Shortly before I’m due to interview her in a hotel room, I run into Victoria Hamilton in the loo. I wouldn’t have recognised her from The Crown, in which she plays the Queen Mother, even though she swears they did nothing to her appearance – except make her wear “a swimsuit that had tits built into my stomach. Then they’d take all my makeup off and put a grey wig on my head.”
I would have recognised her from Deep State, because I’d only just watched an episode: a hot, gory spy drama, paranoid and nail-biting. But really I recognise her because I feel like I already know her from all her great theatre roles and countless period dramas, from Scoop to Mansfield Park.
Fantastically warm and funny, Hamilton brings a huge amount to a conversation with just eyebrows and intonation. When we talk about The Crown, the acclaimed Netflix series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, I mention that it can’t have sounded like a very interesting proposition: just a bunch of rich, repressed people doing what they’re told. “Honestly,” she says, “most actors’ first thought was, ‘Really, really? More royalty. Really? Really? The Queen Mother? Really?’” It’s like a masterclass in how many different ways there are to say “really” in a sceptical and unenthusiastic voice.
In the Fox series Deep State, she plays a gay Republican senator facing a cover-up as she investigates the deaths of special forces agents in Mali. “It’s very pertinent,” she says. “This sense that there are decisions being made and we have no idea who’s making them, conflicts being funded for agendas we have no clue about.”
As for her part, she says: “I think there’s never been a better time to be an actress over 40. They really are starting to write fully rounded protagonist roles for women who aren’t 35. I never thought, at 48, I’d be doing a job that had a love story written into it. If you’d told me that 10 years ago, my jaw would have been on the floor. Your fuckability quotient – wait, you can’t put that in an article.”
Can’t I? “Oh, go on then. It started to happen with The Killing and Borgen, where not only were women carrying shows, they didn’t have a face full of Botox and weren’t pneumatic-looking. And the sexuality of those women was suddenly real. Real bodies and real people and it’s 100 times sexier than the sex scenes that we’ve all been watching for decades, faked and airbrushed and boring.”
Theatre aside, it’s only recently that Hamilton has been cast as a character who wasn’t incredibly sweet. “Because that’s the sort of face I’ve got – in film, the personality of your face gets cast, instead of necessarily what’s inside. That’s why I spent the first 10 years of my career in theatre, and still constantly go back. The roles have more depth. There’s a wonderful thing that happens where someone can hit the stage and, within half an hour, you think that is the ugliest or the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen. Whatever stage energy you’ve chosen to give to that character is more important than what you look like.”
She adds: “Also, most theatre isn’t shit. And quite a lot of telly is shit. Or was, until a few years ago. This is a hugely highfalutin conversation. ‘Why do you love theatre?’ ‘Because it’s not shit.’”
The Crown was much more daring at first than it seems, now that it’s been so successful: not for each individual actor so much as the whole thing, and how awesomely expensive it was. This, it turns out, was down to executive producer Stephen Daldry. “Basically, Stephen was trying to create a hybrid between TV and film, holding out for those extraordinary budgets. So in a strange way, much as doing the second series was wonderful, once it had this big stamp of approval, it felt less exciting, because it wasn’t going to fail on that epic scale.”
She seems entranced by the spectacle of disaster, the randomness and absurdity of what works and what doesn’t. “Oh, it’s only romantic when you’ve got a job. Doing that backslapping thing, ‘We’re so brave, this is so romantic.’”
“I don’t really look the way I am,” Hamilton says, though she’s just said she looks like an “elf with tits”, and it’s difficult to know how that would be. She’s never been cast in a successful comedy, which is odd because, conversationally, she is funny – witty, caustic and surreal. “You’re allowed to be funny if you look a certain way. If you then play a part that has a lot of gravitas and darkness, you’re something else and it’s hard to get back. If anyone finds you sexy, you can’t be sexy and funny. Because of course you can’t laugh and have a hard-on at the same time.” There’s a pause while we both consider this. “Actually, that is true, you can’t.”
She’d love another series of Deep State. She wants to do a one-woman show. She has a TV series she can’t talk about that takes her to October, an unprecedented run, she says, of gainful employment. While acclaim came pretty fast for Hamilton’s work on stage, it was always precarious.
“Almost every time in my career, when I’ve done something and people have gone ‘well, that’s it’, whether it’s winning a prize or whatever, I genuinely then have not worked for a really long time afterwards.” Descriptions of her career are shot through with insecurity, long bouts of unemployment. Her husband, Mark Bazeley, is also an actor. “When neither of us is working, we just cry, drink a lot of wine, and really, really worry.” She pauses and adds: “It pisses me off so much. People get up to accept awards, and talk about acting, and say, ‘We’re all so spoilt.’ No we’re not: 98% of actors are struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage, and wondering where the next part is coming from.”
She may be being a little too modest, when in fact there has been considerable deliberation in her career, a lot of careful choices. She talks about taking A Day in the Death of Joe Egg to Broadway with Eddie Izzard in 2003. “It went really well and got nominated for Tonys. I had all of New York saying, ‘You’ve to go to LA.’ I didn’t and I’m glad – and the reason is that I would have been completely destroyed. If you didn’t look like Cameron Diaz, you would get slaughtered and end up doing work you didn’t want to do.”
And as a result, she is not especially famous: “Real fame is if you can’t get on the tube. All I get is people squinting at me, which on a vulnerable day is very odd. You’ve walked around London and people have just frowned at you, as if they slightly disapprove of you.” But then, on the other hand, there’s a body of work that has range, that’s been memorable – and never trivial.
• Deep State is on Fox in the UK at 9pm on Thursdays.
