A Valentine's Day drama without any sex? How Alice & Jack tore up the romance rulebook
Never before have I thought of an interview as -resembling a first date. But when Andrea Riseborough tells me a lot of first meetings are “horribly awkward to watch”, I secretly suspect she might also be talking about our -encounter, not just the opening scene of her new television “love story for the ages” Alice & Jack.
Meanwhile, after my half hour with her co-star and co-executive producer Domhnall Gleeson comes to an end, he apologises for a second time if he smells – he doesn’t, though his luggage has been lost in transit for three days – then struggles to release himself from the Channel 4 boardroom. The door fails to open when pushed, so he presses what turns out to be the light switch, and plunges me into darkness. Finally, with an embarrassed guffaw, he -discovers the door is not that high-tech, it just slides.
The six-part drama – which launches on Valentine’s Day – sees Alice and Jack collide for the first time after connecting on a dating app. Alice, who works in finance, is as brittle as broken glass – -something of a specialism for -Riseborough, who has been hailed for her capacity for portraying “wounded, damaged souls”. She says she relished playing someone “unapologetically spicy”, because “mainstream characters on screen are often presented with -impossibly unattainable moral standards”.
Gleeson’s Jack is a doe-eyed medical researcher who is not quite sure what has hit him. They wash in and out of each other’s lives over 16 years. It is almost the same length of time as the careers of the two actors have been intersecting (this is their third collaboration, following 2010’s Never Let Me Go and 2012’s Shadow Dancer). Gleeson (son of actor Brendan) has previously rejected the notion that he is either “conventionally handsome” or “a typical romantic lead”, but says now that he is 40, those ancient quotes are no longer accurate.
Riseborough, 42, says she had never had the thought about herself. “No, but I do have a funny brain, so maybe it’s my own failing there. I just think everybody is a romantic lead. It’s something that we all can commune over. That’s one of the things that I really love about the show – that it represents what love looks like for a lot of us, which is a commitment to really, really hard work. We’re all of us deserving of love and love often is so imperfect. My industry is very responsible for perhaps misrepresenting that.”
Gleeson, who says the only work he has wanted to watch or make since Covid has been “about -connection and love”, puts it more starkly: “I think it’s just honest about the fact that, if you’re lucky, you’ll experience love, but love will f--k you up and you will f--k up love.” He was so burnt out by the project that he took a rare 10-month break. “I was tired. A lot happens in this thing.”
Neither is keen to share much about their own romantic stories. Gleeson declines even to comment on his relationship status (“That’s just a precious thing that I keep -private”). Riseborough is happy to reference her partner, the actor Karim Saleh – they met on the set of the romantic drama Luxor – and to say that dating apps are “not -something that I would choose for myself”. But when asked about why modern dating is such a -minefield, she replies only “from Alice’s -perspective”.
Alice & Jack’s creator, the -seasoned American screenwriter Victor Levin, says that this is his most personal production yet, one he has been working on for six years and mulling over for decades. “The germ of it really is this -question that I’ve been thinking about for most of my adult life,” he says on a video call in front of his four-poster bed in Los Angeles. “What does love conquer? You hear as a child, love conquers all. Does it conquer some, does it conquer almost everything? Does it conquer a lot less than one thought?”
He still cannot quite believe he got both of his “gifted” first choices for the lead characters. “That’s -science fiction to me! I mean, that never happens.” After the project was relocated from New York to London, Levin insisted that Riseborough and Gleeson use their own accents – Newcastle and -Dublin. “I think that the sound of dialogue is a hugely ignored aspect of moving-image work, but I think it’s crucial. They have beautiful instruments, and the sound is -beautiful. It’s like music, in my view.”
The actual score is provided by Stephen Rennicks, who worked on pandemic hit Normal People. Both dramas had intimacy coordinators, though this one must have been twiddling her thumbs. The little sex that was in the script was removed by the director of the first two -episodes, Finland’s Juho -Kuosmanen (Compartment No 6). “I felt that I personally didn’t need those scenes in the show,” he says while ambling around the snow-covered streets of Helsinki. “It’s much more about the complexity of emotions than of sexual behaviour.”
Kuosmanen was personally recruited by Riseborough, who had been filming in Finland and nabbed his number from her driver (who just so happened to be a former -student of the director). She was keen to find an independent -film-maker who could create a -“cinematic version” of Levin’s fast-paced script. Cambodian-born Briton Hong Khaou (Lilting) took over for the final four episodes. “I feel like cinema is more -gaze-driven,” says Kuosmanen. “So it happens more between the way the people are looking at each other, rather than what they are saying. I personally like silence.”
Last year, Riseborough was – according to The Hollywood Reporter – “Oscar’s most talked-about nominee” after scooping her first nod, for Best Actress for To -Leslie. The micro-budget indie, in which she played an alcoholic mother, had grossed just $27,000, but vocal support followed from Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Aniston, Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet (the last of whom said: “I think this is the greatest female performance on screen I have ever seen in my life”).
After the shortlist was announced, Riseborough should have been celebrating the unlikely coup. Instead, she found herself at the centre of a race row, with her critics saying her recognition came at the expense of two highly tipped black actresses, Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler.
Now that awards season has come around again, I ask what advice she would give to anyone else caught in the eye of an Oscars media storm. After a pause, she says: “Just… congratulations. Just congratulations,” as she hugs her oversized leather jacket. On whether the nomination has changed how she is seen or what she is offered, she says it is “hard to quantify”; she just wants to focus on getting her own projects off the ground. “Before the nomination, I was working to produce a certain number of things with film-makers who I absolutely love. They are the same films that [they] were before.”
While talking to Levin, I make the mistake of referring to Alice as – at least on the surface – an -unsympathetic character. The writer looks at me as if I have just insulted his wife. “This is a -character who is in a lot of pain, and who is kind of a walking miracle,” he says. “Just the fact that she exists, that she has been able to fashion a life for herself despite what she’s been through. It’s as if there’s an electric current running through her body, that’s what she’s dealing with every minute.”
I reassure him I fell in love with Riseborough’s performance, having watched previews of the first two episodes, but that is not quite enough. “I hope you are more in love with Alice by the end,” he urges with a smile. “I really do hope that you warm to the character. I think you will.”
Alice & Jack begins on Wednesday on Channel 4 at 9pm