Ruth Wilson has thought and talked a lot about marriage.
She won a Golden Globe in the Showtime drama The Affair as Alison, a waitress in the town of Montauk, New York, who begins an extramarital relationship with Dominic West's Noah.
She played her own grandmother in the BBC drama Mrs Wilson, about the posthumous revelation of her grandfather's polygamy — he married four women and fathered seven children — and, this spring, in the film True Things, she is Kate, a single thirtysomething who has an intense, adrenaline-filled fling with a nameless bloke she meets at the benefits office, when her mum just wants her to settle for a nice, boring man with a job.
As a result, says Wilson, 40, "I personally have no interest in walking down a church in a white dress. I've had to do a lot of dressing up in my life, so the idea of being the centre of attention like that makes my toes curl slightly."
In New York, where she lives for part of the year when she is not at her flat in southeast London, she goes to spin classes full of women "with exactly the same ring on their finger, talking about their bachelorettes. You think, that's all they're living for. It feels so depressing."
She doesn't want to sound judgmental, she corrects herself, it's a personal choice. "[Marriage] actually does offer the most amazing promise of stability but over the past 10 years I have really learnt to love my own space. It doesn't really frighten me. I like being alone."
Wilson has carved a career as a Proper Actor. She is deep-thinking, avoids social media — "I've got better things to do" — and says she is terrified of the red carpet. Her on-screen roles are complicated and knotty, interspersed with theatre so notoriously difficult it borders on masochistic: King Lear, Hedda Gabler and, this spring, The Human Voice, a female monologue written by the surrealist Jean Cocteau in the 1920s. "I feel like I'm landing nicely now that I'm 40," she says.
Wilson's breakthrough role arrived in 2014 when she was cast in The Affair, a primetime show with a shagathon for a storyline. After four seasons she left abruptly. At first her departure was reportedly the result of a pay disparity between herself and West, which she has dismissed as being untrue, but in 2019 The Hollywood Reporter revealed that she "took issue with the frequency and nature of certain nude scenes".
"Dom and I had to do so many sex scenes and I decided at one point I wasn't going to show my nipples any more," she later told ES Magazine.
How does she feel now, looking back at the way in which those scenes were filmed? "It's a long story," she says. "I feel fine now. I think for many people in the industry it was a rite of passage, unfortunately, having experiences that felt uncomfortable. I feel like the world has now moved forward and it's brilliant. Hopefully anyone in those scenarios won't have to deal with it in the same way."
Claire Foy recently told Radio 4's Woman's Hour that sex scenes are "the grimmest thing you can do" and you "can't help but feel exploited".
The most difficult part on The Affair, Wilson continues, was the lack of instruction. Today intimacy coaches are increasingly employed to choreograph sex scenes as if they are stunts, with a huge amount of detail and openness.
"Since #MeToo and Time's Up, intimacy coaches are really scientific about sex scenes," Wilson says. "But before nothing would be said. It would be about making it up as you go along. No one wanted to discuss [sex scenes], so the actors were invariably left to create something on the day and that's desperately awkward. It's a horrible place to be." But … "I'm not defined by it. It happened."
We leave it there but Wilson asks to meet again a couple of days later to clarify, worried about her words running away from her, as they have done in the past. It is a nuanced story, she says, sitting in a booth at her local pub, drinking a coffee. "If something doesn't feel authentic, in the context of something like a sex scene, it can start to feel exploitative. And that was happening on The Affair a bit. Now I'm working as a producer we have the space where if you're feeling a bit uncomfortable we can talk about that."
Her new film, True Things, which she has produced and in which she stars, is about the type of relationship so intense that it makes you sick. "Those relationships are not necessarily bad," she says. "They energise you, they make you feel alive, they overtake your whole body. You are addicted, obsessed, infatuated. But they can't last."
We meet first in east London and she is straight-talking and serious. Our conversation is often her kindly imparting advice to me, reflecting on her thirties, the decade I have ahead of me. She is more sure of herself now. "After years I finally feel like I have power in my own life. I'm making my own work, I feel very autonomous," she says.
In the film Wilson plays Kate, who works at a benefits office in Ramsgate. Kate is bored by her routine, bored by her packed lunches in the staff kitchen, bored by the same pub every Friday night and scrolling through dating apps the morning after.
Then one day a man we only ever know as Blond walks into the benefits office to sign on. "You're lovely, aren't ya," he says, resting his lips on the edge of her computer screen. Recently released from prison, he is earthy and impulsive, governed by desire and not much else.
They swim naked in lakes and shag on the grassy banks and dance and take drugs, and talk about how they are soulmates. But he is cruel and unknowable. Moments of intimacy are swiftly followed by emotional distance. Kate doesn't understand what is going on between them and it makes her feel unhinged.
"I was Kate, particularly at times in my twenties, and I've been Blond at times in my life too," Wilson says. "My friend watched it and she said, is that me and Bad Luke?" Her friend's ex, I presume, who was talked about so much that he got his own moniker. "It's everyone, it's all those relationships that are so common. We don't talk about them much but they're extraordinary. There's something in the danger that makes you feel alive."
Wilson herself has been subjected to years of speculation over whom she is dating (invariably involving whichever A-list co-star she is working with at the time). She either witheringly denies or refuses to comment on such rumours. Her boyfriend lives in New York and all she'll say is that they didn't meet on a dating app (she has never used one).
"It sounds really tough [online dating]," she says. "You've got to sell yourself because there's always another choice, always someone pinging, [there's always] potential elsewhere.
"The thing that blocks intimacy is you trying to be something for someone else," she continues. "I feel intimate with my partner because there's an honesty … He can see all the sides of me and not judge them. That's feeling loved, in a way."
Wilson wanted to ensure the sex in True Things was seen through a "female lens". She employed Ita O'Brien, an intimacy coach, who talked the actors through the scenes. "It was really straight up," Wilson says. "'OK, this is cunnilingus, we've got to put the camera here, your hand here, Tom [Burke, who plays Blond], your hand here, the action has to be like this.' I didn't feel over-objectified in those moments. Everyone works out what they're comfortable with, rather than just 'Shag over there in the corner'."
Sex scenes are another reminder, she says, that as an actor your body isn't really your own: "There are many things that are really difficult about the industry. You're rejected repeatedly for jobs. You're objectified and looked at, and people comment on your image and your face. People commented on my lips for years. Going on the red carpet always feels strange. The first time I went on one I was 24, nominated for a Bafta [for the 2006 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre], and it felt like a war zone, being papped, lights going off, people screaming your name. I felt utterly terrified. You have to have a tough outer shell to keep going."
As a result, she admits, she has largely dissociated from her body. "I'm not sure I can quite see myself. I very rarely look at my face in the mirror."
Wilson grew up in Surrey, her father an investment banker and her mother a probation officer. So far so normal. Until the bigamy. Her father's father, Alexander Wilson, was an MI6 agent and espionage thriller writer. He died suddenly in 1963 and at his graveside were two of his wives, who before then knew nothing about each other. Two more wives would come forward.
Today the families are close and sprawling, the half-siblings, cousins and grandchildren getting together every couple of years. "Everyone has such a brilliant attitude," Wilson says. "There was no resentment or jealousy about [my grandfather] having spent more time with one family than the other. It feels so long in the past that everyone is in a place where they could accept the reality of it and find humour in it, and find it sort of absurd."
As a child Wilson was a tomboy. Inevitable, perhaps, with three older brothers. She sounded brave and determined, carting the Usborne Facts of Life, aged 11, into her Catholic girls' school. "I told them we needed sex education," she says, "that it was vital." She persuaded her father, on the board of governors, to table a discussion on the subject.
Something changed, though, when she was a teenager. "I remember being about 15 and going up to London to Carwash, a nightclub [in Soho], in tiny little hot pants," she says. "Then suddenly I was 16 and I was in big T-shirts and rugby shirts and baggy jeans." Within a year she became aware of her "burgeoning sexuality" and didn't know how to cope with the attention. "I found it quite uncomfortable, it felt dangerous. I didn't know how to negotiate it, so I started dressing like a boy. I felt like it was a way of disappearing slightly, to avoid that gaze."
I remember that change too. Being looked at differently by men and hating it, wanting to disappear into the pavement. So I ask what she thinks we should do. Do we teach girls about how their developing bodies might be interpreted, or does that make them feel like the unwanted attention is their fault? "It's tricky," she says. "My mum never really spoke much to me about it, and I went to an all-girls Catholic school, so it wasn't particularly open about anything, sex, puberty."
She went on to study history at Nottingham University and was then classically trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Women are certainly more conscious of how people interpret them, she says. "We are very good at shapeshifting. We have a 360-degree sense of how we're seen, particularly in a new relationship. You're constantly trying to work out the individual opposite you and trying to give them what you think they're looking for."
In True Things, Kate's phone is the third member of Kate and Blond's relationship. It is a brilliant portrayal of modern romance, much of which is played out virtually. "Her obsession is not just about the individual, it's about the phone too," Wilson says. "There's the agony of what to say, what's going to appeal to him, how you sound keen but not too keen."
Kate reaches for her phone in the night, hoping to see messages from him — there are none. She watches him typing a text, the three little dots appearing, then disappearing again, as he decides not to respond. Her phone makes him feel within reach, but really he is nowhere near. The internet has complicated our love lives hugely. There are so many ways to interpret someone's words in a text that you can read it exactly as you want. Which is dangerous. And once a relationship ends you have a phone-full of interactions — months', sometimes years' worth — that you can reread. It allows you to crawl back inside the bones of it all and pretend it still exists. "[Texting] makes our imagination go wild," Wilson agrees. "We're all caught in this weird web of miscommunication. And then they disappear and you're, like, aargh, why aren't they responding? It's obsessive."
The ticking clock of fertility changes the way women date in their thirties too, she says. It makes you imagine a future "before it's even there. You're never in the reality of the relationship, you're in your imagination of what it might be." The pressure is ingrained from a young age — marriage and children were part of the playground conversation. "I remember saying, 'I'm going to have two kids,' someone else saying, 'I'm going to have three kids.' Aged 11. You're deciding what your wedding is going to be like. But honestly it's never been something that I've wildly wanted or even really thought about."
I find the thought of someone crying tears of joy at the sight of me in an overpriced white dress depressing too, I say. Is it the institution or the ceremony? "I just don't see the point of it unless you've got kids, when the world is set up to make it easier for you if you're married, legally. The idea of being with only one person forever is … I don't know … I'm not sure that's natural or achievable. If you look back at why marriage was set up, it was economical or it was social status. It was a contract. Now women are more economically independent, marriage is purely about love.
"[But] how long does love last? Can it really last a lifetime? People expect forever and when it doesn't work out they're somehow surprised." Each to their own, but for Wilson she's simply "not interested" in marriage.
"When I first started acting I was filming a movie in New Mexico and all the women in the make-up and hair truck were in their forties, fifties, sixties and none of them had kids. I just fell in love with them all. I'd never been around that many women who were autonomous, without children and who were colourful, brilliant, vibrant, who didn't give a f***. It suddenly felt like there was an alternative world out there."
Two years ago, though, Wilson decided to freeze her eggs. "It is invasive, the worst thing for me was getting my blood drawn every other day, that was horrible," she says. "But the extraction wasn't too bad. Throughout that process I learnt more about my ovaries and eggs and what they do than I've ever learnt before. I was embarrassed that I didn't know this before."
Cambridge University's all-female college Murray Edwards recently announced it would put on fertility seminars to teach women to start planning to have children by their mid-thirties, so they didn't "forget" to have a baby. It was controversial. Wilson thinks it's a good idea. "[Learning more about my fertility] didn't make me want to have kids more or less, it just helped me understand what my body is doing. It made me in awe of what our bodies do without us knowing every month. The hormones and emotions around that, what your body goes through, the shedding and the death and the life prepares women for life."
In her downtime Wilson lives a quiet existence, reading and running. She sleeps a lot. She is obsessive about her work, constantly looking for new projects to produce, her mind always "swirling" with ideas. She is preparing for The Human Voice, her one-woman play at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. It is a monologue — a phone call to a former lover, whose voice is redacted, in which she tells him of her loss, her pain, her anger at their break-up. Jean Cocteau wrote it in response to his actresses complaining that they never got monologues. He made it, in retaliation, very difficult.
Wilson needs to leave — she is meeting her parents, who are in London for the afternoon. She admires their relationship, admires its resilience. But she sounds almost claustrophobic when she talks about the equivalent for herself. Throughout both of our meetings she has circled the same topics: love, intimacy, trust, commitment.
"What is attraction in the first place? Those initial throes can be incredibly sexy and you can feel amazingly connected. Is that just some weird smell; that they smell good to you and you can feel connected to someone? When I was in my twenties I was right in the middle of all this stuff," she says, looking straight at me. "But you must remember the magic dust of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The love potion that descends. You fall in love with a donkey and the veil lifts and it's just a donkey. It's extraordinary."
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London
