The actress is 27 — the same age as the singer when she died. With the director Sam Taylor-Johnson, she talks about why we should remember the star for her amazing talent, not drink and drugs.
Thirteen years ago we lost the most enigmatic, talented pop star of a generation, Amy Winehouse. Tears Dry on Their Own, Love Is a Losing Game, Rehab — when she was well enough, and she wanted to, music poured out of her. But the music became overshadowed by a tumultuous, short life played out on TV and in the papers. After all the drugs and drink, the bulimia, bloody ballet pumps and messy beehive, Winehouse’s death, at the age of 27, left a vast “What if?”
Her songs were glorious, sassy jazz that felt timeless but also of their time, yet Winehouse’s legacy has felt more picked apart than celebrated. Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary, Amy, was a disaster movie fixated on tragedy, while the family’s 2021 riposte, Reclaiming Amy, was mostly just sad: a film that no parent should have to make, but Winehouse’s mother, Janis, and father, Mitch, believed they had to.
Time, then, for a reset, for Back to Black, the Winehouse biopic named after her definitive second album that tells the story of her firecracker career. Yes, there is pain, but in the film, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and starring Marisa Abela, best known for the BBC’s banking and bonking drama Industry, the music is front and centre. “I had a call from my agent that they wanted to meet and my instinct was, ‘Woah!’” Abela says. “But I felt an obligation to do right by Amy.”
Cynics will suggest this is just her label revving up sales and streams, but Winehouse wrote music because she wanted it to be heard and Back to Black offers her a stage to perform on for one last time.
“All my sense of her recently has been through the media and documentary,” says Taylor-Johnson, whom I meet with Abela for afternoon tea in London. “We have judged her through them, so I wanted to make something that people would watch and then go straight home and listen to her music.”
That said, both women know that Back to Black is a minefield, fraught with the possibility of exploitation. When, say, unearthed Prince music is released, or when the Freddie Mercury film Bohemian Rhapsody downplays his sexuality, people ask if the subject would have wanted this. Last year, when the first image of Abela as Winehouse was papped, columnists leapt to question the ethics of the film.
So is this film controversial, as it has been labelled? “No I don’t think so in any way,” Taylor-Johnson says. “Noise will always be big about something like this, but nobody has really seen it yet and we’ve made it through Amy’s words, music, her perspective. Anything else would, yes, have been exploitative, but this retelling lacks tragic hindsight. It is not an investigative piece — it joyfully honours Amy.” So invested was Taylor-Johnson in moving on from doom and gloom that she agonised over the death. They took a month to edit the last three minutes.
The director is calm, if drained, having just finished the film. She has her 57th birthday party — organised by her husband, the rumour-mill James Bond Aaron Taylor-Johnson — to head to later. Abela, meanwhile, is thriving in her growing spotlight. She is unleashed, presenting the Baftas and the Brits and making a film directed by Steven Soderbergh with Cate Blanchett.
Taylor-Johnson is a smart fit for this hefty project. Her debut, Nowhere Boy, was another music flick, about the early life of the Beatles, while her visual art long looked beyond the façade of fame. “Celebrity is the worst word for anybody who’s actually talented,” she says, adding that, from her notorious 2004 video installation showing David Beckham asleep all the way up to Back to Black, she has wanted to find “where someone’s iconic status germinates”.
She saw Winehouse perform at Ronnie Scott’s, early enough for her to be in a New Voices night. She remembers her as “so shy, but her voice so powerful” and says the singer looked at the floor for the whole gig, just staring, thinking: “If I do not see anyone, I can perform …”
Taylor-Johnson met eight actresses over two days to cast her Winehouse — with Abela the only one who turned up without the accoutrements and beehive wig. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Here’s the eyeliner, here’s the hair,’” Abela says. “I didn’t want this to feel like impersonation. The reason people fell for Amy wasn’t because she teetered about on 9in heels, but because of who she was as a person.”
Then came the tricky part — the weight loss and the singing: “Amy Bootcamp”. Abela moved to Camden and worked ten hours a day with a personal trainer, using a dietician to ensure she was thin, but safely so. Winehouse weighed less than seven stone (44kg) when she died. “I see my body as a true instrument that I’m training for a job,” Abela says, with George Ashwell, one of the trainers who worked with her, adding: “Obviously Amy was thin for unhealthy reasons, but you can achieve [that look] while also being healthy in order to play her.” The film, bar the last scene, was shot back to front, so that Abela was at her thinnest at the start, before being the healthier, younger Winehouse at the end of filming.
For the singing, meanwhile, the initial plan was to use original Winehouse vocals, but Abela trained to the extent that the vocals in the film belong to the actress. She took guitar and vocal lessons, working with vocal coach Anne-Marie Speed four times a week, two hours at a time, for three months before cameras rolled. “It’s full-time preparation, it’s like an athlete,” Speed said. “You’ve got to get the body working in the right way to truly produce the voice.”
It paid off. When Abela sang What Is It About Men? at Abbey Road, Taylor-Johnson was blown away. One day Abela’s mother, Caroline (also an actress), came to the set to watch her daughter sing Tears Dry on Their Own live — and promptly burst into tears.
Abela was born in 1996, which makes her the age Winehouse was when she died. She remembers her father, Angelo, recording Winehouse on Jonathan Ross for her debut album, Frank, in 2004. “It was the first time that I was aware of her,” she says. “He just said, ‘This girl is so special.’” Abela agreed and listened to Frank in the car on the way to school, feeling the singer’s life resonated too. As with Winehouse, Abela’s parents split when she was young.
Abela’s mother is Jewish too; was that important in playing Amy? “Yes, definitely,” Abela says. “Amy spoke about being Jewish a lot. She was a proud Jewish woman and wore a Star of David necklace.” Last month, a pro-Palestinian sticker was placed over said necklace on the Winehouse statue in Camden — in death, as in life, her image clearly remains out of her hands.
And it is not just Winehouse’s legacy that has become public consumption. The Kapadia film painted Mitch as an awful father and Winehouse’s former husband Blake Fielder-Civil as simply a wretched addict. I think Back to Black exonerates Mitch, and damns Fielder-Civil further, but Taylor-Johnson insists that the family had no say in what she shot.
“People still have all their judgments, because it’s been very laid out,” she says. “But this is a totally different perspective of Mitch as a parent, through Amy’s eyes. It’s, ‘For right or wrong, all the choices he makes, that’s just my dad.’”
Taylor-Johnson met Janis and Mitch. She felt she had to, out of respect. “They deserved for me to listen to them,” she says, “and to take or discard whatever was good for the film.” She sighs. “And when we met, both were absolutely crippled with grief still, sadness and regret. There are just so many complex feelings.”
Did she meet Fielder-Civil, played in Back to Black by Jack O’Connell? “I didn’t. Jack did. I think, for him, there is a lot of fear around the film and he was afraid to meet. I tried a few times. But, also, the only villains I wanted were addiction and media attention and, ultimately, Back to Black is an outpouring of her love and brokenheartedness for him. She never stopped loving him and I don’t think he stopped loving her either.
“I did ask Janis what she thought of Blake, though,” the director adds. “She said, ‘I don’t like him and I don’t not like him. But I’m so grateful Amy got to experience the love like no other love I’ve known.’” Did she ask Mitch too? “Mitch is …” she begins. “Mitch is, maybe, a lot more opinionated about Blake…”
There are echoes of Princess Diana. Both women lived out complex lives in public and died young, leaving years of gossip in place of how they would actually want to be remembered. The leaked pap shot, though, infuriated them. Taylor-Johnson rolls her eyes. It was taken from a scene in which Winehouse is at a low point, stumbling around Soho. Real life paps, sensing the blood money of yore, tried to get a shot of the actress playing Winehouse and started to mix with the actors playing the paps. It was chaos.
“I don’t think the culture is fixed, but it has changed,” Abela says. “There was something carnal and brutal about the appetite back then that is different now and social media brings a different scrutiny. I’m not sure how that would have affected Amy, though. I doubt very much she would have had Instagram.”
Taylor-Johnson would be shooting and spot aNikon camera from 2022. “‘Get him out of here!’ The terrible irony and parallel was that we were filming how Amy was so pursued by the press and how it played a part in her discomfort in the world and we were having to deal with the exact same attention for Marisa.”
She pauses. “I thought there was more awareness now. All the culture back then, at Amy’s time, was, literally, hounding people like her or Britney in their most vulnerable states. These young women were stalked. It should have been illegal.”
Finally, I ask the most important question — what would Winehouse have thought about this film? “I thought about that a lot,” Abela says. “Because I know how outspoken she would have been.” She smiles. “And you know, I hope that, if there was a world in which Amy could see this, that she would feel proud of herself.”
Great acting transformations
Gary Oldman is… Sid Vicious
It is some feat of acting to be able to play the most damaged Sex Pistol in Sid and Nancy (1986) and Winston Churchill too, but Oldman blitzes it.
Cate Blanchett is… Bob Dylan
Six actors played Dylan in Todd Haynes’s superb I’m Not There (2007) with none more striking than Blanchett. Helped by the curly hair, cigarette and shades, the Australian woman imbued the man.
Rami Malek is… Freddie Mercury
The Queen singer was a toothy chap and so, to mimic his overbite, Malek had dental acrylics made for Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). One set had to be binned for being too big for the actor’s mouth.
Austin Butler is… Elvis Presley
Butler was electric as Elvis (2022) and sure put the work in. He listened to endless interviews and practised Presley’s voice, even perfecting his laugh. Such was his immersion that he found the voice hard to shake.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London