Jessica Brown Findlay interview: ‘The first female Bond? Go on then!’

Jessica Brown Findlay has been cooking and knitting her way through the pandemic. She’s good at cooking, she tells me, on an early-morning video call; knitting, less so. “Everyone’s going to be getting really terrible jumpers from me this Christmas,” she laughs.

It was all going to be so different. “My ambition this year was to do more dancing, travel more, and work really, really hard,” she says. “Whoever’s up there was like, ‘Ha!’”

Lockdown also disrupted an even more important plan for Brown Findlay and her partner, Ziggy Heath, whom she met while they were acting together in the bawdy 18th-century drama Harlots. “We had to cancel our wedding, which was a bit of a hit.” It worked out in the end, though; the couple’s rescheduled wedding took place a fortnight ago. Brown Findlay’s year is speeding up, too: Harlots, which was originally shot for ITV Encore between 2017 and 2019, is enjoying a second lease of life on BBC Two; and she is about to appear in an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World on Sky Atlantic.

Of course, there are those who will always think of her as Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey, whose death during childbirth in the third series way back in 2012 had a huge emotional impact on viewers. The 31-year-old struggles to escape the label “Downton’s Jessica Brown Findlay”, however many years pass. “I always feel a bit confused, I’m like, ‘What?’ It’s just so far away from how I think of myself.” She insists she’s not even posh, as people tend to assume – she grew up in an ordinary 1950s semi in Berkshire, and has been earning her own money since she was 14 years old.

She was at art school when she won the role of Lady Sybil, and still finding her way in the world. She’d already had to give up an earlier dream of becoming a ballerina because of injury; acting was just one avenue she was exploring. “I was new and green, thinking, ‘Oh, I’m doing this, and then I’ll become an artist’.” Since Downton, she’s had an awful lot of parts, too, including a trio of game-changing stage roles for the gifted director Robert Icke at the Almeida in London, but more of that later.

First, I want to know if she wishes Lady Sybil hadn’t been killed off with eclampsia so that she could have made a nostalgic return in last year’s Downton film. “It’s been quite a long time,” she notes, then pauses. “I actually watched it on a plane and wept like a baby.” The trigger was a scene in which Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess tells Lady Mary that she may not have long to live. “I honestly felt it, like, ‘Why did no one tell me? Why did no one call me and let me know that Granny’s not well?’

“I’m still so close to all of them,” she adds. “I was just WhatsApp-ing them this morning. I feel so connected to that family, our kind of cronky family, it’s all still there.”

It’s not hard to imagine her being an adored surrogate family member; she’s a warm, funny presence, even through a computer screen, sandwiched between a radiator and a clothes rail at home in east London. She and Heath have been getting to know their neighbours during the months when acting work has been halted, and taking little drives together in their vintage Morris Minor.

Brave New World was the last thing Brown Findlay shot before lockdown. Huxley’s dystopian vision is set in a future New London, where traditional procreation has been superseded by test-tube babies, genetically altered to fulfil strictly hierarchical, preordained roles in society. Universal happiness is guaranteed by the mood-lifting drug Soma.

Brown Findlay, who says the only drug she uses is caffeine, plays Lenina Crowne – for whom Huxley coined the term “pneumatic” – opposite Alden Ehrenreich (fresh from starring as the young Han Solo in the 2018 Star Wars prequel). Here, he plays John, the outsider from “the Savage Lands” untouched by New London’s futuristic social engineering, who falls in love with her. Lenina, though, has undergone a radical shift for the TV series, becoming more questioning and rebellious.

I ask Brown Findlay if Huxley, for all his visionary qualities, was backward-thinking when it came to women? “I think the writers very quickly turned around, and said, why does this really interesting character just dissipate?” she says.

There is little risk of that happening on screen, particularly in the show’s action scenes – there’s no doubting that this is a performer who trained for years to become a dancer, with the physique to match, who could surely play big action roles. “I’ve never been waiflike. I’m quite strong,” she says. “Someone picked me up the other day and said, ‘Surprisingly dense!’.” She laughs. “I like seeing strong women on screen. I’d like to be one of them.” Could we be looking at the perfect candidate to be the first female Bond? “Go on then,” she says.

There is a lot of sex in Sky’s Brave New World. I wonder if Brown Findlay had an oh-my-god moment when she saw the script. First off, she says, she’d only been given the pages for the first episode before her audition and “learnt more about quantity, let’s say, as the show went on”.

The series turned out to be something of a trial run for the intimacy co-ordinators who have been widely introduced since the Me Too movement alerted the world to abuse in the world of film and television. “What has massively changed, for me, in the industry is that when I started out, it was a negotiation … ‘We want to see this,’ and it was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to show you that. I can maybe show you this’. It was all a push and pull.”

On the set of Brave New World, she says, she would consult the intimacy co-ordinators “basically every single time there is something intimate – and that’s not even just sex stuff”. “You negotiate with them, you talk to them,” she says. “You think, ‘How do I feel today, in my body, right now?’ When I was younger, I had no idea I could say no. And when I tried to sometimes in the past, it just didn’t go down well – ‘You’re new, we can find someone else.’ It was very manipulative. So, this was actually an amazing experience, considering the show. It was the safest and the most comfortable I’ve ever felt.”

In 2014, Brown Findlay, along with celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna, was one of more than 100 women targeted in a large-scale hacking of private images and videos from Apple’s iCloud storage service, which were then shared online. I ask her if she has been watching I Hate Suzie, Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper’s drama in which sexually explicit photographs are hacked from the phone of the lead character (played by Piper), and whether it captures anything of the trauma of her own experience. “It definitely is tapping into something true,” she says, “because when I watched the first episode, my whole body went hot. I started sweating. And I started shaking. It’s something that I think, you know, ‘I’m… OK now, it’s OK,’ and then suddenly my body just started reacting.

“There is something about the shock of something like that, and the complete inward spiral that happens when you’re violated in that way [that] is so difficult to explain,” she adds. “It definitely intensified where I was at that point in my life.”

The period that followed was one of great expansion for Brown Findlay as an actress. In 2015, she played Electra on stage in a daring reimagining of Aeschylus’s Oresteia by Icke that won rave reviews. Icke then cast her as Sonya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, followed by Ophelia – broken, mad and in a wheelchair – opposite Andrew Scott in his 2017 production of Hamlet, described by one critic as an “all-consuming marvel”. She tells me that, before Icke cast her, she had been going into meetings where “they’d say, ‘so let me get this straight, you’ve not done a play and you’re not trained?’ No.” But when she talked to Icke, he told her, “ ‘Why would that mean you can’t do it?’ He gave me this boost of bravery.”

She took that courage back with her on to film and TV sets. “I felt so emboldened by what I’d learnt,” she says. “Before I worked with those actors in the plays, I think I struggled even to say out loud that I was an actor.”

We take a brief detour to discuss the excited fans waiting nightly by the stage door for Scott to emerge, even before his appearance as the “hot priest” in Fleabag made him a national heart-throb. It’s his talent, she says, that has people flustered. “Talent is very undemocratic. It’s just sort of… someone has it and it’s incredible when you see it.”

We also chat about music. Brown Findlay is fantastic in the 2017 Morrissey biopic England Is Mine, playing the singer’s close friend, the artist Linder Sterling. Morrissey has come under fire for his provocative remarks on race and his support of the far-Right political party For Britain. It has caused Brown Findlay some soul-searching.

“It’s a conundrum,” she says. “I’m an indie kid. I’m a fan of the Smiths…” But his music is off the playlist in the Morris Minor. “We were talking about this in the car the other day… I don’t think it’s about cancelling everything. Art should be controversial. But if you’re saying things that are hurtful and cruel? No.”

I leave Brown Findlay to get on with her day, but not before asking if she thinks there might be a post-pandemic second series of Brave New World that moves the plot beyond Huxley’s novel. “I’d love that to happen,” she says, “but at this stage, I don’t know. I’m just… painting my living room.”

All episodes of Brave New World will be on Sky One and Now TV from Friday