GLASS talks to versatile British actor about her forthcoming film, Sound of Metal, in which she transforms into a primal-screaming rock chick
THERE are two things I learnt from reading past interviews with Olivia Cooke. Her assertion that she’s a sentimental soul, and almost every journalist’s assertion that, as a RADA reject, the Oldham-born actress is “grounded/refreshing/down to earth” – lazy code for working class and northern.
Commentary on unicorns like Cooke who’ve excelled without the stairlift of private acting institutions is so one-note that part of me hopes that she turns out to be a monstrous diva.
Secret-Scouser Kim Cattrall’s disappearance from our screens has left some shoes to fill –could Cooke be the woman to dispel the head-pat-fallacy that successful, working-class, northern actors are, en masse, grounded/refreshing/down to earth? Early signs are positive. As her image materialises, I’m struck by her lipstick, which possesses a less-than-grounded golden shimmer. Upon closer inspection there also appears to be a baby tiger lounging in the background of her video feed. Interesting …
“Oh God … sorry. That’s embarrassing. Ignore the background – I had a Tiger King quiz the other night. I also watched an entire YouTube tutorial on how to paint my face like a tiger … hang on I’m sending you a picture.”
It pings through immediately and is several levels above the Primary School Summer Fair job I was expecting (sorry, Olivia). Still, she sounds unsure whether she should be unabashedly proud of her work or slightly embarrassed by how good it is. It is weirdly good. “I’ve had way too much time on my hands … [but I do] think I’ve always been quite good at make up. I remember being a kid and watching my mum doing a full face every day, then experimenting when I’d go disco dancing on a Friday night.”
Olivia Cooke. Photograph: Nick Thompson
Olivia Cooke. Photograph: Nick Thompson
It’s around this moment that I realise Cooke is not the prima donna I’d (selfishly) hoped she might be. She’s disarmingly unaffected and charming in a very natural way. “We’d get dressed up and put shit loads of glitter on our faces, basically. So I guess I’ve kind of always been interested in making myself look different.”
And she has looked different in pretty much every role she’s taken since getting her start on 2012 BBC drama, Blackout. In the years since, Cooke has had long hair, short hair and no hair; she’s looked the picture of health one minute and gravely ill the next (Bates Motel, 2013-2017; Me and Earl and The Dying Girl, 2015), flitting from year 2045 (Ready Player One, 2018) to the 1820s (Vanity Fair, 2018).
What endures amid each transformation, in film and in the pixelated flesh of lockdown zoom chats, is the variety in her oversized eyes, ever towing the line between birdlike fragility and sheer, ungovernable verve. A 20/80 split. They’re eyes that could grant the occupier a steady stream of roles in the loving daughter/girlfriend mould, if said occupier’s ambitions were limited to perfecting “doe-eyed and deferential”.
Instead, she’s exhibited a rare dedication to making interesting choices. Her latest big screen about-face sees Cooke sacrifice her eyebrows to play Lou in music/relationship drama, Sound of Metal, opposite Riz Ahmed’s Ruben. It’s another fascinating change of pace.
Olivia Cooke. Photograph: Nick Thompson
Lou is a primal-screaming, eyebrow-bleaching, no-moss-gathering rolling stone of a woman, who sleeps in, thumbs her nose at green smoothies and has been in recovery for four years. She tours America with boyfriend, band mate, fellow recovering addict (and provider of green smoothies) Ruben, forever heading towards the next gig and further from her fading dream of a past life.
But by the fifth year of their shared sobriety something has changed, something unimaginable; Lou is subsequently shedded and Louise stands in her place. Louise is French, she hosts mature parties with canapés, shares stories about her “little gypsy life” of the past four years and sings maudlin duets with Papa. Ruben remains … Ruben. It’s a situation Cooke can relate to.
“I think [Lou and Ruben’s love] is definitely real. I think you have those relationships that are really important and seminal, and then your trajectories take you on completely different paths and it’s so hard to come back together again. What they have is beautiful, and special … They say to each other ‘you saved my life’, and it’s true, they really have. Relationships can do that.”
Olivia Cooke. Photograph: Nick Thompson
That part about Cooke being a sentimental soul is not wrong. She’s subsidised her Tiger King screenings with Patti Smith memoir Just Kids (“It made me really sad and nostalgic [having just left New York], so that was a heavy two days!”.) And she favours acoustic melancholy-mongers over the alt-metal she performs as Lou. “Well it depends if I’m in a depressive mood or not.” She lets out a cackle. And when she is? “I’ll listen to Damien Jurado.” (For the uninitiated: think an American, marginally less-upsetting Nick Drake.)
To become Lou, Cooke worked with 29-year-old avant-garde New York musician and “noise artist” Margaret Chardiet of Pharmakon. “She was basically my teacher. She taught me all the songs on the guitar, she taught me how to loop … taught me how to scream. We wrote the lyrics to one of the songs together – you can’t really tell what I’m saying, but it’s there!”
It doesn’t surprise me that she’d take the time to write a full song word by word and then scream it inaudibly. She clearly cares, a lot. It wouldn’t matter if the audience failed to notice her screams were half-assed gibberish, because she would know herself and that would be enough. Like so many things, it appears you only get out of acting what you put in.
“Sometimes it can feel better than therapy.” Another cackle. “I feel like a lot of the roles represent something in me that I need to purge. You gravitate towards these roles unconsciously and then you realise ‘this is weirdly mirroring my real life’. [Then it’s over] and you feel this relief, this sense of enlightenment.” It sounds like a lot and takes me back to Cooke’s earlier suggestion that the past few months have had her “ageing like a president” – her words, not mine.
Olivia Cooke. Photograph: Nick Thompson
Olivia Cooke. Photograph: Nick Thompson
“Oh absolutely – it’s exhausting. And you really need to save it for when you’re actually on camera. You don’t want to be crying in-between takes and all of a sudden have no tears left.” It’s an approach she doesn’t share with co-star Ahmed, who, I’ve read, can be pretty method on set. She nods and does something in between a smile and a grimace. “In the really tough moments of filming, I do find myself pushing against it and being quite mischievous … which is probably quite bad for the other actors. I get a lot of ‘shut the fuck up Olivia’.” I can picture it now – the Method Actors Union plastering those very words on wanted posters all over LA, in big, capital letters.
As we call time on our second interview in two days, it’s around this moment that I resign myself to the fact that Cooke is everything I’d hoped she wouldn’t be: grounded, refreshing and down to earth. This has nothing to do with her distinct Oldham accent or distinct lack of RADA certification; more because she reckons her Executive Producer credit on upcoming film Little Fish is “hysterical”.
And because she reacted to the unfortunate deletion of our original interview by telling me: “Don’t worry, to be honest I am so hungover from my quiz that I’ve been worrying all day about sounding like a dumb-dumb.” She needn’t have feared being a great disappointment, if anything she’s been disappointingly great.
by Charlie Navin-Holder
Sound of Metal is available on Amazon Prime
First published in the Summer 2020 issue of Glass – Shine
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Photographer NICK THOMPSON @nickthompsonstudio
Fashion Director KATIE FELSTEAD @katiefelstead
Production ALEXANDRA OLEY @alexandra_georgette_oley
at NICK THOMPSON STUDIO
Talent OLIVIA COOKE @livkatecooke
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