UK Edition
Gold Digger star Jemima Rooper: ‘Weinstein wanted me in a miniskirt and high heels’
I know a few older women who are with younger men and it's really great,” says Jemima Rooper. “It's working out really well for them.” It’s a bright morning, and I’m in a little café in north London with the star of Lost in Austen, One Man, Two Guvnors, and hit new play [BLANK] – and we’ve been chatting about a topic that is sure to be much discussed when the BBC One drama Gold Digger airs this week.
Rooper may not be a household name but, at 38, she has been racking up stellar performances on both stage and screen since her teens, from a Bobbie brilliant enough to match Jenny Agutter’s original in the 2000 TV remake of The Railway Children, to a highly-acclaimed Ann Deever in an unforgettable production of All My Sons in 2010.
In Gold Digger, she plays Della, the lesbian daughter of newly divorced Julia (Julia Ormond), who, on her 60th birthday, begins a love affair with a man half her age (Ben Barnes), to the horror of Della and her brothers.
“I can understand how, if your son was the same age as your lover, they would think, ‘What does that man want with my mother?’ ” Rooper says. Julia’s children assume he is the gold digger of the title, but “at the centre of the story,” she notes, “is a woman who’s going, ‘My life is not over’.”
Don’t we always assume those relationships are just about having a younger sexual partner?
“I think that’s the suspicion,” she says. “Or to dismiss them as a moment of madness or something superficial.” But there is still a double-standard, she says: we think nothing of it when a man goes out with a younger woman, but we still raise an eyebrow when a woman has a younger boyfriend.
Ormond, she continues, is a sexy woman regardless of her age (she’s 54). “She and Ben look great together,” she adds, then starts to giggle as she wonders how she would react if it was her own mum arm-in-arm with Barnes. (Her parents, I should add, are still together.)
Della, meanwhile, is fixated on a woman she used to be with, masochistically scrolling her ex’s social media feed. Has she ever felt that kind of obsessional emotion. “Yes,” she says, twice, without elaborating. Experiencing it in the age of Facebook and Twitter, though, she says, would be “torture”.
“You get all these people who find it much easier to meet – and that side of it must be exciting, but the other side is, you have access to [your object of desire’s online feed] and with the best will in the world, who would be strong enough to go, I’m not looking at that. I’m very thrilled that I’m not in that stage of my life.”
Rooper and her partner, writer/director Ben Ockrent, have been together for a decade now, and they have a four-year-old son, Ezra. Rooper is, however, at that stage in an actress’s life when there are suddenly no roles for women her age, she says.
“There are many parts for men,” she notes, of her male actor friends, but the women invited to audition for their “love interest” roles are younger. Has there been any shift at all? “I think the generation below are probably seeing a change,” she says, but she definitely gets fewer auditions than 10 years ago.
Rooper has been acting for a long time. She grew up in Hammersmith, the daughter of Alison Rooper, for many years a Radio 4 presenter, and Jonnie Rooper, a former BBC executive. Her Wikipedia page slightly conjures a child from the pages of Roald Dahl: “Rooper expressed a wish to be an actress at the age of nine and contacted an agent,” it states. “That’s possibly written by my mum,” she laughs. (It also includes her GCSE results.) “I think I found the name of a kids’ agent in the Yellow Pages, and my mum took me along.” She didn’t get any work until much later, she insists. I have an image of her banging the breakfast table, demanding a better agent. There’s nothing Violet Beauregarde about her in person, though. She’s self-deprecating and wry, slight, and dressed in a jumper with enormous bubble sleeves, which she occasionally spreads wide as she makes an expressive point; a soft vampire in fawn knitwear.
As a 13-year-old, she was a perfect curly-haired George in the BBC’s Nineties children’s TV adaptation of The Famous Five – curling tongs! – and people still sometimes call out George to her in the street. I wonder what she made of the furore earlier this year about the Royal Mint’s decision not to forge an Enid Blyton 50p coin for fear of a backlash about the author’s racism and sexism. Rooper thinks Blyton is a victim of her time. “There's a lot of very unprogressive thoughts and feelings [in her work] that unfortunately were products of that time… But at the heart of it are lots of brilliant things that are healthy and wonderful for kids and their imaginations. I think it’s a shame that hasn't been celebrated.”
In the early Noughties, she played a lesbian ghost in three series of Sky One’s Hex, alongside a yet-to-go-stratospheric Michael Fassbender, whom Rooper refers to affectionately by his second name, recalling them half-inching bottles of wine from a country hotel. It’s clearly a Rooper thing, because she does it again when she talks about her magical “six months on Broadway with Corden” as part of the original cast of One Man, Two Guvnors. (She was the play’s cross-dressing heroine.)
Luck and timing are key to that sudden explosion in a career, she says. She thought it might happen for her after playing the lead in the much-admired Lost in Austen in 2008, but found herself building a successful stage career instead, in productions ranging from Blithe Spirit to Little Shop of Horrors.
She’s currently performing at the Donmar Warehouse in Alice Birch’s powerful, provocative play [BLANK]. In its stand-out scene, a guest rages against the liberal feminists at a dinner party in their “bleeding heart bubble of hypocrisy”, with their skin-deep political engagement and recreational drugs. Has Rooper been to parties like that? “Yes, probably a few… It was the hardest to rehearse… because there’s a lot of recognition, sort of ‘ooh god, that’s me.’”
In 2013, she appeared in a Harvey Weinstein film – One Chance, the true story of Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts. She met the producer but was never alone in a room with him, and has a surprising insight from the shop floor, “Controversially, there's this feeling, when someone who has the power to make careers doesn't really give you a second look, or isn't really bothered about you… it's incredibly annoying. Not that I wanted that kind of attention.
On the first day of filming, she adds, “his PA appeared with a whole load of new costumes and it was all massive high heels, short skirts, basically sexing up the character. I was supposed to be the weird, funny girlfriend… She was sent to do it, to make me feel comfortable about it. If Harvey himself had come along and said, I want you in a miniskirt and high heels, I’d have been, excuse me? Then you hear these awful stories of these girls and because it was probably a woman who said, ‘Harvey really wants to meet with you,’ those women were really sort of complicit in allowing that to happen.”
The moment she found most embarrassing, she says, was when she was cast in Brian De Palma’s 2006 adaptation of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, with Scarlett Johansson. “I got three scenes in a big movie and one of them was a 1930s porn film with another girl. I was 22… I knew that I was probably going to have to be topless… and when we did the porn element, there was a point when Brian was asking if my pants could come off, and I was like, oh my god, what do I do? When you’re doing a small part, you don’t feel like you can just go, ‘hang on, I need to call my agent.’ You want to be amenable. Luckily, he saw I had two tattoos on my back and said, they’ll take too long to cover with make-up. I was so happy. I’ll probably get tattooed underwear now.”
Gold Digger starts at 9pm on Nov 12 on BBC One