The casting of Vanessa Kirby (London, 1988) to play the princess Margarita in The Crown It was “catastrophic in every way”, the creator of the series likes to repeat, Peter Morgan. Kirby had applied suntan lotion with little skill. As Morgan recalls, the palms of her hands were very dark, and the actress was also sweating.
But not even that “chaotic” vision could with “the honesty, electricity and magnetism” that it gave off, “the courage and rawness with which it exposed itself.” She was chosen from that audition and Morgan saw it clearly: “This woman is going to be magic.”
The next two years that magnetic magic was fulfilled and spread. Kirby, who had already made a name for himself in the UK working on the stage, became an international star thanks to the princely role and Netflix. “A gift” she defines it.
Beginnings in the shade of the cherry trees
Unlike other actors and actresses, Vanessa Kirby loves to talk about her work, her roles, her process, her love of acting. It may be that she is still infected by that magic that she spreads and from which she was infected for the first time when she was 11 years old, seeing the brothers Redgrave, Vanessa and Corin, in The cherry garden.
It was the umpteenth work to which his father, “a fan of Shakespeare” and also a prestigious urological surgeon, dragged her along with her brothers. She was always bored, until that night. “I felt in that garden with them. Whatever magic it was, I felt absorbed by it ”, she says.
He saved her too, he says. The interpretation, the theater, saved her from a childhood that, although privileged, in an elite school and a fine neighborhood in London, suffered from constant harassment from her classmates. Only in drama classes did he feel free. Feeling safe in that space, at 17 he tried to enter theater schools. “Without any preparation, with no idea of anything” was rejected in all of them and left for nine months of travel.
Upon his return, he entered the university, to study and live. “I met an incredible group of friends, we went out every night and rehearsed every afternoon,” he says. When he finished, he no longer had a doubt which way to go. This time they did accept her in a good theater school, but the confirmation came at the same time as a representative and the offer of three roles in a row on the stage.
Against sexualization
At only 24 years old, Kirby began an upward career in English theater that was dotted with television and a small role in films of some impact (A Matter of Time, The Fate of Jupiter). Until it came The Crown and the great offers, according to the actress, at a good moment, in the middle of MeToo to give her the responsibility, at the same time that she gained “a more fortunate position”, in which to be able to say “no” to roles of vase women.
“I don’t want a shot of my ass. I don’t want to be shot from a sexualized gaze. That’s not me, ”he says. And defends her role as a fatal woman in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (and the two sequels that are now rolling) for the possibility of deciding what clothes to wear and how to delve into the character. “I never thought action would be my genre, but now I understand that you can also transcend it if you try to find the real woman behind the character,” he answers.
Fragments of Vanessa Kirby
However, taking as a reference Gena Rowlands, after the departure of The Crown With BAFTA included, Kirby has dedicated herself to finding transformative and subversive roles in which she can experience “the lucid dream state” that acting is for her. That happened with Fragments of a woman when she finished the fourth final shot of a sequence shot of almost 30 minutes in which she gives birth to a dead baby.
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At 32, Vanessa Kirby is not a mother. When she accepted the role of Martha in Fragments of a woman, The story of a breakup after the loss of a desired baby with a sequence shot of a home birth, she knew she had a lot to investigate. “I had to understand what it’s like to wait for your first child, give birth, and feel the pain of not having the person you were expecting,” she explains.
The actress attended a birth and studied so much that she thought and felt like Martha before Shia LaBeouf, his partner in the film, and Ellen Burstyn, his mother. Hungarian’s English debut Kornél Mundruczó (White God) he liked it so much Scorsese who got involved as a producer. It may be the movie that turns Kirby’s career upside down, sounding like Oscar.
And maybe double, for his other role of the year, in The World to Come. The actress ended without knowing “if that had really happened or had imagined it.” A bit like it is now, still in a dream. Although it is their reality.
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