone and said, 'What accent are we doing? OK, great. See you there.'"
If you can't say something nice
It's easy to draw a parallel between the poison-pen letters of the film and the widespread practice of trolling on social media today.
As Wicked Little Letters shows, trolling is not a recent invention.
"We think it's a new thing," Colman says. "We haven't learned in 100 years."
What has changed is the medium. Today, thanks to the internet, trolls can access a much larger audience.
"You can press send, and it's out there," Colman says.
"It's cruelty with anonymity, which is deplorable in my book."
She may be comfortable with profanity, but Colman has no tolerance for unkindness.
"I do believe that old adage, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all — if only everyone lived by that."
It is no surprise that Colman is not on social media — and never has been.
"I refuse to be … I don't want to know what people think of me who don't know me and have never met me. Unless it's nice," she adds.
"But I think, unfortunately, you never remember the nice bits. You'd only remember if someone was mean. I know myself; I'm not thick-skinned enough. If I had been part of social media, I think I would have retired from this job years ago."
The actor inherited her principled kindness — along with her propensity for swearing — from her mother.
"I always saw her being kind and treating everybody with respect. If we hadn't been respectful to people, she would have come down like a ton of bricks.
"She has a belief that everyone's born equal … and I believe that too."