Freddie Fox – son of Edward, nephew of James, brother of Emilia and cousin to the Question Time racism refusenik Laurence – is under no illusions about how he is regarded. “‘Oh, let’s get Freddie in to play the nasty posh guy,’” he says. Rare is the script that doesn’t require him to play gay, decadent or beastly, preferably in spiffy period dress. He’s been a Bullingdon bullyboy (The Riot Club), Louis XIII (The Three Musketeers) and a perky Cambridge graduate in Victorian sitcom Year of the Rabbit, though he first caught the eye when he starred in Worried About the Boy as the singer Marilyn, all lippy and leopard print. “If I need to play a few posh boys to pay the bills then fine,” he tells me via Zoom from his London living room. “But I want to be Iago, Hamlet, David Bowie. I want to explore all the costumes in the cupboard.”
He plays strikingly against type as a violent fugitive in his new film. Or rather, his old film: the 17th-century Shropshire western Fanny Lye Deliver’d wrapped in May 2016, then underwent a protracted post-production period. He was 26 when shooting started; he’s now 31. How’s his memory? “They sent me the trailer. That brought a lot of it back.” He remembers, for instance, the seven-week shoot becoming 10. The rain fell, the set flooded, the midges had a field day. At least the punishing conditions suited the material. “The Holiday wouldn’t have worked there,” he agrees.
As we talk, he ties up his hair. Now and then, he will dart off to fetch something he wants to show me, such as the signed photograph he got from Burt Reynolds in a meeting that inspired his own short film Hero. He looks nothing whatsoever like his rugged character in Fanny Lye Deliver’d. “I’m quite a downy little chick,” he grins. As the thuggish Thomas, he and his lover (played by Tanya Reynolds) inveigle their way into the home of Fanny (Maxine Peake) and her tyrannical husband (Charles Dance). Their campaign of mounting violence becomes the catalyst for her eventual emancipation.
“There’s something quite exciting about Thomas,” he says. “You can understand how the fresh blood that comes into Fanny’s life in the form of this devil figure shows her who she can be beyond the confines of her marriage. On the other hand, he’s an emancipator of people for his own sexual pleasure, so you get that whole gamut of what we would now call ‘toxic masculinity’.”
When the intruders coerce Fanny into bed, Thomas brandishes an angry-looking erection. Was the actor consulted about his prosthetic penis? “Sort of,” he laughs. “There’s a section in the contract outlining the rights of approval that my agents would have over it: ‘It shall not prejudice the reputation of that artist,’ that sort of thing.” There’s always the danger it could set the bar unreasonably high. “Exactly. You don’t want to big yourself up too much. When I saw it, I was like: ‘Fucking hell! That’s almost an offensive weapon.’” No, he didn’t keep it as a souvenir. “Where would I put it? On the mantelpiece?”
Fox is not averse to a candid sex scene: he was naked on stage in the 2012 revival of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, and he spent much of his time in Russell T Davies’s series Cucumber either receiving or dishing out a jolly good seeing-to. This was back in the days before intimacy coordinators. “I’m all for those. Sets are frightening enough places without taking your clothes off in front of 50 people. Cucumber made me comfortable about it, but this was Tanya’s first film, so for her to do all that was very intense.” I interpret his protective tone as a colleague’s concern, though it was reported recently that he and Reynolds, one of the stars of Sex Education, are in a relationship.
This isn’t the first time he has used his charisma to disturb as well as disarm. He was persuasively chilling in the ITV drama White House Farm, in which he played Jeremy Bamber, who is serving a full life sentence for the murder in 1985 of his adoptive parents, sister and two young nephews. “It’s your duty as an actor to find the vulnerabilities, insecurities and pain of any character,” he says. That bodes well for his forthcoming turn as Mark Thatcher, opposite Gillian Anderson as his mother, in the next series of The Crown. “You have to make sure that your portrayal of someone who has been painted two-dimensionally in the media is as three-dimensional as possible. It can’t just be: ‘Oh, he said that because he’s an arrogant twat.’ Someone may do or say arrogant, twattish things, but that’s not who they are.”
And there I was wondering exactly how to broach the subject of his Maga-cap-wearing cousin. I thank him for supplying the perfect segue and he shakes his head with a rueful smirk before composing his features into a poker face.
It was during an episode of Question Time in January that Laurence Fox doubted whether Meghan Markle had been the victim of racist media coverage, rolled his eyes at the claim that he was a beneficiary of white male privilege and accused a mixed-race audience member of displaying racism toward him. I ask Fox if he watched the episode. “I’ve seen it, yes. But I’ll preface anything you’re going to ask me by saying I won’t talk much about this because I’m in a slightly compromised position. One of my fellow cast members, as you’re aware, has had an open debate with him about things he said.”
That’s one way to put it. In fact, Maxine Peake – Fanny Lye herself – deliver’d a blistering attack shortly after the Question Time debacle. “Black and w/c [working-class] actors can only speak the truth once they’re established,” she tweeted. “Their voices aren’t heard before. Posh actors, on the other hand, only complain when they want attention. Anything shit to sell @LozzaFox or is it just a coincidence you’ve gone right wing?” When the actors’ union Equity later apologised for a tweet calling Laurence Fox “a disgrace to our industry”, Peake was among those to express anger at the climbdown.
“I neither want to take sides nor reopen a debate that’s already happened,” Fox tells me now. “That’s really all I’ve got to say about Laurence.” Are they close? “Yeah. He’s my cousin, I love him.” He also rates him highly as a performer. “There’s a dangerous quality to his acting that I think all actors strive for, and that can inevitably seep into one’s off-set life a little bit, too.” Is it true he was spat at in the street because of his cousin’s views? “Listen,” he sighs, wearying of the subject. “An incident happened and I have no idea whether it was related to Laurence. The person could’ve been drunk, on drugs, anything.”
Of course, Fox is not his cousin’s keeper. And he is as quick to assert that racism should be challenged as he is slow to single out Laurence for reprimand. “In the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd, I do think we are all duty-bound as global citizens to stand up to systemic racism within institutions like the police force. We need to stand together shoulder to shoulder, calling it out and taking it down.”
He doesn’t share his cousin’s apparent difficulty with acknowledging the circumstances that have made his success possible. “As a white man with a public school education, I am a product of white male privilege. I have a duty to listen to people who come from different worlds and to see how I can support them. The George Floyd incident is one example. It’s about how I can help and listen and learn to serve the whole a bit better. It’s just no good saying: ‘My lot’s fine and I don’t understand yours so it doesn’t matter.’”
Fanny Lye Deliver’d is released on 26 June