Victoria Hamilton interview: ‘I think female desire is a complex subject’

‘My God, I can’t speak for the Queen Mother,” says Victoria Hamilton. I’ve just asked the actress who played the much-loved royal in the first two series of Netflix’s The Crown to pronounce on Prince Harry’s decision to leave the family firm, and wondered what his great grandmother would have advised?

“I imagine she’d have been pretty shocked,” she eventually decides. “She was of that generation where you still didn’t show your private life to the public.” Hamilton, I should add, is not regal in person, even via the odd formality of a video call. She’s playful and pixie-like (though I’m sure she won’t like that description).

She wouldn’t call herself a monarchist, either, although she says, the older she gets – she’s 49 – she notices “how you get more and more emotional about anything in your life that is a constant”. The Crown also gave her an invaluable insight into the institution. “You basically sacrifice any kind of choice of how you’re going to live your life. I wouldn’t want to live in it. I certainly think I sympathise more with the Royal family than I did before I played that role.” On Harry, she adds: “I don’t think you can underestimate the trauma for those two boys of losing their mum in the way they did.”

It must feel close to home. Hamilton has two young sons herself, and also recorded a voice-over for a documentary about Diana this year. It has been the only work available during the pandemic. “There were actors all over London desperately trying to buy the right mic and software so that they could record at home. In the hottest bit of the summer, we had to put a stepladder up in our bedroom and throw a 10-tog duvet over it and sit inside it like a tent, with the mic. “I was in there in my bra and knickers, sweating, thinking, ‘This is insane’, but also going, ‘but it’s work!’”

In fact, she and husband Mark Bazeley have essentially become “not very good primary school teachers” to their sons over the past six months. There’s a little echo of her mother in that; she ran a nursery school from home, while Hamilton’s father “started out as a tea boy at an advertising company in his teens and worked his way up to build his own advertising company”. Hamilton grew up in Surrey and went to an independent school and was the first member of the family to win a place at university, before ditching it to train as an actor.

She made a big impression early in her career. On stage, she was nominated for two Oliviers and a Tony and had critics calling her the new Judi Dench. On television, for a time, she seemed to be trapped in period dramas, starting with her first screen job out of drama school, as Mrs Forster in Andrew Davies’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with Colin Firth’s pond-dipping Mr Darcy. Hamilton has also done period drama with the late and great Diana Rigg, both on screen and in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (the play on which she also met her husband). She recalls Rigg taking her for a drive when the play went to Edinburgh, close to Rigg’s home. “She put me in this open-top car and drove at speed through the Scottish hills, breaking the speed limit all the way, holding a cigarette out of the window, telling me these wonderful stories. It was the epitome of glamour.”

These days, Hamilton has escaped the corset. In fact, she was all set to shoot the second series of Sky One’s political thriller Cobra, in which she plays the Dominic Cummings-like chief of staff to Robert Carlyle’s prime minister. But filming has been put back twice already due to Covid. Now, though, she’s about to appear alongside Steadman again in an unputdownable new BBC One drama from Mike Bartlett, Life, in which she returns to the character she played in two series of Bartlett’s ratings hit Doctor Foster. Hamilton’s kindly Anna, viewers will recall, walked out on her husband Neil after Suranne Jones’s title character had slept with him as “revenge” against her own partner.

Hamilton is picking up where she left off in more ways than one. She had just finished playing the lead in a run of Bartlett’s state-of the-nation play Albion, at the Almeida Theatre in north London, when the coronavirus hit. Has she become Bartlett’s muse? “I don’t think Mike needs a muse,” she says. “I just feel very lucky to have met him.” (They first worked together eight years ago, on Love, Love, Love at the Royal Court.) Life is like a sophisticated take on a soap, with the stories centred on a large house in Manchester divided into four flats, rather than a street or pub. Anna is now living as Belle – in fact, Bartlett hid the fact that it was the same character, Annabelle, when he first sent Hamilton the script.

In Life, Belle is thrown into the role of surrogate mother to her off-the-rails niece Maya (Erin Kellyman), after her sister’s suicide attempt. Maya instantly spots that she is cramping Belle’s ploy to have sex with the handyman, and suggests she uses an app like everyone else. I wonder if Hamilton thinks a lot of women will relate to Belle’s difficulty acknowledging that she wants sex at all?

That’s a very interesting question coming from a fella,” she laughs. “She doesn’t actually want sex,” the actress adds. “She may want physical pleasure. She may fancy an orgasm, but what she wants is love and to be truly connected to someone. “I think it’s becoming easier and easier to talk about that stuff, as a woman. God, I hope it is otherwise, what’s been the point of the last 20 years? I think female desire is a very extraordinary, complicated subject. I think it’s profoundly difficult for men and women to deal with. Whenever I’ve thought about writing anything, that’s the subject I’d write about, because I find it endlessly fascinating.

“The interesting thing to me about that question, from a man to a woman, is that it’s raising the question, ‘Is there such a thing for women as just sex for pleasure?’ And I would say there probably is, but it still isn’t the same as just sex for pleasure for a man. Because there’s a whole world of psychological emotional stuff going on, in order to just have sex for pleasure that I think isn’t quite the same for men.” The generation gap is writ large, too, in Life. Is she concerned about the culture wars we seem to be living through?

She says MeToo and Black Lives Matter needed to happen but worries about an extreme effect that cancels out all the good, where artists are starting from a point where they’re worried what the reaction will be if they “confront this topic, show this theme, play this character”. “God forbid, we end up reducing our ability to express ourselves and to speak out and create without fear.”

Life starts on BBC One at 9pm on September 29