Honeysuckle Weeks: Smells Like Free Spirit
Behind the posh voice and coiffed hair Natasha Paulini finds a rambling bohemian flower
Above: by Vincent Starr
Something should really twig when an agent says her client would like to shoot in a cemetery. Glamour locations and diva demands are not for Foyle’s War star Honeysuckle Weeks are . Stomping up in a pair of biker boots, Weeks is a strange, yet cool combination of tough androgyny – “I have thighs like a prop forward; there’s no way I’m wearing heels” – and girlish sincerity. It was not a very warm evening after what for Weeks was probably a full day of rehearsal. Hair and makeup took place in a mausoleum and twilight had more than fallen by the time we wrapped up. Yet throughout it all, it was lilting Welsh hymns and booming Shakespeare recitals.
“I love Kensal Green cemetery,” Weeks says enthusiastically. “I sneak in here at midnight with Kensal and let him loose.” Um, Kensal? “He’s my Tibetan mastiff, traditionally used to protect yaks and monasteries. And Honeysuckles. I make sure I pick up all the turds from the gravestones, though.”
Not something you’d expect Samantha Stewart, prim and proper driver to Michael Kitchen’s Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle, to utter – although the fact that it’s in the same cut-glass cadence is a little disturbing. “Sam’s very proper,” says Weeks. “I’d like her to party. I like having a good time; I’m a bit more of a carouser. I bet Sam would love to let her hair down out of that ghastly coiffure. It’s hideous. When I look in the mirror, I see my grandmother.”
Hairdos aside, it’s a role that has made Weeks’ career, and one she is incredible grateful for. “I put a lot of work into that role. I prayed for that role,” she says. “Even though she’s grown up along with me, she hasn’t seemed to reach maturity as a woman. I don’t think she’s even been to bed with anybody.”
Which is probably just the way its Middle England audience likes it. Weeks kept Sam’s innocent qualities because she felt they chimed with something in our national identity in times of the war; that although we faced great hardship, we also had what Weeks describes as a “great period of purity”.
Nostalgic Sunday-night viewers, though, are in for a change: Foyle’s War is a war no longer, the new series centring on a time after the conflict. “I know my character runs some sort of boarding house with insalubrious characters coming to stay – gangsters doing dodgy deals in her rooms. I think it’s going to be dealing with the period, when people were feeling the pinch.”
Acting has been in Weeks’ make-up long before she ever took it to screen. Born in St Andrews, Scotland, Weeks’ mother Susan, pregnant with Weeks, played Roslyn to father Robin’s Orlando in As You Like It. Getting married on stage every night naturally led to a real-life ceremony – and a love of the stage instilled in a very young Weeks. “Both my parents wanted to act,” she says, “which is why they made me do so from a very early age. They knew that to make it in this industry you have to start early. As I was the firstborn they felt the sun shone out of my every orifice, so why wouldn’t people want to stare at me on stage for prolonged periods of time?”
The budding actor’s first role was in a Green Party political broadcast directed by the famous David Bailey. Hollywood promptly beckoned, with a casting of the then 11-year-old in Stephen Spielberg’s A Far Off Place. “I was flown first class and taken by a stretch limo to LA. But Spielberg fired the original French director, and I was fired too – they wanted an American girl, and the French director was the only one who wanted me.” The girl who landed the role was Reese Witherspoon: “I have great admiration for Reese, but I do feel a bit wistful – oh, it could’ve been me! – but I did learn something about Hollywood. Coming back I was flown economy and caught a yellow cab. That taught me a lot about the nature of this business. It is a beast, with very big teeth that can suck all the life out of you. And I’m glad I learnt it very early on.”
Weeks found her own Orlando at Oxford University while studying English Literature, Lorne Stormonth-Darling, 15 years her senior. “I thought he was damned sexy, and the most extraordinarily charismatic man I’d ever seen in my life. Completely out of my league. He was also in love with my best friend.” So what happened to the friend? “She laughed at him! She said to me, ‘Honeysuckle, if you can take him seriously, go for it.’ So I did. He’s a total joker; he’s wonderful. He’s like Aragorn of Arathorn [JRR Tolkien’s adventuring hero from Lord of the Rings]– he takes me to mountains and makes me walk up them. A man should be like a mountain, steady and eternal and strong.”
One such adventure led them to their wedding day, albeit unexpectedly. On the border of Tibet and Nepal, the couple were staying at a small village, much to the consternation of the locals who refused to let them do so as an unmarried couple. “It was extraordinary. For a start, you’re on top of the world, let alone on top of the world! I was dressed up like a proper Tibetan girl. I got on one of their ponies and was paraded through the village, and had to go around the Buddhist prayer wheels, chanting to rid me of evil spirits.”
Then there was the wedding breakfast. In a generous act of good faith, the Buddhist villagers slaughtered, skinned and poached a ram to the gastronomic delight of their Western guests, all washed down with “gone-off yak’s butter tea – it was disgusting”. Despite the traditional vows, Weeks decided against taking on her husband’s name: “If I was called Honeysuckle Stormonth-Darling, people would laugh me out of town, it’s so preposterous; Honeysuckle’s bad enough!”
The couple live on Harrow Road, opposite the Kensal Rise Cemetery. Another of Weeks’ favourite haunts (pun thoroughly intended) is Paradise by Way of Kensal Green. “It has great music gigs, especially The Great Brain Robbery [Trepan Records’ regular showcase event]. Johnny Borrell plays there, Lily Allen has sung here, Pete Doherty – all that lot. Sophie Dahl, and Jamie Cullum, too – he is small. Less a mountain, more a molehill,” she laughs uproariously.
Watching the Beijing Olympic torch go down Harrow Road in the snow, going out to Tesco disco – “gangsters, movie stars and rock-’n’-rollers” – The Cow for Guinness and oysters… Weeks is a West Londoner through and through. And has the hilarious stories to prove it, including one particular night that involved a lock-in at an Italian deli larder. “A friend of mine knew the owner, and we spent the whole night drinking in the larder, surrounded by pigs’ heads and cow carcasses. We got out at six in the morning.”
You get the idea that Week’s life is not one of Pilates, the method and ubiquitous Kabbalah strings. She admits to really wanting to do action movies – a gun-toting heroine, or “d’Artagnan daughter in a fencing film where I have to be French and run across rooftops with a sabre”.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles is, unfortunately, off the table. But you can catch Weeks on tour with Bill Kenwright’s production of Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn, as Eva, the (unsuccessfully) suicidical wife of a philandering husband played by Marc Bannerman. “Alan Strachan [the director] is brilliant, and the actors are too. It makes such a difference to do a play with people who are really amazing at what they do,” Weeks says. “I came away from every rehearsal knowing about 10 times more than when I went in. It was like having a battalion of information fired into your earholes.”
You’ll find Weeks in The Bill as well this month, and she’ll soon be shooting The Scottish Doctor with Irish actor Kieran Hines: “I play an an eccentric shopkeeper who he fraternises with.” This all, of course, around the seventh series of Foyle’s War.
So is Weeks an innocent too, like Sam? “Yes,” she says emphatically. “Well, I wish to be,” Weeks adds, somewhat less emphatically. “I hope to cling to that for as long as I can. I’m not ground down by the humdrum realities of life. I think that’s why people have children; to have an excuse to behave like a kid again. To look at the world as wonderful; that it is wonder-full. And all you have to do is go for a walk in the cemetery to get that sense of wonder.”