What would you do if the career you’d built your life around suddenly made you feel nothing? That’s what happened to Killing Eve star Fiona Shaw, who, in an exclusive interview with Good Housekeeping, opened up about the moment she almost chose to reset her life and walk away from the career she’d worked so hard to build.
In 2013, Fiona was starring in the New York run of The Testament of Mary, a stage adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novella. “I was running one day between the matinee and the evening performance - I don’t run any more, by the way - and I saw the sign outside the theatre with my name on it. I felt no joy. I just felt tired,” she recalled during the interview.
She’d been working hard, touring with an acclaimed production of The Waste Land and doing an Ibsen play with the late Alan Rickman. She’d also worked with the great Terrence Malick on TheTree of Life. And yet, by the time she jogged past her name in lights, she had absolutely no desire to carry on with it all.
“I felt so weary. It was a frightening feeling, because it’s all I’d ever done,” she said. “I thought I might stop acting and teach. I didn’t know any other life; I metered my life out in productions and there I was, on the precipice, wondering how I could quietly back out.”
Thankfully, the feeling passed and, as fans will know, the 68-year-old has gone on to have a sort of second round of success in the world of TV. It was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the actress and esteemed writer behind the first series of Killing Eve, who you could say changed everything.
Fiona was sent the script for the hit BBC series and she can remember the moment vividly. “I sat in bed reading it, thinking, ‘I don’t know what this is!’ It was very odd,” she explained. “I met Phoebe for lunch somewhere off Goodge Street in London, and I knew immediately that she was the most extraordinary person. If I could have a spiritual daughter in my life, she’s that. I’m aggrandising myself by saying that – I should be so lucky!
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“Phoebe and I had RADA in common, although I loved my time there while she had an unhappy time. Everything is for a reason; if Phoebe had become a jobbing actress, she wouldn’t have written Killing Eveand Fleabag."
Starring alongside Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh, Fiona played the duplicitous M16 agent Carolyn Martens in Killing Eve, helping it to become a global hit. "There was a transcendental magic about it," said Fiona.
Phoebe then asked her to appear in series two of Fleabag as her therapist and it’s fair to say that Fiona hasn't looked back. Now, she’s stepping into the shoes of Mrs Jennings in a new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood and Caitríona Balfe.
“No actor can ever say life is hard, because you’re looked after by so many people,” Fiona said of her experience on the film. “But within that context, I spent last summer getting into a corset at dawn and walking around with tons of padding beneath my dress and a wig beneath those big hats, and it was very hard.
"But I enjoyed playing Mrs Jennings enormously and I got to see all those wonderful houses in England – I’m always thrilled if someone can show me around a stately home.”
She was particularly impressed by Daisy Edgar-Jones, “a lovely, enchanting girl’ whom she considers a terrific actor. “She’s got every quality that I didn’t have at her age; she can withhold. When I was in my late 20s, I was busy saying, ‘Watch me do this!’ It took me a long time to learn that the camera doesn’t want you to do any of that. I’ve got it now, I think.”
