When director Steve McQueen decided to follow up the groundbreaking 12 Years a Slave with a remake of a 1980s television crime drama, sparks were always going to fly. Giles Hattersley meets the women of Widows.
It is an electric-blue-skied morning in Manhattan when the cast of Widows (surely this year's most anticipated cinematic thriller) assemble in a white, sun-flooded photographic studio high up in a skyscraper overlooking the city. It is a scene straight out of a '80s media fantasy: racks of sumptuous monochrome fashion line the walls and an indecently populated army of assistants buzz about like gorgeous worker bees, while Aretha Franklin's "Ain't No Way" plays. "Perfect," cries Arthur Elgort, the 78-year-old veteran photographer, as the four stars, in various stages of Hollywood dominance and ascent, line up for his camera against a backdrop straight out of The Vanity Fair Diaries.
Yet something else is afoot. Despite the intoxicating throwback glamour, there are several fresh and pleasing elements about today's shoot for Vogue. Firstly, we are here to celebrate Steve McQueen's follow-up to 12 Years A Slave, the British auteur's 2013 Oscar-sweeping opus that was hailed as a modern masterpiece and credited with tilting the axis of black representation in cinema this decade. How on earth do you follow that? "Carefully," the Turner Prize-winning artist turned Tinseltown player tells me. And yet his next move is anything but. Widows, his fourth feature, is the awards season's most extravagantly plotted, politically labyrinthine, imaginatively violent, Scorsese-sprinkled thrill ride — the four leads of which happen to be women. Though "happen" is not the word. That they are women is the foundation on which McQueen has built his arthouse-meets-blockbuster moment, reinventing what a mainstream "action" film can look like — and what it can achieve emotionally.
Naturally, the 53-year-old principal arrives today in chameleon mode, looking almost confusingly youthful with her hair wrapped up in a scarf. "Excuse me," she says bobbing up and down as she shakes my hand, "I've got a bag of wigs under my arm." Action star Michelle Rodriguez, 40, who, thanks to Avatar and The Fast and the Furious franchise, ranks among Hollywood's highest-grossing actors, makes a beeline for her. "Hey V!" she cries, before moving on to a 10-second hug with Cynthia Erivo — the 31-year-old Brit who won a Tony for The Color Purple and is making her move to the big screen. Quieter than the others is Elizabeth Debicki, 28, the young Australian actress best known for playing Hugh Laurie's lover in television spy hit The Night Manager. "I'm a lazy ex-ballerina," she whispers to me after Elgort asks her to dance about the studio for his camera. "I haven't taken a class in four years."
"During casting I only thought about who was best to play each individual character," says McQueen. "There was this energy when you combined these four, though. The story is about women coming together in a hard situation, and whatever their differences – be they 'racial' or sociological – they have to work that out and become a team." Mission accomplished. As they assemble today, they look like a female supergroup about to break into a rousing ballad on the theme of anti-uniformity. Standing at more than 6ft 5in in her heels, Debicki seems from another planet to her co-stars who, in age and energy, scarcely resemble one another, either. "I love the concept of a group of women," says Davis, whose conversational tone gambols between sweet and self-effacing and thundering gravity. "Too often we are told to see each other as the enemy, like crabs in the barrel. But not this time."
Safe to say, Widows is not Ocean's 8. With a script by McQueen and thriller-scribe-du-jour Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), it was forged in the Hollywood system, so is heart-racing and sexy, yet so much more is at play. They filmed in Chicago last year, joined by Neeson ("my big ol' lips on his li'l thin Irish lips," laughs Davis) and Colin Farrell. The latter is on creepily excellent form as a politician of Irish descent whose family, led by Robert Duvall's rage-filled patriarch, rule the local district. He enters the fray when the millions go missing, while Daniel Kaluuya haunts proceedings as the single most terrifying screen heavy since Joe Pesci in Casino.
In fact, McQueen takes his leads to a point of reinvention rarely seen at the multiplex. Rodriguez, high priestess of the blockbuster, kept turning down the role of Linda, an impoverished and abandoned mother of two, because she refuses to play weak women. "That's the epitome of everything I despise," says the star, who is both deeply charismatic and wildly intense. "The horror of having your security and your life just ripped out from under you, I hate it. It's the thing about poverty — coming from nothing, as I have – I've always been repulsed by it." Yet McQueen, who had to "literally beg" her to accept the part, spotted a previously untapped range. "And I'm like, 'Michelle, you need to look at this. Why does it make you so uncomfortable?"'The answer? "My mother was that woman," she says, shaking her head. The performance is devastating.
The most exciting element, however, is why four nominally sane women, with jobs, children and lives, plot a robbery. "Wholly driven by desperation and grief," Davis says, instantly. Erivo, whose extraordinary physique, born of a ruthless gym schedule, made her the ideal fit for Belle, the runner/driver of the team, agrees. "It's not trying to be a fad movie about women who happen to do a heist," she says. "It isn't flowery, it isn't polite." Domestic violence, prostitution, chilling familial relations and motherly love all conspire to take the women to what Debicki – who plays Alice, a fascinatingly layered update on the gangster's moll trope – describes as "that point where you understand the choices being made".
In fact, McQueen takes his leads to a point of reinvention rarely seen at the multiplex. Rodriguez, high priestess of the blockbuster, kept turning down the role of Linda, an impoverished and abandoned mother of two, because she refuses to play weak women. "That's the epitome of everything I despise," says the star, who is both deeply charismatic and wildly intense. "The horror of having your security and your life just ripped out from under you, I hate it. It's the thing about poverty — coming from nothing, as I have – I've always been repulsed by it." Yet McQueen, who had to "literally beg" her to accept the part, spotted a previously untapped range. "And I'm like, 'Michelle, you need to look at this. Why does it make you so uncomfortable?"'The answer? "My mother was that woman," she says, shaking her head. The performance is devastating.
On set, all of the women were dealing with personal demons. Again, Davis breaks it down: "Every once in a while a role helps you address the thing about yourself you always felt uncomfortable with," she says. "Elizabeth being tall and awkward growing up and always feeling like that was not a plus; Michelle feeling that femininity thing that she's always rejected, but then there's a part of her that's so deeply vulnerable; and Cynthia, you know, just feeling..." she pauses. "Because we're two black girls, you know, we feel a lot of things. Always labelled strong and almost ultra-masculine and not pretty. It's all of those things that we have to make peace with – we have to slay, like a dragon."
Pre-filming, after a long debate on the phone, during which McQueen hung up on her a couple of times, Davis agreed to go wigless on screen; Debicki made her peace with 5in heels and micro-skirted Herve Leger bandage dresses; Michelle cried and cradled her on-screen children; and Cynthia embraced her strength. "He's an alchemical marriage between man and woman in one man," Rodriguez raves of her director. Or, as Davis has it, with a pitch-perfect eyebrow raise: "Steve is very picky." According to Debicki, "he's the soul terminator". There is much industry talk that Widows might be the Australian actress's "Lupita moment" (McQueen directed a then unknown Lupita Nyong'o to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar), but she bats away the rumours. Any of the women could bag one. "I mean, we could not be more varied in who we are," says Debicki. "Where we come from, how we look, how we sound, our senses of humour. Then you put us together with Steve as the conductor," she says, smiling, "and it's a beautiful thing."
News Credit: British Vogue
Pre-filming, after a long debate on the phone, during which McQueen hung up on her a couple of times, Davis agreed to go wigless on screen; Debicki made her peace with 5in heels and micro-skirted Herve Leger bandage dresses; Michelle cried and cradled her on-screen children; and Cynthia embraced her strength. "He's an alchemical marriage between man and woman in one man," Rodriguez raves of her director. Or, as Davis has it, with a pitch-perfect eyebrow raise: "Steve is very picky." According to Debicki, "he's the soul terminator". There is much industry talk that Widows might be the Australian actress's "Lupita moment" (McQueen directed a then unknown Lupita Nyong'o to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar), but she bats away the rumours. Any of the women could bag one. "I mean, we could not be more varied in who we are," says Debicki. "Where we come from, how we look, how we sound, our senses of humour. Then you put us together with Steve as the conductor," she says, smiling, "and it's a beautiful thing."
News Credit: British Vogue
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