Phantom Thread Oscar Nominee Lesley Manville on Not Going Mad Playing Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night & More

Lesley Manville is up for a supporting actress Oscar this year for her superb performance as Daniel Day-Lewis’s severe-seeming sister in Phantom Thread and is combining the obligations that accompany being a nominee with performing at Wyndham’s Theatre opposite Jeremy Irons in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Broadway.com caught the warmly expansive performer one recent morning during rare down time to talk trans-continental travels, playing the titanic role of Mary Tyrone and sharing awards season with her ex-husband Gary Oldman.

How familiar were you with Eugene O’Neill’s posthumously published masterwork when the offer to play Mary came your way?
I’d seen Jack Lemmon do the play when I was really quite young, and I knew that it had been on the West End since then. But the key for me was that I felt in completely safe hands with our director, Richard Eyre, who in fact suggested Long Day’s Journey to me when we were working together several years ago on Ibsen’s Ghosts. [That production transferred in 2015 to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York as this one will do in May; an L.A. run is planned as well.]

What is your particular fascination with a play regarded by many as the great 20th-century American drama?
You just feel O’Neill’s brilliance at every turn. It’s such a hefty piece and, at the same time, so heartfelt. The experience of doing it does, for me, feel cathartic, particularly [Mary’s] final speech when she’s in this deep morphine state. 

Is it difficult to leave behind so emotionally fragile a character after each show?
I don’t really take characters home with me. As soon as I’m done and upstairs in the dressing room, it’s left me. It cannot be a total absorption into the character: that’s a nonsense. I’ve been Lesley for 61 years, and it’s not like all of a sudden, I can be Mary Tyrone wholly and fully. In the end, I can only do what I do, which is act, and when I’m in it, I’m really in it. In the moment, it’s profound.

So, you’re not indulging in the so-called “method”?
Listen, can you imagine if I took Mary Tyrone or Helene Alving [from Ghosts] or Mary from [the Mike Leigh film] Another Year home with me? I’d go mad!

How is it sharing this play with Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone, the onetime thespian heartthrob to whom Mary has given over her life?
I think Richard [Eyre] cast Jeremy for the part because he felt, as I felt, that Jeremy just has everything you need for James. For one thing, he looks like a dashing ex-matinee idol. We’re told in the play that women used to wait at the stage door for James Tyrone, and they’re still doing that today at Wyndham’s for Jeremy: They can’t wait to see him ride off on his Harley Davidson.

Was it important for you that an audience feel the love that knits Mary and James together, no matter how grievous things may get?
That’s actually what I love about the play: you see this couple but it can’t only be about the pain they’re in. It’s even more tragic if you get some glimpse of what they were really like together and how sexually hungry they were for one another. There are moments of a lovely twinkliness between them, which Jeremy and I like to play with. 

Were you in rehearsal when you got news of your Oscar nomination? 
We were about to do a run-through and were having a quick lunch break, and I knew they were coming out that day, but there wasn’t any wifi in the building. I didn’t, in any case, think I’d get one. So, I’m sitting at the back of the rehearsal room and suddenly my best friend phones followed literally two seconds later by my agent, and I just screamed to Richard [Eyre, the director], “I’ve got a nomination!” And he came and gave me a big hug.

How extraordinary is it that one of your fellow nominees, Lady Bird’s Laurie Metcalf, also played Mary Tyrone in the West End, in her case in 2012?
I’m so looking forward to meeting her! The movie world is going, “Oh, look, Lesley and Gary [Oldman, Manville’s ex-husband] have both been nominated for an Oscar,” but I’m also thinking, “We’re going to have two Mary Tyrones!” I’ll have something to talk about with Laurie, that’s for sure! 

What is it like for your son, Alfie, to find both his parents nominated for Oscars?
And for BAFTAs [the British Oscars.], too: it’s surreal! He’s a very sensitive boy and doesn’t talk about those feelings a lot, but I think he and his partner Lucy have been deeply touched by the whole thing. He was the one who rang his dad and told him of his Oscar nomination [for Darkest Hour]. Alfie woke Gary up at 5:30AM L.A. time and told him, and I said, “Yeah, but I’m sure dad was probably very comfortable that he was going to get nominated, whereas I didn’t think I would be nominated at all!” [Laughs.]

How are you juggling everything that’s going on, which has included work on the second series of a British TV period drama Harlots?
I’ll tell you, I looked at my sofa last night and realized I hadn’t sat on it for weeks, so I made myself sit on it! It’s been a juggling act for sure to enable everything to happen, but I know my constitution and I know my energy levels and I can organize my life very well.

Doesn’t your career at the moment—which includes the popular British TV sitcom Mum—happily disprove the often-voiced assumption that roles dry up for women as they get older?
There’s a part of me that feels guilty about that, but I also do think there is a shift. There is definitely an understanding in the industry that there is an audience, particularly of women, who want to see stories of themselves when they’re over 40 or 50 or 60. Life doesn’t end when you get your bus pass! At the moment, I’m having a f**king amazing time.

Do you have Oscar weekend planned like clockwork?
Thankfully, we don’t play Mondays, so we’re going to shift our Sunday matinee to another date so that I can go to the party and arrive back in London Tuesday morning. It’s going to be a little bit rushed to get me [to L.A.] but as long as the flights aren’t delayed, I will be at the ball!