It is not every day that you get up, turn on your computer and encounter an enchantress, a witch, smiling at you via video link. It is hard to know which of us – the enchantress, the witch who is otherwise known as the actor Morgana Le Fay Naomi Jane O’Reilly, or me – is more excited.
“I feel like I have the weight of the nation behind me,” she says. “The excitement of a nation behind me!”
We are both really quite dizzy and most definitely dippy over the news that she has been cast in the third season of HBO’s luxuriously loopy The White Lotus. In case you have been confined to a desert island with only a coconut tree for company, it is set in fictional, super-luxury resorts where the super-rich, super-screwed-up and super-bored people go. Just, you know, for something to do.
They mostly get super-scammed or murdered. In the meantime, they get to wear ultra-expensive clobber and eat and drink ultra-expensive food and plonk and be rude to under-paid natives before getting the ending they deserve. It’s revenge for rudeness to the poor people, who have to cater to their every whim while wearing their fakest smiles.
The most famous cast member, thus far, was the wonderful Jennifer Coolidge, who played the, yes, luxuriously loopy Tanya. She survived the attempts of “the evil gays” to murder her on the luxury yacht they lured her to, only to leap from the boat and cave in her over-coiffured head.
Perhaps, suggested one fan, O’Reilly will turn out to be Tanya’s long-lost daughter. That would be fun. This is a fun story: two weeks after she sent off her audition tape, she got a text while at a friend’s wedding. The text, from her agent, said: “Oh my gosh. We’ve just had the most amazing feedback from the casting agent of The White Lotus.” The text arrived just as the bride was about to walk down the aisle.
O’Reilly’s first thought was, “Oh, don’t make this about me.” Her second was: “I wanted to stop the wedding! ‘I just have something to say … Does anybody know a little show called The White Lotus?’” The amazing thing about this is that mostly actors audition and then hear nothing for months, or just nothing at all. After a couple of weeks, she was told that there was still strong interest from the creator and director of the show, Mike White, and that she should hear in the next few days. She thought: “Ah, I can still just enjoy this. I still get to just enjoy the buzz of the hope, the dopamine, because I know I’m not staring down the barrel of three months of waiting. And maybe …” She likens getting those frequent rejections to turning her into “a lumbering drunk at a bar who wants to pick fights with everybody”.
The next day at 7am, she was told she had the part. “So respectful, so loving and lovely. And I just got to be fizzy and excited in the kind of way that you dream about when you first start out.”
Fabulous at being famous
You imagine that she is almost perpetually fizzy and excited but, of course, she’s not. Nobody is, especially not when you have been in the precarious game that is being an actor. She is 38. The White Lotus might make her famous. She would be fabulous at being famous.
Would she like to be famous? “I would like to not have to prove myself with every single job, every single prospect of a job. You know, after 17 years of doing this, I feel like, with every single audition, I have to prove what I can do.” It sounds exhausting. “And semi-insulting, actually,” she says.
She is in Thailand now, where the third series is set. She will be staying at a fabulously posh hotel. “I believe so, yes,” she says, putting on her fabulously posh voice. Well, she does have to get in character. “Yes. Yes. Yes. I need to do it for research.” Because she’s such a bleeding-heart liberal: “I have a little bit of class shame. I feel a little bit guilty about ordering a drink that costs as much as the waiter’s weekly wage.”
She has posted a picture of a watermelon being constrained by a seat belt. And another of a pair of luridly pink plastic fish-shaped slippers at a market. She appears to be wearing them. She has very Kiwi toes. She could do with a posh resort’s pedicure. You think, what the hell must her fellow cast members make of her? Quite possibly that she’s a bloody loony from the Antipodes. That’s what you call perfect casting.
I already knew she was a witch. This is because I have interviewed her before, in 2016. “I think you put a spell on me,” I tell her of that encounter. She is delighted at the idea. “Really? What happened?”
I explain that I re-read that piece and blushed. I appeared to spend most of the interview fluttering my eyelashes at her. It was an amazingly flirty interview. You are not supposed to fall head over heels in love with people you’re interviewing. I fell head over heels in love with her, and you would, too. That I did is because she bewitched me, I tell her. She is a spell-caster. She says she loves to play and that I love to play. “If you’d been a brick wall, it would not have been like that at all. Nooo.”
Acquired taste
Other than the The White Lotus news, the reason for talking to her again is that she is in the really very good psychological thriller written by Sarah-Kate Lynch, Friends Like Her, which screens on Three and ThreeNow from April 15. She plays Nicole, a mother of three young children, who is pregnant again. She is having a baby for her best friend, Tessa, played by Australian actor Tess Haubrich. What could possibly go wrong?
Nicole is straightforward, practical, married to her nice husband, Liam. Tessa is wild, a bit snooty, and rich. She and her husband, Liam’s brother Rob, run a helicopter business, flying rich tourists about Kaikōura, where the series is set. Nicole is horrified when Tessa makes Rob fly to Christchurch to pick up a pair of shoes, the price tag of which would make anyone feel faint. Tessa flaunts her money about the small seaside town, which wins her no friends, except for Nicole. As one character says: “She’s an acquired taste.” To which another member of the Kaikōura coven responds, sneeringly: “I won’t be acquiring that.”
The two women have a bond: there are flashbacks to a traumatic event in Thailand. Still, they seem such an unlikely couple. Of course, O’Reilly likes Tessa. She could be friends with her. “She’s playful. She’s naughty. She’s a good time.” She might be describing herself.
Another reason to hate Tessa: she’s skinny. She gets about in designer clobber. Nicole is more of a leggings and flannel shirt sort of country gal. Did O’Reilly have costume envy? “Sometimes. But, you know, there’s actually that scene where we’re in the park having a big picnic-barbecue thing. It seemed like the coldest day in the world. There was never a colder day than that. She was wearing that little tiny dress. And she’s a slip of a thing.”
Body angst
When she was a girl, O’Reilly went through a stage of wanting to be a slip of a thing. On her Instagram page, there is a page from her 1998 diary. There is a scrawl of a fat girl: “Me.” And one of a skinny girl: “Anyone else.” She had written, in an anguished scribble: “I’m a fat and ugly cow.” Your heart breaks for that girl. “I know. It’s awful. Poor girl.” That poor girl grew up to be beautiful (she probably always was). She turned that young girl’s despair into her successful one-woman play, Stories About My Body. So suck on that, body angst.
She and her husband, the film-maker Peter Salmon, have two kids, Luna, 8, and Ziggy, 5. In 2021, the couple won the Emmy for Best Short-Form Series for their comedy thriller, Inside. Not too shabby for a fatty. Of course, she’s not a fatty and never has been. I’m just playing. But she already knew that.
I say – because I’m head over heels in love with her, obviously – that I hope she now knows that she’s amazingly beautiful. “Sometimes. Cow. Sometimes I can really say that. Anyway. Thank you.” Did she just call me a cow? Or did she just call herself a cow? Who knows? But it’s funny either way.
Acting is playing and playing is magic. “Any sort of art is a kind of magic.” Her parents are also magicians. Her mother is the dancer and choreographer Mary-Jane O’Reilly, co-founder of legendary dance company Limbs. When she was 50 and her daughter was 15, they got tattooed together – to honour an agreement made when Morgana was 5. At the age of 63, her mother took her “neo-burlesque” show to the Edinburgh Festival. Nudity may have been involved.
Her father, Phil O’Reilly, is a graphic designer. He likes to joke that they named their only child Morgana in case she wanted to be a stripper when she grew up. They may be a tad eccentric.
She sort of is a stripper. She doesn’t shy away from getting her kit off. She once, while scantily clad, got paid by blokes to lick her toes in a fetish club in New York. She plugged Stories About My Body like this: “Warning: There will be nudity. And you’ll love it.” She says: “I think I have a bit of a fascination with something if something scares me. I want to kind of play with it.”
She believes in magic. It’s her job. “I think you’re conjuring something. I think you’re a conduit for something. I think any kind of play is a recognition of magic. And look, I do work in an industry where there is a lot of waiting. A lot of maybes. And if you don’t have a bit of magic then it can just feel like chaos. I love how in ancient Greek mythology, they called the time before the gods arrived “chaos”. And to me, that’s what magic does. It just gives a bit of meaning and a bit of order. If for no other purpose than just to figure out how to get through it.”
I don’t want to be rude, but she could do with applying a bit of magic and a lot less chaos to her bookcase, which looks as though some rabid animal has recently romped through it. We both examine her bookshelves. She says, hopefully, “Don’t you think it looks even extra magical?” No, I don’t. It looks like chaos. Her closet is in similar disarray, she says. “It’s like my brain.”
She is, you hope, about to become a big star but she is the least starry person you could possibly imagine. She is Zooming in an old T-shirt and shorts, barefoot. There is a laundry basket piled with not-very-folded washing on a bed. Perhaps her resident ghost could do a bit of a tidy up, including those woefully disordered bookshelves.
She claims to believe in ghosts. “If you have a ghost story, I want to hear it.” A man walks into the room. It’s a ghost, she says. The ghost says, “Hi,” picks up a power cord and leaves the room. I say that I don’t believe it’s a ghost. I’m fairly sure it’s her husband. She insists that it was a ghost. Oh yeah, if it was a ghost, why did it go out through the door when a ghost could have just gone through the wall? “Don’t ask questions, Michele. It’s magic. It’s unsolved mysteries for a reason.”
She is a deliciously unresolved mystery. An adorable nutter. A seriously good actor. What is there not to fall in love with? Cow.
