Study the acting resume of Anne-Marie Duff and “fearless” is an adjective that pops into one’s mind: George Bernard Shaw’s “Joan of Arc,” Racine’s “Berenice,” Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Ibsen’s “Nora,” and Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude.” That’s not to mention Queen Elizabeth in “The Virgin Queen,” an acclaimed BBC-TV miniseries. Now the 43-year-old London-born actor is making her Broadway debut in the Everest of classical female roles: Lady Macbeth in the Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “Macbeth,” with Ethan Hawke in the title role and directed by Jack O’Brien.
Hawke has praised his co-star, the daughter of Irish immigrants, as being able to tap a “huge trove of emotion,” an actor who is unafraid to expose body and soul to uncover the complexities of every character she undertakes. Lady Macbeth almost eluded her. She was asked to play the role when her husband, actor James McAvoy, assayed Macbeth earlier this year in a West End production. She refused, noting that a husband-wife pairing in the roles of Shakespeare’s most famously uxorious couple would distort the production and become fodder for the tabloids. “That’s all people would talk about,” she says. It was a gift then when O’Brien approached her to play the role. ARTINFO recently spoke with Duff about her explorations into a woman whom she considers one of the most misunderstood anti-heroines in literature and the humanity with which she has tried to imbue the Lady’s tortured soul.
In what way do you see this as a love story that has gone terribly awry?
That was our main objective when I first spoke to Jack [O’Brien] many moons ago about doing a production. That’s what he was kind of obsessed with, that they’re desperately in love with each other and there’s enough information in the text to support that. As storytellers, we hope that the audience will become invested in their love. Many people who don’t know the play have this assumption that it’s about a man who has a Machiavellian wife who leads him astray. But it’s a two-way street. They both have bloody hands.
Lady Macbeth’s reference to milk in her breasts seems to indicate that they may have just lost a baby. How does that influence their relationship?
We kept thinking about that possibility and it’s helpful in finding them and in finding her. She’s a tricky one. You can look at a film-noir version of the play and here’s a man who makes a mistake and is led down in a spiral of shame. It’s not easy to rationalize her. So it was a good base camp from which to climb this mountain. If that’s their starting point, then they need to find a future, one without offspring. How can they move forward? And so they become immersed in this incredibly perverse vision of tomorrow.
This is a very sexual “Macbeth.” Are there elements of S&M to their relationship?
Ethan and I joke about it but we definitely think there is. That’s the dynamic between them — pleasure and pain. I don’t want to be flippant or jokey about it because it can easily teeter in the wrong direction, but there are a lot of relationships that thrive for many years in strange territories.
It intimately bonds them?
There you go. It’s about intimacy. People feel closest when they’re fighting, having mad sex, as opposed to being quietly intimate. Passion is a funny monster and it manifests itself in different ways.
Does it manifest itself in her goading him to murder the king through emasculating him?
[Laughs] She does a lot of that throughout the play. “C’mon lady, give him a break.” But it’s cloaked in her saying, “I want you to be more of yourself.” That’s probably a terribly 21st century [thing] but I also think it’s the most human. To try to give it more nerve endings is to say, as she does, “You’d be so much more the man.” When I say that, I think, “Yes, more of who you truly are rather than just some sort of macho version of that.” And he thrives on that. He’s constantly saying, “Push me, push me, push me.” And now he’s pushed.
She can push his buttons. Can Macbeth push hers?
I hope that’s the story we’re telling. It feels like he takes over control and that he’s ironically more hungry. I feel that she’s happy enough with the death of Duncan. “Stop. We have what we want for ourselves.” She’s not blood thirsty. But he develops a thirst for it. And then he starts to chip away at her confidence. After the coronation, he says, “Go away now.” It’s this weird two-way street with them.
Speaking of a “weird two-way street,” how is it working with Ethan Hawke?
Great fun. We have really good laughs. You have to when you’re playing such unhealthy people. He’s a lovely, generous actor with a huge emotional capacity. He’s wide open, not just as an actor but also offstage. We take care of each other and that’s been a huge relief. It’s such a huge leap of faith when you get involved in a production, especially thousands of miles away from home.
You’ve played characters as disparate as Lady Macbeth and Saint Joan. What’s the main difference in your approach to these two?
This will sound bizarre to people outside the creative process, but they’re very similar. They’re both yearning to move forward in the world in the way they’ve committed to it. That’s what we’re all trying to do as human beings. But these women are at a point of crisis where their mettle is being tested. And it is curious to explore in the cavities of yourself some aspect of humanity with which to play them. Each application of emotion is different. But you don’t say, “Gosh, I’m playing such a different character.” You just try to make them swollen with humanity in whatever way you can.
Does she have a greater ambition to be queen than he has to be king?
She may have a burning ambition to be queen. That’s a tangible thing to which she can apply herself as a woman. “I’ve achieved this in my lifetime.” But she’s not a sociopath. She’s still capable of feeling shame and guilt. And loss. And the greater loss for her is the loss of him. As conflicted as their love is, it is full of integrity. She gets to a point that not only has she lost him but she also has blood on her hands. Then she’s truly bereft.
So her famous sleepwalking mad scene is as much about losing him as it is about her guilt?
I think that plays an enormous part. That’s my interpretation.
Most scholars think that Shakespeare left her unfinished, that she needs another scene. Any idea what it would be about and where it’d go?
It feels like there should be a scene — just before the sleepwalking scene — in which she begs him to stop the killing. I think it’s that. And his refusal and his bloody-minded commitment to this insane path is what tips her completely over the edge.
How do you negotiate the gender ambiguities of Lady Macbeth, who calls on the evil spirits to “unsex” her, to make her void of feminine feelings of compassion and empathy?
She’s not Joan. She doesn’t chop off her hair and assume a new sexual persona. She wants to rid herself of any emotional obstacle — sensitivity, culpability — that will get in the way of their ambitions. So yeah, I still see her as having a strong feminine power that she does not negate. But the play’s not set in 2013, it’s set in a no-time nightmare world though we do adhere to an historical sense of the play. She’s still a woman in a man’s world. She could never run for president in this world.
Do you feel that a woman who runs for president now would have to utter “Unsex me now” before she did?
Yes. Absolutely. You’d be obliged to otherwise you’d be operating in a room full of men who’d be more than happy to accuse you of being too emotional, too empathetic, too sensitive. It’d be an absolute necessity.
You’re married to an actor —
Am I? [Laughs]
— do you give each other notes?
Not so much notes but help sometimes — and encouragement because certainly in the early stages of performance, that’s so important. We’re like in a corner of a boxing ring and either of us are there with the sponge, cleaning up the blood and changing the [mouth] guard. You got to be a team. If you’re playing the same sport, you may as well play as a team.
