Tuppence Middleton’s got a problem. Albeit a uniquely thrilling problem, because she’s gearing up to play Elizabeth Taylor, that most demanding of screen goddesses. A woman who famously said, ‘big girls need big diamonds’, and who, in all her eight decades on this earth, never once cooked breakfast. Who once kept Queen Elizabeth II waiting for 20 minutes, and Princess Margaret – a rival – for 30. Who, when filming Cleopatra in Rome, turned up to only 12 of her 228 shooting days; at the end, she left with three Rolls-Royces for her entourage, six lorries for her furnishings, and three more for her (entirely un-housetrained) pets.
The play that 36-year-old Middleton is gracing is The Motive and the Cue, a new drama by playwright du jour Jack Thorne (of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), directed by multiple-Oscar-winner Sam Mendes and co-starring heartthrob Johnny Flynn as Taylor’s on-off husband, the divinely drunken Welshman and actor Richard Burton. The hotly anticipated play, which opened at London’s National Theatre in April, dramatises a moment during Burton and Taylor’s legendary tempestuous romance when, in 1964, police had to control the feverish crowds that waited outside the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway as she arrived every night to watch her then-new husband on stage (‘I get an orgasm just listening to that voice of his,’ she once purred). He was starring as Hamlet in an experimental production directed by Sir John Gielgud (played by Mark Gatiss in The Motive and the Cue).
‘Almost the hardest thing about it all is to communicate to a younger audience quite how famous Burton and Taylor were,’ says Middleton, sipping on a flat white in the Notting Hill café where we’ve met. ‘Every night, for over 100 performances, there’d be thousands of people out on Broadway, waiting to see them. Fellini was shooting in Rome when the pair were filming Cleopatra and there were so many journalists around, he [popularised] the term “paparazzi” especially for them – it comes from the [Italian] word for buzzing flies. There’s just not that level of interest in anyone any more.’ It was an interest fed by the sheer bigness and bravura of the Burton/Taylor approach to Hollywood – the $1 million, 68-carat Cartier diamond Burton bought her to pour salve on a squabble; the way Taylor would scatter her bathroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel with so many ‘make-up bottles, wands and brushes’ that maids reported it was ‘as if a cyclone had hit a Bloomingdale’s cosmetics counter’.
Still, Middleton has been sizing up Taylor’s glamazon spirit (‘She always had a silver cabinet on set, stocked with Bloody Marys: I love that’) and trying to channel it with an eccentric method of her own devising. She douses herself daily in Byredo’s Gypsy Water – ‘because I stayed in a Hollywood hotel where that was the shower gel, so that’s my “Liz and Hollywood” signifier’.
More conventionally, Middleton has been devouring Taylor biographies and watching old interviews with the star. ‘Liz was a really interesting, complex person. She was so much a product of Hollywood. She made her first film when she was 11, so she was raised by the studio system. She was very effusive and theatrical. You could presume she was just a luvvie, but in her community she was very loving.’ Taylor married eight times – she wed Burton twice – which ‘may have seemed frivolous or irresponsible, but it was really just like someone marrying every boyfriend they’d ever had’, explains Middleton. ‘In her reasoning, if you fell in love with someone, you married them – and she fell in love a lot.’
Middleton’s physical transformation into the screen goddess won’t be difficult: on stage, her natural dark curls will be concealed by a beehive wig and, with her dimply smile and radiant skin, she is every bit as gorgeous as Taylor was. She is, though, undoubtedly lower maintenance in real life. Today, she is dressed in a white crochet top, black trousers and black patent loafers. The most Taylor-ish touch is her array of jewellery, including a gold chain around her neck, a 1970s Finnish chunky amethyst ring her partner, the Swedish director Måns Mårlind, gave her to mark their daughter’s birth – ‘amethyst’s my birthstone and I also love the colour purple’ – and a gold necklace bearing their daughter’s name, which, until the Tatler shoot, she had not taken off since her birth.
The downbeat-ness is not entirely surprising. Off-screen, Middleton likes to come across as scrupulously unstarry, even though her china-doll face, once spied, is searingly familiar: if you didn’t catch her as incestuous sexpot Hélène Kuragina in the BBC’s War and Peace, or as beleaguered Fi Lawson in the recent ITV thriller Our House, she will certainly have entered your consciousness as the charming Lucy Branson in the two Downton Abbey spin-off films. Posing as the maid of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Baroness Bagshaw, played by Imelda Staunton, she is later revealed to be the baroness’s illegitimate daughter (and heir).
But Middleton isn’t lacking in glamour wattage. Although her Instagram page avoids the personal and is mainly filled with her own stylish photography, if you look closely you’ll see comments from the Emily in Paris star Lily Collins, the Baby Driver and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright, and the actor and Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander. Her appearance at the Downton Abbey: A New Era premiere last April made headlines as she dazzled, six months pregnant, in Maison Valentino.
It’s true that the Rolls-Royces are not for her either: she has arrived at our rendezvous by bicycle from her home in nearby Kensal Rise, where her neighbours include Sienna Miller, Adwoa Aboah, Thandiwe Newton and, sporadically, Phoebe WallerBridge. She and Mårlind divide their time between Stockholm and west London. ‘My Saturday routine [when in London] is often to go to the street-food market in Portobello and have spicy Himalayan dumplings called momo and then browse the record shops – I’m trying to build a collection.’ She also loves the Lexi Cinema on Chamberlayne Road (‘It’s run by volunteers and it’s really beautiful’); live music at Ronnie Scott’s (‘I know it’s a cliché’); and the Green Note live music bar in Camden. In summer, she escapes to Dungeness in Kent: ‘It feels as if you’ve stumbled on an abandoned town that’s falling off the country. It’s perfect for writing and thinking.’
Going from Downton Abbey to Elizabeth Taylor is career-changing for Middleton, who is still best known for her work on screen. After finishing drama school – ArtsEd in Chiswick – Middleton got her first jobs in film and television, and ‘once you’re on that track, it’s how you’re categorised’, she says. ‘I’ve only done two plays: one was at the Jermyn Street Theatre and one at the Soho Theatre – tiny venues. Now I’m going to be on stage at the National, which has 900 seats.’ Her brown eyes widen. ‘I’m terrified.’
Her daughter was just three months old when Mendes offered her the role of Taylor: she jumped at the chance. ‘I had to take some time out when I was pregnant and it was really lovely to have time with the baby, but now felt like the perfect time to reset everything, to start to feel like I’m an actor again – but learning to work in a different way.’
The name Tuppence comes from the nickname Middleton’s grandmother gave her mother, ‘so my parents gave it to me’. In fact, despite having a sister called Angel and a brother called Josh (‘My parents were going to call him something a bit more out-there, but then they let me and my sister name him’), Middleton is solidly middle-class. No relation to the Princess of Wales, she is rather the middle child of an investment manager and a hairdresser; she was brought up in Clevedon, Somerset, and privately educated at Bristol Grammar School.
But while Elizabeth Taylor blazed from movie set to backstage and Bulgari boutique to party with brazen abandon, Middleton must find the whirlwind life of an actress incredibly challenging. She lives with severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She has been terrified in particular of illness and vomiting for as long as she can remember and says her life has been dominated by ‘this anxiety just buzzing under the surface. You’ll wake up in the night in a cold sweat or you can’t get to sleep and you can’t figure out what it is.’ To keep the monster at bay, she has performed endless rituals – ‘I have to look at the light switch eight times before I leave the house’ – which she believed would prevent bad things from happening.
And so, the hedonistic lifestyle of the great movie divas has never been an attraction for Tuppence Middleton. Talking therapy and the occasional use of mild antidepressants have helped: ‘The hum underneath calms down, and you feel more able to get on with life,’ she says. And in person, you’d be hard-pressed to tell: she is great fun, warm and garrulous. Surely all this must be behind her? She smiles ruefully. ‘No, there are times when it’s worse and times when you feel it’s getting better. But as you get older, it’s just about managing it.’ She has new coping strategies now – photographing the kitchen taps before she leaves the house, for example, so later she can reassure herself that she didn’t accidentally leave the water running.
Alongside acting, she has also been writing and plans to direct a film with Mårlind, 53, whom she met three years ago on the set of the acclaimed Netflix series The Defeated, which he wrote. While in 1962 Taylor was condemned in a column for the Vatican newspapers for ‘erotic vagrancy’ because she was so unsubtle about her then-extramarital fling with Burton – Middleton is less than forthcoming about her own relationship. Though she does rhapsodise about their life together in Stockholm, where she and Mårlind indulge in exhibitions at Fotografiska and lavish dinners at Pastis restaurant in the Old Town. It is there that she wants to settle, but Brexit has scuppered the plan – as a Brit, she can only stay in Sweden for a maximum of 90 days out of every 180. Marriage would make no difference. She sighs: ‘It’s a pain in the arse.’ Undeterred, she has been doggedly learning Swedish for nearly three years: ‘I understand most of what’s being said, but at the moment I often answer in English.’
And actually, if she’s accidentally channelling Taylor, why worry? Burton once claimed that, despite all the years the pair spent filming in Rome and partying on Capri, ‘the only word Elizabeth knows in Italian is “Bulgari”’. Middleton is clearly relishing the idea of inhabiting this creature. ‘Liz was a total romantic and I completely relate to that. Most actors are, because we love the idea of dipping our toes into other people’s lives: “What if I’d been born there, or lived in that period?” I’ve always found it terrifying appearing in public as myself – doing the red carpet, or presenting an award. But playing Liz? Well, bring it on.’
The Motive and the Cue is at the National Theatre until 15 July
