Contender Q&A: Lesley Manville, ‘Another Year’

Mike Leigh’s filmography is not lacking in emotionally draining high-wire performances — Brenda Blethyn in “Secrets & Lies,” David Thewlis in “Naked,” Imelda Staunton in “Vera Drake,” to name just a few. But there’s a frayed-nerved quality to Lesley Manville’s performance in Leigh’s “Another Year” (opening Dec. 29) that’s as raw as any of those.

Manville plays Mary, an unattached middle-aged woman whose friendship with happily married co-worker Ruth Sheen grows increasingly desperate as her life falls apart. Mary is a lively sort, the kind who drinks too much and laughs too loudly, but her vivacious facade crumbles as she comes to terms with her own loneliness over the course of an increasingly disastrous year. “Another Year” is Manville’s seventh film with Leigh, the culmination of a collaboration that began with 1980’s “Grown-Ups.” Although she’s one of Britain’s most esteemed stage actresses, Manville’s movies with Leigh represent the bulk of her big-screen work. Now, with the attention “Another Year” has received since its Cannes premiere, her interest in working more frequently on this side of the pond has a good chance of bearing fruit.

Mike Leigh has rebutted, sometimes vehemently, the idea that his films have messages. But they are organized around very strong themes, which in the case of “Another Year” have to do with getting older, something your character, Mary, is having a lot of difficulty with.

I don’t think he would deny that before he makes a film he does have themes and notions in his head about what he wants to deal with — none of which he shares with us. The question I get asked the most is, “What did you think when Mike handed you the script and asked you to play Mary?” Of course, there was no script. There is no Mary. He would never say to me, “Right, I want us to end up with someone who’s a kind of lonely alcoholic.” That’s what she became. He was obviously steering me in a certain direction, but Mary is the result of what we made her. And we did start from her childhood, Day One, and we created this woman whose father she’d never known, the mother deserted her when she was in her teens. She was always an outsider at school, she didn’t function very well. She had a string of disastrous relationships. So you then put a person like that into adulthood. The whole thing about her drinking too much and dressing too young and behaving inappropriately, it’s arrived at quite organically with the process you’ve used to create her. So nothing is pinned on like a badge.

You’ve made seven films with Leigh over the last three decades. Has the process changed in that time?

It hasn’t really. The way we create the character and rehearse and then structure it and shoot it has not really changed. The only thing that’s different now is that he has more time. When I started working with him, he was making films for the BBC and Channel 4, when he had much less time. We did it, still. But now, he can work elaborately. [“Another Year”] was 18 weeks rehearsal and 12 weeks shooting.

Between rehearsal and filming, that’s seven months, which is longer than it takes to make most blockbusters. Can you work on anything else in that time period?

Of course, as an actor, you did get days off. It’s a bit stop-start in the beginning. But as it carries on and hots up, if you’re going to end up with a big part in it, you’re going to be in quite a bit. You can’t do anything else. He says you’re on it and you’re on it. For one thing, your focus would get diverted. But also, if he finishes with you on a Monday afternoon, he can’t say for sure when he’s going to need you back, depending on what other people are doing. He might not be able to bring your character back until some other characters have reached a certain point of development. So you just have to be available. The thing about this process is that once you’ve created the characters, you can put them in any situation, and you don’t have to intellectualize.

As a child, you trained as a singer. How did you change course?

I can sing, but I was mostly singing classical stuff then. I kind of went off it without being informed about it. Nobody ever took me to the opera, so I just decided I didn’t like it, but it was based on nothing, really. I was quite independent. I just announced one day to my parents that I wanted to leave school and go to a stage school in London, and they just kind of agreed — which was a bit silly, but it did work out all right. Then at stage school, I did meet a very good acting teacher, and she did start turning things about for me. Then one day I met Mike, and it changed overnight. The great thing about working with him in my 20s was that he made me realize I could play people who were absolutely not like me. Before that, I was basically playing myself.

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