Andrea Riseborough Thinks ‘Alice & Jack’ Shows What Love Really Looks Like

Andrea Riseborough has suffered a lot on television as of late. She met her untimely demise on HBO’s The Regime playing Agnes, right-hand woman to her friend Kate Winslet’s despotic and ridiculous Chancellor Elena. While appearing as a guest on Little Gold Men, Riseborough laments Agnes’s departure: “The moment she leaves us is so silent and shocking and tragically subtle,” Riseborough says on the podcast. “It’s so horrible, the faceless fallout of war.”

While her arc on The Regime may have ended, the Oscar-nominated Brit is still on screens thanks to her turn in Channel 4’s Alice & Jack, airing now on PBS, as the pricklier half of a couple who can never seem to get on the same page. Alice & Jack reunites Riseborough with her longtime friend Domhnall Gleeson as they portray a lovelorn couple who, try as they might, can’t escape each other’s orbit. 

“When my character, Alice, meets Jack, it’s the first time she feels, really, hope,” says Riseborough. “It’s the first time she finds faith in mankind.”

Riseborough dropped by Little Gold Men to chat about how she tackles emotionally taxing subject matter, what love really looks like up close, and the blurry line between art and reality in Alice & Jack.

Vanity Fair: It’s clear that Alice and Jack are meant to be, that they’re cosmically linked, and yet they can’t seem to make it work. Why do you think that is?

Andrea Riseborough: Everybody goes through different things. We, all of us, have different stories. Everyone’s great love story, whatever it looks like, is worth being told.  In this story, the character that I play, Alice, has been through some horrific stuff. It makes her spicy, and she’s not felt love in this way. She, like everyone else, deserves her own love story. All of these beautiful love stories may not end up looking like a film set in a fancy apartment in New York with a “struggling” protagonist who’s living in like a four-bedroom apartment in New York. [Laughs.] 

That has its place, but those romantic comedies in the most broad sense don’t always represent what love looks like. It’s such a mess, and it’s so confusing. I think, more than anything, love is that great challenge that—it holds up that great mirror to you where all of your darkest fears bubble to the surface. You behave like the worst version of yourself in spite of wanting to
present yourself as being completely perfect. You’re simmering in a pot and all of those insecurities come up. Were you to have a camera very close to somebody in those moments, I think it would look a little more like this story does, because none of us are presenting the best of ourselves often when we’re in love because we’re the most scared. We have the most to lose.

As you mentioned, Alice has a particularly dark backstory. I have to imagine as an actor, it’s difficult to tap into. How do you explore that territory and also stay relatively sane as a human being?

Well, I produced this show, so I was working on it for about three years before we shot it. I think probably one of the most challenging things was that for our writer, creator, Victor [Levin], Alice was very clear on the page, but at the beginning we had the first and the final episode. So I knew where we were starting and where we were finishing, as did Domhnall. But we didn’t have the meat yet.

So as Vic came to know me and Domhnall better, he began to take parts of our lives. [You’re] playing a character who’s been through such a great deal historically, and then they’re mixed with little snippets of you, familiar snippets of yourself. As an example, her voice is quite close to mine. It’s only about five miles down the road from where I grew up. It’s not exactly how I sound, but it’s similar. There’s lots of things that are very close to me and pieces of information that Vic had garnered from my own life that he then sort of peppered into the script. And that was very psychologically confusing. I’m not sure I would want to do that again. It’s very strange because you start almost rewriting your own past. Everything gets a bit crossed and wonky in your brain.