‘They want the model type, classically beautiful, and I’m not': Downton Abbey's Joanne Froggatt on making it in Hollywood
Dutiful. Dowdy. Cruelly abused. Joanne Froggatt earned her recent Golden Globe the hard way playing Downton Abbey’s Anna Bates. Now she’s answered Hollywood’s call and moved to LA to chase the big time. ‘I’m ready for my close-up,’ the actress tells Event, ‘but will my face fit?’
‘I’d like to work on a big-budget U.S. film, ideally playing the total opposite of Anna Bates, someone really evil. It would be nice to do lots of different roles and swap between TV, film and theatre,' said Joanne Froggatt
There is nothing that Hollywood likes better than an actress who is unafraid to fall to pieces on screen – and look terrible as she does it.
The model-turned-actress Charlize Theron famously won an Oscar for her portrayal of a lesbian serial killer in Monster and this year Rosamund Pike, Julianne Moore and Reese Witherspoon have all been nominated for Oscars for playing mentally scarred women in no make-up.
Now the British actress Joanne Froggatt, who plays Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, has finally been garlanded for looking decidedly dowdy below stairs for the past five years.
The turning point for Froggatt came in series four of the Sunday night drama when her character was raped (in the next series she was accused of murdering her attacker).
All that trauma secured the actress her surprise gong at this year’s Golden Globe Awards, and she picked up another last week with the rest of the Downton team when they won a Screen Actors Guild award for Best Performance In A Drama.
Months of looking bruised and red-eyed on screen finally paid off for Froggatt when she stepped up to the stage of the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles to collect her prize, looking gorgeous in an elegant Marchesa gown.
Days before the ceremony in LA, I meet 34-year-old Froggatt in a decidedly less glitzy location – an empty wine bar in Beaconsfield, within easy distance of Heathrow airport.
She lives nearby and says it’s handy because she and her husband, IT consultant James Cannon, are taking an early flight to California the next morning.
The first thing I notice is how much prettier she is in real life. In Downton she ties her long, blonde hair back in a severe bun and wears no make-up.
Today she’s in jeans and a dark sweater and, with her hair loose on her shoulders and a bit of mascara around her large, grey eyes, the effect is transformative.
She’s warm and friendly and insists on going to the bar to buy me a glass of wine. She sticks to green tea. She’s excited about going to America but convinced she won’t win.
‘I don’t mind, it’s just fun going to these things,’ she concedes.
‘I’m not a big-budget Hollywood type. They want the model type, classically beautiful, and I’m not... It’s certainly easier for the men. There are more interesting character roles for them,' said Joanne
‘Downton is huge over there – so most people in the industry have seen it. I’m still always surprised by the kind of people who say they’re fans.
'The first time I went to the Emmy Awards with Michelle Dockery [Lady Mary], Matt Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, came over and said, “I love your show”. Michelle and I were both huge fans of his so that felt amazing.’
Three days after the awards ceremony we speak again, this time on a phone line from LA.
The Globes have been a triumph for the Brits. Froggatt and Ruth Wilson [for The Affair] both upset the odds by winning Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress respectively in the TV drama category.
Meanwhile in the film section, Eddie Redmayne scooped up the Best Actor award for his role as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything – proving that looking bad pays off for the men as well.
‘I’m still in shock,’ she says. Her voice is high-pitched with excitement as she describes the evening.
‘The red carpet was chaotic. All these Hollywood superstars arrived at the same time in their limos.
'I had Amy Adams in front, which was good because nobody was interested in me. I just snuck in. I was sitting at our table feeling quite relaxed having drunk a glass of champagne when they read my name out. It was such a surprise that it took a few seconds to sink in.’
Just before the ceremony she bumped into Kathy Bates – who was up for the same award – outside the ladies’ toilet.
‘I’m a bit shy but I plucked up the courage to introduce myself and we had our photo taken together. I thought, “This is the highlight of my evening. It can’t get any better.” Not in a million years did I think I’d be called up on stage.’
You wouldn’t have known it from Froggatt’s gracious acceptance speech, widely praised in the media and on Twitter, in which she spoke about the great sense of responsibility she felt representing a rape victim.
‘After this storyline aired I received a small number of letters from survivors of rape,’ she says.
‘One woman summed up the thoughts of many by saying she wasn’t sure why she’d written, but she just felt in some way she wanted to be heard.’
'I don’t go to the gym without mascara and foundation on,' said Joanne
Froggatt then paused and told the celebrity-packed ballroom, ‘I’d just like to say I heard you and I hope saying this so publicly means in some way you feel the world hears you.’
These prestigious American awards will clearly give Froggatt a huge boost in her ambition to conquer Hollywood.
‘I’d like to work on a big-budget U.S. film, ideally playing the total opposite of Anna Bates, someone really evil.
'It would be nice to do lots of different roles and swap between TV, film and theatre like Judi Dench and Helen Mirren do. That’s the perfect mix.’
She and her husband are planning to spend six months living in LA once the next series of Downton has completed filming.
If she does move out to California she will have plenty of the Downton Abbey family to keep her company.
Almost all the cast now have American agents based in LA. Lesley Nicol, who plays the cook Mrs Patmore, goes out every autumn when they’re not filming so she can attend auditions.
Dan Stevens, who begged the scriptwriter Julian Fellowes to kill him off so he could go to America, has carved out a successful film career for himself, appearing in several high-profile productions including Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb; while pal Dockery has appeared in the action-thriller Non-Stop with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore and has a Hollywood sci-fi film with Sir Ben Kingsley in the pipeline.
Given that Stevens and Dockery have already started to crack the U.S. film industry, why has Froggatt not had any firm offers yet?
‘I’m not a big-budget Hollywood type,’ she says wistfully. ‘They want the model type, classically beautiful, and I’m not.’
Does that come down to sexism?
‘It’s certainly easier for the men,’ she concedes. ‘There are more interesting character roles for them.
'Also there are more actresses than actors so there is more competition. But things are getting better for women, particularly on TV.’
On top of this, there are the logistics of committing to a blockbuster TV series. It’s almost impossible, Froggatt says, to juggle career options while she is working on Downton, which is why Dan Stevens felt he had to leave.
‘We film for eight months of the year. I’m only free in the autumn and it’s hard to find a project that fits in that window.’
I point out that playing a maid isn’t very conducive to looking glamorous, particularly not in the last two series of Downton when Anna Bates went around for weeks looking dreadful after the rape and her arrest on suspicion of murdering her attacker.
‘What you mean is I’m not afraid to look s***!’ she retorts, laughing.
‘The weird thing is that I wouldn’t leave the house like that on a day-to-day basis. I don’t go to the gym without mascara and foundation on, and yet I’m quite happy for millions of people to see me looking absolutely terrible on screen.
'I don’t have any vanity when I’m acting as long as it’s right for the role. It just so happens that Anna Bates in Downton or my film roles have not been very glamorous.’
Intriguingly, the character’s arrest for the murder did have the actress delving into the psyche of the woman she plays.
‘There was one point when Anna is being interviewed by the police when I did wonder whether she might have done it,’ Froggatt confesses.
‘So after I read the script I called the producer and asked him. He said, “No, she’s innocent”, which was helpful because it informs how you play the role.’
Her co-star Brendan Coyle, who plays her on-screen husband Mr Bates, Lord Grantham’s valet, asked the same question in series two when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife.
Control of Downton scripts is famously tight. Cast members usually get the first four episodes before shooting starts but after that it’s up to the wire.
‘Julian is writing and rewriting up to the last minute and he’s doing it all on his own,’ Froggatt says.
‘It’s amazing to write that many hours of TV with such a huge cast. If he was in America, he’d have an entire writers’ room to help him.’
As an ex-actor, Fellowes is aware of the sensitivities of the cast and tries to make sure everyone gets their fair share of screen time.
After five years, he also knows the actors really well, says Froggatt, and tries to write to their strengths.
‘My back story for Anna came from wondering why she is so emotionally mature and grounded... Maybe she grew up on a farm with a lot of younger siblings and was a mother figure from a young age,' she said
‘We tease him about whether he will appear in a cameo but he always jokes that he’s one of the grown-ups now and it would feel strange to go back in front of the camera,’ she says.
Fellowes doesn’t provide the cast with a history for their characters, leaving them free to invent their own.
‘My back story for Anna came from wondering why she is so emotionally mature and grounded.
'I thought maybe she grew up on a farm with a lot of younger siblings and was a mother figure from a young age,’ says Froggatt. ‘She probably experienced death quite young, which made her more mature and strong-minded.’
A bit like Froggatt, who grew up on a farm and is able to display a combination of pain, vulnerability and inner strength that’s very powerful on screen.
That talent was evident in her debut film In Our Name, about a soldier and mother of a young child returning from Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
In her latest film, Still Life, Froggatt is the daughter of a Falklands veteran who dies on his own, a sad alcoholic.
She knows nothing of her father’s fate until she is contacted by a shy, unassuming man from the council – played by Eddie Marsan – with whom she forms a romantic attachment. It’s a subtle but poignant film about solitude.
Having done two films with a connection to ex-soldiers and mental health issues, Froggatt has become an ambassador for the charity Combat Stress, which helps veterans with PTSD.
‘I did quite a bit of research into the subject for my first film role and afterwards I began to notice how many homeless people used to be in the Forces,’ she says.
‘It’s quite shocking. I think more should be done for veterans. Whether you agree with the politics of why they were there, they risked their lives for this country and we should support them when they come back.’
Still Life is out this week but Froggatt says it’s unlikely to get the attention it deserves because small independent British productions don’t have the marketing budgets that Hollywood blockbusters get.
Her backing of small-budget British films about ordinary people is unsurprising given her low-key upbringing.
She was born in Scarborough, where her dad ran a confectionery business. He sold it when she was four so the family could move to a smallholding in the middle of the North Yorkshire Moors, where they attempted the good life, raising animals and growing their own veg. Her parents sold the land a few years ago but still live in the same house.
Froggatt showed steely determination from early on. Encouraged by the head of her secondary school, she joined a youth drama group at Alan Ayckbourn’s Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.
On her own initiative she applied and won a place at Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead, whose former pupils include Kate Winslet.
When her parents couldn’t afford the fees, she wrote to her local council who told her there were no grants for people her age. She was 12. A year later, after much lobbying, she auditioned for the council and they gave her a grant.
Joanne with Sophie McShera, Laura Carmichael and Phyllis Logan at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last week. Filming on the sixth series of Downton Abbey begins this month
‘I’m amazed when I look back at myself at that age, but I got a bee in my bonnet,’ she says.
She was lucky: these days local authorities no longer hand out grants for drama school. It’s one reason the new generation of British stars tend to come from well-off families.
Froggatt’s glamorous new life on the Los Angeles party scene must seem a long way from the Yorkshire moors. After the Globes, she tells me she went to four different parties with Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith).
‘It was crazy but exciting seeing all these amazing people,’ she gushes.
‘I felt so proud to be part of it. We started with the HBO after-party, then Harvey’s, then my agent’s, then Laura’s. I think it was 3am when we finally got to bed.’
The HBO party was held around the pool area of the Beverly Hilton, guests treated to a typical LA menu of champagne, gluten-free snacks and a huge buffet with ice sculptures. Harvey? That’s producer Harvey Weinstein, the most powerful man in Hollywood.
When I ask Froggatt to name stars she spoke to, she refuses. Reading the guest list later, I can see why.
The room was packed with A-list celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Taylor Swift and a large contingent of Brits including Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, Ricky Gervais, Jamie Dornan, Cara Delevingne and Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend, Cressida Bonas.
Most of the Downton cast stay in two hotels near Highclere Castle [where it’s made] during filming and often have drinks, dinner and a gossip at the end of the day.
‘There’s a lot of laughing, particularly with the downstairs lot who are quite rowdy – there’s some big personalities,’ Froggatt says.
‘Between takes we play Bananagrams [the word game], which is fun. Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith and Laura Carmichael are all really good at it.’
Filming on the sixth series begins this month. ‘We all thought season five would be the final one,’ confides Froggatt.
‘But quite soon after we started shooting, they announced there would be another one and we all agreed to stay on. After that who knows?’
With its sixth outing, Downton will have outlived its predecessor Upstairs Downstairs, the wildly popular ITV drama that ran for five years. But even Downton’s most ardent fans agree that it’s looking tired.
The audience for this year’s Christmas special was half that of previous years. But with a global audience of 120 million, it’s a cash cow ITV and Fellowes are reluctant to abandon.
The Americans can’t seem to get enough of it. Season five began on U.S. public TV in early January in a storm of publicity.
Stars such as Shirley MacLaine, Paul Giamatti and George Clooney have all made their way to Highclere Castle for cameo appearances. There are rumours that Kim Kardashian has been angling for a role.
In the meantime there are whisperings of a Downton Abbey movie. Froggatt says she’s keeping her fingers crossed that it will happen.
Maybe Fellowes will write another traumatic storyline for poor Anna Bates – one that finally turns this Downton maid into a Hollywood star.
‘Still Life’ is in cinemas this Friday
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