Samantha Bond on Her Ideal London Role Opposite Real-Life Husband Alexander Hanson

Samantha Bond may be best-known the world over as Moneypenny in the James Bond (no relation!) films, back when Pierce Brosnan was playing 007. But the distinctively smoky-voiced actress has been a regular London theater presence for 25 years, earning a 1999 Tony nod for her only Broadway outing to date in David Hare’s Amy’s View, playing the daughter of Tony winner Judi Dench. She can currently be seen as the scheming yet alluring Mrs. Cheveley in the West End revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Vaudeville Theatre. Bond’s co-stars include her real-life husband, Alexander Hanson (A Little Night Music), so sharing the stage with a spouse was among the topics under discussion during a genial New Year’s chat with Broadway.com.

Happy New Year! Were you able to enjoy yourself at all during the busy Christmas-season theater schedule?
Let’s just say that we went to a party where people were saying that they thought the Christmas holiday had gone on too long and I wanted to go, “What holiday?” [Laughs.]

The upside is that theaters in London have been particularly full, as they are on Broadway.
We’ve had lovely houses. I think what’s happening, in this country at least, is that people save up going to the theater as a treat because everyone is a bit cash-strapped. So if you’re going to go to the theater, this is the time of year to do it.

It’s interesting that you and your husband [Broadway vet Alexander Hanson] have never worked together before. After all, when you played Hannah in [Tom Stoppard’s] Arcadia, he could easily have played Bernard.
Alex certainly could have, except that he was doing A Little Night Music at the time. To be honest, it’s been mostly a matter of logistics that has kept us from working together until now. We’ve got two teenagers, and although we had proper child care until they were about 10, since then we’ve tried for only one of us to be in the theater at a given time. Otherwise there’s no one at home. Arcadia is an interesting case in point: I could really only do it because it came in during the summer holiday when the kids had done their exams.

So, are you enjoying sharing a stage with Alex eight times a week? [Hanson plays government minister Sir Robert.]
It’s been a great experience, truly. At the beginning of performances, particularly, I found that I would get appallingly nervous, whereas Alex has nerves of steel. So it was quite nice to look into a fellow actor’s eyes and see eyes that you knew and loved and were comforting. Also, Alex had been away for the year in New York doing Night Music, so this seemed like a wonderful opportunity to find one another again.

What was the response of the rest of the cast? It must be rather daunting playing opposite a real-life couple.
I think everyone was quite aware that we were married, but, happily, most of Alex's role is not with me. It's only in Act One that we spend much time actually acting opposite one another.

Alex told me when we spoke last fall that he had done several previous productions of this very play. Had you?
I did it in drama school [in Bristol]: I gave my Lady Markby [laughs]. I had never seen a professional production and didn’t see the Peter Hall one [from the 1990s]; I don’t know why. But it’s nice in a way when you haven’t seen it before, and it feels particularly nice at this point, halfway through our run. It’s a bit like skiing, when you’re coming down a mountain side and suddenly you think, “I can do it!”

As Lady Cheveley, you get to be both venomous and sexy.
Yes, and I don’t usually play wicked women. I loved playing Mrs. Arbuthnot a few years ago [in Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, with Rupert Graves]. That was heartbreaking to do and had a great emotional journey. On this one, I get to turn up with a lovely frock—I call it my Oscar-winning frock, in the most fantastic turquoise—and be horrid to everyone in as charming a way as possible.

You wore a comparable frock on Tony night in 1999, when you were nominated for Featured Actress in a Play for Amy’s View. [Bond lost to Death of a Salesman’s Elizabeth Franz.]
I did! I had my brother, Matthew, and my mum with me. She was going through chemotherapy at the time, and the producers got another seat for her, which was so kind. I knew I couldn’t win because of Elizabeth but I thought, “She can get the Tony; I’m getting the frock.” [Laughs.] It’s quite the day in New York, the Tonys—you do the Sunday matinee and suddenly you’ve got hairstylists and makeup people in your room and you’re being offered diamonds. I was lent diamonds worth $100,000 for the one night, and there was a gentleman who said, “Do you want a security guard?” I said, “I don’t, no,” and then thought, “Do I need one?” [Laughs.]

Did you consider using that Broadway moment to decamp for L.A. the way English Tony nominees such as Rufus Sewell and Eve Best have done?
No. I’m afraid I’m a terrible bore, but the children would have been seven or eight, and that’s not the time when you can whisk off and take them with you; they need to be settled. Maybe I lack ambition, but I was kind of the wrong age, as well. I think if you’re in your 20s and you’re male, that’s one thing, but for a woman about to be 40, it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

The Bond films were good to you, but you’re no longer part of them.
It’s very odd at the moment not to have a Moneypenny or Q. I’m assuming they’ll bring her back, but if they do, it certainly won’t be with me. It’s not that I didn’t want to do it with Daniel [Craig], but I felt when I was first offered the job that I would play the role with Pierce [Brosnan], and that was that. It’s a funny thing: Moneypenny was sort of a double-edged sword. It finished Lois Maxwell’s career, and I didn’t want to be that person however many years on.

Not much chance of that given the regularity of your work on TV and in the theater.
I try to do one play a year. Otherwise it gets too frightening!