Dame Kristin Scott Thomas on Meeting the Queen, Emails From Helen Mirren & Her West End Reign in The Audience

They say there’s nothing like a dame—but what about two dames? That’s the situation currently with Peter Morgan’s London and Broadway hit The Audience, which has one dame (Helen Mirren) playing Queen Elizabeth II in New York City and another (Kristin Scott Thomas) who has taken on Mirren’s Olivier award-winning role at the Apollo Theatre on the West End. A film star who has returned to the stage in a big way in recent years, Scott Thomas took time late one afternoon to talk acting royalty, meeting the queen and wishing her New York counterpart well at the Tony Awards this weekend.

What is it like to confront the double challenge of playing Queen Elizabeth, and also of Helen Mirren having played her to such success?
I don’t know whether I did confront it, to be honest [laughs]. To tell you the truth, I never saw [Helen’s] performance, which made it a lot easier for me because I kept hearing how marvelous it was. In any case, so many roles have been played by so many people: I don’t know how many actors have played Electra [the Sophocles tragedy in which Scott Thomas starred at the Old Vic last fall].

And it’s not as if you and Helen Mirren have overlapped much before, though you were both in the film Gosford Park.
Yes, though I think we probably had one line together: she was downstairs and I was upstairs. But Helen’s been very sweet: she keeps sending me emails.

Are you excited for her at the Tony Awards this weekend?
Are they this weekend? I didn’t realize! I haven’t a clue when it comes to prizes and have sort of given up on all that, but [Mirren] will surely win, won’t she? She wins for everything!

You presumably gained some insight into this role when you met the actual queen at your investiture earlier this year. Did Her Majesty offer up any words of advice?
No, there was no small talk at all. She shakes your hand and says a few sentences and then it’s on to the next person. In a way it’s been easier to glean insider information from various sources—people who’ve met with her or worked with her and of course there’s so much written about her.

So what did she say to you?
She asked me what I was doing and I said, “I’m about to pretend to be you, Your Majesty,” and she said, “Oh, in that play,” and then she said, “Well, that will be a challenge,” which I thought was very sweet. But the point is, I’m not really playing her, I’m playing our fantasy of her—the projection that we all make on to her as this uber-mother-goddess-type person. We all project on the queen like crazy!

I’ve seen the play three times and there's always a sense of anticipation as the queen makes her entrance.
Very much so. You can feel when we come on stage that they really are waiting and that the audience wants to know what she’s really like and then they get my version, which is nothing like what she really is [laughs]. What I suspect is that Helen’s probably more like her in some aspects and I’m probably more like her in other aspects and we both bring completely different elements to the thing.

It must have been amazing on the UK election night last month when you updated the show to keep pace with current events. Were you rehearsing new material the very next morning?
Yes, I got an email at 6 a.m. saying, “This is the new scene: please learn it for 2 p.m.” [Laughs.] But this whole experience has been frightening, not just because of learning new words but also because I’m quite out of my comfort zone. There’s nothing in this part that I can relate to personally—no inner, unexplored event in my life that I can access first-hand. So all that has been frightening but also quite exciting.

Recently, you’ve had an increased commitment to stage work, almost like a second calling.
Except that I’ve always wanted to do theater and really didn’t want to make films and sort of got sidetracked into making them. What happened then was that I had just had my third baby and was making a film in L.A. and somebody rang and said, “Do you want to do [the Racine play] Berenice in French on tour” and I thought, well, yes, because nobody’s going to ask me to do this again, so I did and it led to all these other things.

Were you worried about the technical equipment needed for theater since that can sometimes be the first hurdle for film actors when they do stage?
Not really: I just sort of knew. I did train as an actress and my first jobs were on stage, so I knew I had the physicality for it, but what I didn’t know was how an audience was going to react to me since that is the bit of it that you just don’t know. You think, “are they going to like you? Are they going to connect with you?”

So being made a dame must have felt like a particular validation.
It was like getting a gold star—I was so excited. I know there are lots of people who turn these honors down but my response was, “Yes, please.” It just makes me really happy to think that somebody somewhere has agreed that I am worth it, or rather that my work is admired enough to be able to be considered for something like that.

You’ve done The Audience and Electra back-to-back, and Old Times prior to that, with you and Lia Williams swapping parts. That's a lot in a relatively small amount of time!
I just so prefer plays to making films; the characters are so much better. I’d love to do Brecht and some more Pinter—I love Pinter—and I’d love to do something opposite Ralph Fiennes or Mark Rylance. They’re completely brilliant.

No more films then?
I did say a few years ago that I’d given up movies, but then I think, “I will probably do another one,” and they are still sending me lovely things. But what I love about theater is the completely other concentration that is required to communicate to 800 people for two hours. That’s an exhausting experience but good exhausting—it’s what I like.