Women Talking talk about austere conditions on set

Women Talking star Claire Foy has opened up about the everyday things she and the rest of the cast had to give up when the film was being made. Director Sarah Polley wanted to reflect the austerity of the community where the story is set, so the actors were make-up free.

Women Talking is released in selected cinemas on 10 February and around the UK on 17 February, 2023.

Video transcript

I wondered if you were asked to give anything up so that you could actually adopt that way of life. And I'm thinking of things that we might count as very basic, like toiletries and stuff like that. I know you didn't wear any makeup, but were there other things that you had to forgo?

CLAIRE FOY: Shaving our legs and plucking our eyebrows.

No, and I think originally Fran, who produced it, wanted us all to live in the colony together. Didn't she? In the houses. And she wanted it to be like an immersive experience, and then realized that couldn't happen.

I don't think so. I think the nature-- weirdly, what I think ended up happening with this job was that the nature of shooting it, because we ended up doing a lot of it on a soundstage, we were removed-- and it was COVID-- we removed from everything basically the majority of the time. It was a very isolated, odd experience, which I think fed into it.

But that's acting, isn't it? That you have to imagine that they have no electricity, they've never learned to read and write. They don't know-- there is like a like an intellectual leap that you have to do.

SARAH POLLEY: Well, no one had any makeup, so that was the first thing. Like, there wasn't even that natural-looking makeup. No one was allowed to shave their legs.

FREDA COOPER: That was tough, Ben.

BEN WHISHAW: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

SARAH POLLEY: And I mean, we really-- they were really community. Nobody went to their trailers ever. There wasn't really trailers accessible, so it was just this big green room where everybody was together, kind of like a theater company. And so everyone spent enormous amounts of time together, with babies and dogs and, you know, tarot cards. And it was a whole world in that green room.

And I think that-- I mean, sometimes I felt guilty about it because we were really keeping you guys in pretty austere circumstances a lot of the time. But it was, I think, really good in terms of building that community.

FREDA COOPER: Was there anything that you had to give up, Ben? Or equally, would there have been something if you'd been asked to give it up that you'd have gone, no way.

BEN WHISHAW: If someone had said, you can't have a glass of wine at the end of the day, maybe I'd have felt annoyed about that.

CLAIRE FOY: Coffee! In the mornings. No way-- not if you get up at 3:00.

CLAIRE FOY: Anything to do with food. It's the only thing that gets me through the day.