As posted on CLAUDIA

The first time I saw Charity Wakefield was in the 2008 BBC version of Jane Austen‘s Sense and Sensibility. After the definitive interpretation of Kate Winslet, even with a distance of 10 years, it was one of the most difficult roles to bring something effectively new. And she was brilliant, less passionate, but still given one of literature’s most romantic roles, Marianne Dashwood.

Since then I have been trying to follow her career. Charity was born in England, but after her parents separated, she spent her first four years in Spain with her mother and grandparents. After she returned to London, she starred in a school production of Sleeping Beauty, and at age seven decided to pursue a professional career. Between theater, TV, and films, Charity built a solid and respected career, and it was at work that she met her husband, actor David Newman, when they worked together on the play The Graduate, in 2005. But it’s been the priceless and incredible Georgina Dymova on The Great that has come to the fore in recent years. Season 3 is available on Lionsgate Plus starting July 14th.

The Great is a parody of the life of Catherine the Great, “occasionally” reporting the truth. Georgina, for example, is not a true character, quite different from Charity’s next work, who will live as Princess Beatrice in the Netflix film Scoop (which will retell the backstage of Prince Andrew‘s (Rufus Sewell) interview for the BBC about their friendship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein). From London, via Zoom, Charity spoke briefly and exclusively with CLAUDIA about the two projects. And I will confess, her sympathy confirmed to me that my admiration for her was not unfounded!

CLAUDIA: I’ll start our chat teasing because I loved Marianne Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility”, where she made us cry and now, as Georgina Dymov, she makes me laugh often, in addition to so many other roles. Was Georgina a combination of many women who existed in her time?
Charity: I don’t even know! She’s a combination of many, but I really think she’s a Tony McNamara creation [showrunner of The Great]. I find her really fascinating! There are defined paths for this type of character that can be searched easily. For example, curiously, I went to the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery in June, and I remembered how I used to go there precisely to look at paintings from the time [as part of research for The Great] because in these paintings you can see what relationships were like of the people, what aristocratic relationships were like or people at home, that sort of thing. Information not usually found in history books. You can learn a lot from paintings. But back to Georgina, I would say that she can be fictional but also very real because there were many lovers like her. I found it very interesting when I played Mary Boleyn in Wolf Hall, another lover role, how it was completely normal for an emperor or a king to have multiple mistresses and for people to accept them and also accept their children, for the most part. Children were even legalized and inherited fortunes, even if they were not in the line of succession.

CLAUDIA: One thing you can say about Georgina is that she is practical…
Charity: Yes, exactly. Essentially historically accurate. She is real, she means it and she is very comfortable in her position [as a lover], which she wants to maintain (initially).

CLAUDIA: She starts out as an antagonist to Catherine and is linked to Peter, the Emperor. I can’t spoil the season, so I’ll avoid giving away the plot, but what can you share about Georgina’s arc, from where it started to where it’s going? Because a lot has happened to her.
Charity: There’s a lot that happens, yeah! [laughter]. So we found Georgina in a very comfortable place for her. She is married, quite happily that way, and has a great sexual relationship with the emperor, which she claims is just what she wants. This is very true, but if you look at it objectively, she is also completely subject to these circumstances. The Emperor can reject her or kill her at any time and with that knowledge, there’s the element of constantly trying to maintain her position and her lifestyle, and then having little of her royal life at the same time. When Catherine walks in, Georgina expects her to follow the pattern of most wives and just accept that the mistress is like part of the furniture. But Catherine is made of stronger stuff and much more idealistic, she has these crazy ideas like early feminist ideas about what you should tolerate and what you shouldn’t, and what society should be like. My character certainly was happy – at first – to agree, but only because he thought he would maintain his position, but it is the opposite, that just makes it much more threatened.

CLAUDIA: And in the second season, after a visit to France, she comes back even more “against” Catherine.
Charity: Yes, because she sees what we don’t see on screen, which is that all of France is in complete turmoil because there has been a great revolution against the aristocracy. That’s why she comes back with an agenda to prevent it from happening again in Russia, otherwise, her family could die. She knows that the people will one day come out of the streets and kill the rich if they bring these European ideas, so she is against it. However, she is a bit of an actress and manipulator and proceeds to pretend that she understands and is interested in Catherine’s ideals. The interesting thing is that she’s pretty true to life, you know? When people take on another personality. It kind of seeps in and gets messed up.

CLAUDIA: And now?
Charity: So she’s very conflicted internally at the beginning of Season 3. For her, the most important thing is just to fight for a life, but she has to stay alive in the first place. So Georgina is a person who can abandon anyone in order to live and I think that’s fair!

CLAUDIA: And we have a big surprise at the end [laughs]. Do you have any favorite scenes so far?
Charity: I like any group scene, but one of my favorites actually is just a scene I can’t talk about [laughs] Well, I can’t talk about what happens in the scene, but it’s right at the end of the season. and it involves many characters, as well as a baby, who plays Paul [Catherine and Peter’s son]. By the way, they are two twin babies who alternate as Paul, and in the same scene, we also had a dog. To top it off, there was a challenge to pull off this scene because we knew we only had limited time with the baby and limited time with the dog, of course. And there was a lot of text as well as a lot of action, so I was really nervous. I tried to relax, but the more relaxed we got, the more things would go wrong. I just thought, “Everything is going to go wrong. The dog won’t look this way. The baby is going to cry,” but we did the first take and everything went perfectly.

CLAUDIA: I’m curious to see!
Charity: Yeah, and the last take was me looking away and I remember feeling the camera here [glued to it] and hearing everyone on set [coming out of trance]. “Like this?”. It was perfect. It’s so wonderful when everything works. And that happens a lot on our set because the writing is quite theatrical and it has a real melody, a kind of solid structure, so it’s very enjoyable for us to play.

CLAUDIA: Before we say goodbye, what can you share with us about playing Princess Beatrice in the movie Scoop?
Charity: I’ve filmed all of my parts and I really enjoyed it. It’s a world apart, in terms of style and type of work [compared to The Great]. Scoop tries to analyze and interrogate something that happened recently and we are talking about people who are very significant in the life of my country and events that are very difficult subjects. So playing someone important like Princess Beatrice was a very delicate process, but I feel very honored because she is someone I have always looked up to and still look up to. And the subject that we’re questioning in the film is obviously very interesting, but the intention is to somehow recreate and understand from a different point of view something that we’ve already seen. So yes, a very different experience.

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