“I really do wish sometimes that I could do all of this a different way,” Andrea Riseborough said. “But I suppose I just do it the way that I do it. And there are consequences.”
She paused then, pressing her lips into a thin smile. “That all sounds a bit dramatic,” she added.
This was on an afternoon in early March, and Riseborough, 42, a metamorphic actress with a worrying sense of commitment, was seated at a West Village cafe, a basket of vinegar-doused French fries in front of her. She is often unrecognizable from one project to the next, a combination of makeup, hairstyle (what Meryl Streep is to accents, Riseborough is to coiffure) and marrow-deep transformation. Here, offscreen, she wore a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt under a busy leather jacket. Her hair, still growing out from the dismal pixie cut she got for the HBO series “The Regime,” was pulled back with an elastic.
In person, she is a particular mix of gravity and nonchalance. She knows that she has a reputation for seriousness, which she rejects. “It would be pretty strange to apologize for being serious when you’re giggling so much,” she said. But I rarely heard her laugh. She considered each question carefully and her responses were often philosophical rather than personal. “People,” she might say in place of “I.” Or “most people.” Or “everyone.” Her face, at rest and free of makeup, isn’t especially restful. There is a watchfulness to her, a sense of thoughts tumbling behind those eyes.
In her two decades in the business, goaded by a tireless work ethic that sometimes saw her completing as many as five projects per year, she has amassed credits across stage, film and television. It can be hard to find a through-line among those enterprises, mainstream and independent, comedy and tragedy and horror.
In 2022, for example, she starred in the sex-addled queer musical “Please Baby Please,” produced by her production company; the cockeyed interwar drama “Amsterdam”; the boisterous children’s film “Matilda: the Musical”; the bleak Scandinavian thriller “What Remains”; and the wrenching Texas-set indie, “To Leslie,” for which Riseborough received her first Academy Award nomination. (That nomination was complicated by perceived campaigning irregularities, though the Academy ultimately concluded that no guidelines had been violated.) Try to connect those dots.
Riseborough can’t. She disclaims any strategy and if she has an agenda in the roles she chooses, it is hidden very well, maybe even from herself. When I suggested she must have some strong inner core to fling herself so entirely into so many stories, so many lives, she disagreed.
“To say that I have a very stable sense of self would be a sweeping statement,” she said.
She does seem drawn to sad women, troubled women, women in extreme circumstances. That would describe her current projects: the HBO mini-series “The Regime,” in which she plays Agnes, a dictator’s handmaiden, and the PBS romantic drama “Alice & Jack,” in which she stars as Alice, a whiz financier who overcomes past trauma only to face it in the present. Her role in the movie “Lee,” which will be released later this year, may seem like a departure: She plays an editor of British Vogue. But that editor, as it happens, is instrumental in a decision about whether to publish photos of Dachau.
Riseborough didn’t see the pattern. “For the average person, there’s a lot of pain in the human experience,” she said. “It’s not so easy just to live, no matter the privileges you have or don’t. It seems that the human experience for everyone is incredibly challenging. Have I played lots of people in a lot of pain? Or have I just played a lot of people going through things?” Then she relented slightly. An actor, she admitted, could choose not to go to those places, not to take on those roles, to pursue a blither version of her craft. Riseborough has never made those choices.
She grew up in Newcastle, an industrial town in the Northeast of England. Her working-class parents were passionate about theater and film, and they passed that passion on to Riseborough and her younger sister. Riseborough was an avid dancer, in class more than 20 hours each week, and in elementary school she became involved with the People’s Theater, a prominent amateur theater company and “a wonderful, joyful thing to be a part of,” she said.
She continued acting all through middle school and high school, before dropping out at 17 to work a series of odd jobs. Riseborough is somewhat oblique in conversation, tending to answer specific questions generally. But this was the one moment — when asked why she had left school — in which she consciously avoided a direct response.
“At the time, it was untenable,” she said. “That’s what I feel comfortable saying.”
That decision removed her from acting for a while. Plays happen at night; so did her restaurant work. But two years later, she auditioned and was accepted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. While much of the training was psychological, the course also emphasized breath work, speech and movement, physical techniques that she still relies on.
“She has a beautiful, beautiful vocal instrument and incredible control of her body,” said Victor Levin, the showrunner of “Alice & Jack.” “She can express story with her limbs, the position of her head, what she does with her eyes.”
But Riseborough would never rely on technique alone. And the idea of coasting or phoning it in or falling back on the merely physical during an off day repels her. “I don’t know how to do it if it’s not true,” she said.
Will Tracy, who created “The Regime,” confirmed this. “She’s one of the most honest performers you can get,” he said. “That type of emotional truth in acting, I don’t understand how it works. I wonder if she does.”
She began her professional career before she’d graduated and after a few years working in theater, she began to rack up film credits: “Never Let Me Go,” “Brighton Rock,” “Made in Dagenham.” She played a young Margaret Thatcher in the television movie “The Long Walk to Finchley” and starred as Wallis Simpson in “W.E,” directed by Madonna.
If American audiences recognize her — and given the wigs this is a considerable “if” — it is likely for “To Leslie,” in which she starred as an alcoholic single mother. The film, directed by Michael Morris, made just $27,000 during its initial theatrical release, but Riseborough earned a Best Actress nomination, aided in part by the many Hollywood A-listers who tweeted in support. Riseborough wouldn’t say precisely whose idea it was to rally these boosters (“There wasn’t one person,” she said) or if the subsequent investigation tarnished the nomination. She is proud of having made the movie and happy for people to have seen it.
“What was really clear was that it touched so many people who have been touched by alcoholism so deeply,” she said.
This resonated with Marc Maron, her co-star in the film. “When you see her work, you realize that’s all she’s living for,” she said. Other actors, he said, have a practiced interview patter, a facility with the red carpet. Not Riseborough.
“There’s a whole other part of an actor’s job that she really didn’t care about, which is kind of a beautiful thing,” he said. “I don’t know what her life looks like. But the intensity she brings to the work, it feels like life or death, and that’s an amazing way to live in your art, you know?”
That way has its consequences. Riseborough broke both her legs in a stunt rehearsal for the Amazon series “Zero Zero Zero”. (The timing went awry.) Other projects have made her physically ill. “It’s just a very odd profession, because it does affect you, of course, on a cellular level,” she said.
In her current series, the risks are mostly emotional. In “The Regime,” Agnes is forced to share her own child with a despot. Her face is a mask of neutrality, with horror just underneath. In “Alice & Jack,” Alice, as prickly as a porcupine, hungers for love even as she pushes Jack (Domhnall Gleeson) away. In both roles she must feel and feel and feel, and those feelings are rarely happy or easy.
Here, at least, she would admit to some continuity. “The thing that I’m really drawn to is complexity,” she said, moving swiftly from the specific to the general. “It’s wonderful when you see human experience captured in a way where it embraces the vastness and the complication of what it is to be human.”
Her private life is perhaps less complicated. She lives in London with her partner, the actor Karim Saleh. (they met on the set of “Luxor”), though she isn’t often home for long. In her rare downtime, she likes to read, to write, to wander. She is an inveterate people watcher. “Sometimes it’s creepy,” she said. “I try not to be creepy.”
She has spent two decades without particular plans for her career. She won’t claim any plan going forward. “I feel very much at the beginning,” she said.
