Emily Watson may be a “softly spoken, middle-class English girl” – but don’t let that fool you. “Non-conformity runs pretty deep in me,” she says, pointing to a recent rally against climate change that she attended with her children – who played hooky to attend.
“At one point, they were scrambling with others up the railings of the Victoria Memorial,” she says of Juliet 13 and Dylan, 10, “in the shadow of Buckingham Palace, where I’d picked up the OBE a few years back. I was thinking, ‘Uh-oh, this is a bit weird! I should probably keep my head down’.
But at the same time, she says, “my heart was swelling with pride that all these kids – including my own – were saying, ‘This is our future, this is our planet to inherit’. They don’t have a vote, but they were using their voices.’” There is a quietly felt passion in Watson’s delivery, the same as in life as on screen – whether she’s having illicit liaisons in the crypt of the Commons, as she did in the BBC drama, Apple Tree Yard or her BAFTA winning turn as Janet Leach, the charity worker who questioned Fred West, in ITV’s Appropriate Adult.
Though naturally warm, the 52-year-old moves easily to sorrow, too, particularly when recalling the sadness of losing both her parents. Her mother died suddenly from encephalitis in 2006 while Watson was filming in Australia: “I tried to get back before she died,” she remembers, “but the journey was too long, and I didn’t make it. A few years later my father became ill with multiple myeloma, which was also horrendous, but at least I was able to say goodbye properly.
“With any death,” she adds, “you unpack the experience slowly and over many years and it goes through different phases – the drama and trauma when it first happens and later the simple, unchangeable absence of someone.
“Time heals, to an extent, and yet I still miss my mum as intensely as I did when it first happened. Those feelings never go away.”
It is partly Watson’s ability to access her deepest emotions that make her so fine on screen. It’s employed again in Chernobyl, the new five-part Sky-HBO drama in which she plays Ulana Khomyuk, a fictitious nuclear physicist determined to discover what really happened after the explosion at the Ukrainian plant in 1986. “It was an ecological catastrophe and the worst accident in the history of the nuclear power industry”: without the real-life scientists on whom her character is based, “it would have been 100 times worse.”
The ensemble cast includes Jared Harris, Jessie Buckley and Stellan Skarsgard, the latter of whom she co-starred with in her big breakthrough role in Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. “Working with Stellan again meant a lot,” she says. “In our first scene together I almost couldn’t remember my lines!” I was like, “Oh God, I’m in the room with you again!
