Olivia Colman

Having made a name for herself in television sitcoms Peep Show and Green Wing, Olivia Colman never imagined her career would take a turn for the dramatic. But that’s precisely what happened after she met Paddy Considine on the set of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz. Something sparked between Colman and Considine that summer in South West England, but the fruits of their burgeoning creative relationship wouldn’t manifest until 2011, when Considine’s hard-hitting directorial debut, Tyrannosaur, saw Colman deservedly receive plaudits for her role as a domestic abuse victim. LWLies caught up with Colman recently to chat about how her life has changed in the last year and why she’ll never tire of playing the clown.

LWLies: It’s been well over a year since you finished filming. Have you got to the point now where you’re almost sick of talking about it?

Colman: Other films I might be but not this. I think Tyrannosaur will be the thing I’m most proud of until the day I die. I really love this film, I could talk about it until the cows come home.

Where does that feeling come from?

I don’t know really, I just feel so passionate about it. It’s a special film, it all came together so beautifully.

Did you have a sense while you were making it that it might have a long-term effect on you?

I think so, yeah. Paddy is really like a magical creature, he’s become a bit superhuman in my head. I’d never worked with people that wonderful and worked with so many amazing people.

You met each other on Hot Fuzz. Paddy told us around the theatrical release that he knew he wanted to work with you from that moment, did you feel the same way?

I was so excited that he was in Hot Fuzz. I’d seen everything he’d done and was a huge fan, and I remember just being really excited that everyone got on so well, it was a such a fun film to do. But I never would have thought we’d end up doing Tyrannosaur from that moment. I don’t know how he saw Hannah in me from when we met then.

You’re not known for playing dramatic roles, were you intimidated by it? There’s a lot of heavy stuff in the film.

It wasn’t really like intimidation, but there was definitely some anxiety over not wanting to let Paddy down. I wanted desperately for him to be proud of me, I wanted to do it justice. It’s really the part I’ve always dreamed of. I didn’t know my career would go the comedy route, that just kind of happened, so it was a dream project really. He’s changed things for me now. I still love comedy, it’s a great way to make a living, making people happy. But I’m very fortunate that Paddy’s given me the opportunity to move people as well.

Funny how a film can change the direction of your career.

Yeah, although I’m still getting plenty of comedy scripts through. But certainly a lot of scripts are coming in now that I wasn’t being sent before. I’ve got a lovely mixture of things coming through the door, the tricky thing is that it might be  awhile before something as beautiful as Tyrannosaur might not come through again for a very long time.

Where does your passion for comedy come from?

I don’t know. I wasn’t a very good student at school. I was bright but terribly lazy, and I loved making my friends giggle. I liked being the clown. I went to university and accidentally auditioned for a comedy group, it turned out that’s where I met Robert Webb and David Mitchell. It happened by accident, really. The perception can be that something like Peep Show gets pitched and then cast and away you go, but in reality everyone was working their arses off for years before trying to get into comedy. They really locked themselves away and worked at it, and they started writing for other people and eventually we all got our TV break on Bruiser. Rob and David met Sam [Bain] and Jesse [Armstrong] after that and they started writing Peep Sho together for themselves. That’s why there’s a nice chemistry, because everyone worked so hard on it together for so many years.

Tyrannosaur started life as a short film, Dog Altogether. You play the same character but it’s a slightly different story. Did making the short before make Hannah more familiar to you?

Well I only did one day on Dog Altogether, and we only shot the charity shop scene, so you don’t really get a sense of her back story or what’s going on in the world around her. So I didn’t really know that much about her, which made it easier to play her in Tyrannosaur. But actually the scenes we had to reshoot from the short were the hardest we had to do. You hear an echo of it in your head and you start feeling unnatural doing it for some reason. I didn’t approach playing her any differently though.

What is Paddy like on set?

When you’re trying to get yourself into the character it takes a lot out of you. When you’re trying to get into miserable mode Paddy recognises that, so he’ll leave you alone and let you get teary away from the awkward, sympathetic looks. He’s like the voice in your head. He’s always there, like a buddy, really helping you on your way.

He’s quite an intense character as well.

He is, but he’s a very funny man as well. He good at adopting the right emotion and saying the right thing at the right time. I know what you mean about him being intense, but it’s passion really. It comes from the right place. He feels uncomfortable being looked at, so I think he’s much happier being behind the camera and looking on at everything that’s happening in front of him.

Tyrannosaur is available on DVD Monday February 6 courtesy of Studio Canal.

Olivia Colman (text) by Adam Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.