Marisa Abela Was “Completely Obsessed” With Becoming Amy Winehouse

Marisa Abela sips a coffee and settles into the back bar area of the Dublin Castle—a legendary music venue in Camden, north London. She’s sitting no more than 50 feet from where Amy Winehouse performed dozens of times over her short career. The 80-year-old proprietor of the establishment, Peggy Conlon, keeps chatting us up, but she never does mention Winehouse. Abela, soft-spoken and poised in an oversized black leather coat, takes it in stride.

The actor broke out as Yasmin on HBO’s Industry, then had a cameo as Teen Talk Barbie in Barbie. Now she’s starring in the Winehouse biopic Back to Black, from director Sam Taylor-Johnson and her Nowhere Boy writer, Matt Greenhalgh. Costarring Jack O’Connell as Winehouse’s boyfriend-then-husband-then-ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil; Eddie Marsan as her father, Mitch; and Lesley Manville as her grandmother, the movie takes a slice of Winehouse’s life—from ages 17 to 27—and frames it through her lyrics, her music, and the only two albums she ever released: Frank (2003) and Back to Black (2006).

Taylor-Johnson focused on newcomers for the film’s lead role, wanting “somebody who felt fresh and who could inhabit the role to a place where you felt like you were discovering someone,” she says.

“When I was prepping for the film,” says Abela, who is 27—the same age Winehouse was when she died of alcohol poisoning—“it was about getting a sensory experience of where Amy would have been, and how she would’ve felt. The knowledge that she would’ve sat where I’m sitting is an overwhelming feeling, but it’s intertwined with the practical memories of shooting the film.”

While filming throughout north London, Abela got the very strong sense that Winehouse lives on in Camden. Whenever she’d talk to someone in the area, she’d witness their eyes shift in a certain way. “She affected so many people so deeply,” Abela says. “So, in a very real sense, I felt her often.” During production, sometimes Winehouse’s presence would hit Abela: “What if she was sat next to me right now? What would she be thinking? How would she be feeling?”

Though she’d been living with her best friends in north London, Abela moved into her own apartment in Camden—a flat provided by StudioCanal—to fully immerse herself in her character’s world during prep and production. “I was obsessed,” she says. “I was in it so intensely that it was very weird to be with my girlfriends and, like, be in my room trying to move my jaw in a certain way. And they’d be, like, ‘Movie night!’ It was so jarring.”

It was one step in Abela’s full commitment to the role. She frequented Winehouse’s go-to hangouts, like the Dublin Castle and the Good Mixer pubs; she also lost a lot of weight to depict Winehouse’s substance abuse and eating disorder. They shot in reverse chronological order, says Abela, so she was able to do so in a controlled, safe way, with the guidance of a nutritionist. (Just don’t call it Method acting: “[I] couldn’t help but be completely obsessed,” the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art grad says. “But no, I wasn’t walking around my flat, making myself a cup of tea as Amy.”)

Abela also learned how to sing like Winehouse, though her take on tracks like “Back to Black” has been ridiculed by Winehouse’s often ferocious and loyal fans since the film’s first clips and trailers popped up online. Is she frightened at all of that?

“I am super aware that it’s about to come out, and people are going to see it. And that feels super exposing,” she calmly replies. “It’s a very vulnerable feeling.”

Yet Abela is also clear-eyed about the ways in which her version of Amy isn’t a carbon copy of the actual woman. “I didn’t want people to be, like, ‘You couldn’t tell the difference!’ It’s not that. We had very specific discussions about prosthetics and teeth and jaws.” In the end, though, the production chose not to alter Abela’s appearance in that way. “I was, like, ‘Who are we kidding?’ It’s me; we know it’s not her.”

Using Abela’s vocals wasn’t in Taylor-Johnson’s original plan, either. Finding someone who could sing like Amy without her performance coming off like an impersonation, the director says, seemed like “too tall an order.” But though Abela told Taylor-Johnson early on that she wasn’t really a singer, mere lip-syncing was never in the cards for her. “Amy is one of the most iconic singers of her time,” says Abela, “so the singing was a non-negotiable for me.” To credibly become Winehouse, she’d at least have to look the way Winehouse did when she sang, even if that meant simply learning physical traits like “what you can see in my throat, my jaw. But I was gonna work as hard as I possibly could to get to that place where I am singing as Amy. Not like Amy.”

So Abela dedicated herself to two-and-a-half hours of singing lessons every day for four months, and worked with record producer Giles Martin—who trained Taron Egerton for Rocketman—to learn how to replicate Winehouse’s style. “The harder I worked, the closer I actually got to it,” she says. Abela’s vocals—recorded at the iconic Abbey Road Studios, the location of Winehouse’s last-ever recording with her hero, Tony Bennett—wound up in the film.

The point, the star says, is to show how brightly Winehouse shone, how very deeply she felt, and how that all culminated in her iconic music, despite her struggles with addiction and bulimia. “My job was to try and embody that,” Abela says.

Onlookers often describe Winehouse’s career, life, and death as tragic. But Abela was attracted to Greenhalgh’s script and Taylor-Johnson’s vision because of the “life and joy and power and effervescence” that they held. “I want to tell a story that reminds me that she was a fucking riot, you know?”

Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy was indeed a tragic portrayal of Winehouse’s downfall, even as it aimed to be objective. The film, which won an Oscar for best documentary, wove together found footage of Winehouse with interviews of the people who knew her best—including her best friend, Juliette Ashby; her close friend and manager from 1999 to 2006, Nick Shymansky; and Fielder-Civil. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, participated in the film too, but ended up hating it. Abela found it incredibly helpful.

“I remember thinking it was an amazing documentary when I watched it the first time,” says Abela. “[And] as a piece of source material, it was so useful. I learned how playful she was with Nick [Shymansky] through that documentary. But I didn’t want to be told how to feel about any of her relationships through the lens of a documentary that was made by another man taking control of her narrative.” At the end of the day, she was left wondering if that film was an accurate representation. “Like her love for Blake, for example. I felt that that was more in the poetry and music that she was writing” than it is in Amy, Abela says.

Throughout prep and into production, Abela would often wonder, “What would Amy think of this?” Each day in her trailer, she would try to conjure a feeling of pride—because she thinks that, even when someone has been lauded for their talents time and again, they still feel proud when they’re celebrated. If she could see Back to Black, Abela says, “my hope is that she would feel incredibly proud of herself. When her mom came on set one day, she said, ‘I can’t believe all these people are here for my naughty Amy.’ And I hope that’s kind of how she would feel. Just like, ‘Me?!’”

But during filming, there were also times when art imitated life. The London paparazzi swarmed the set, sometimes mixing with the background actors playing the paparazzi who were constantly on Winehouse’s tail.

“You think you understand what that looks like,” Abela says, recalling the tense moments on set, “and then you’re there. And you realize the reality that it’s stalking and it’s harassment, and it feels quite scary. I remember one of the paparazzi saying something like, ‘You can’t get rid of me; I’m like a bad smell.’ And he was smiling while he was saying it. And I just thought, ‘You are so gross.’ I mean, I didn’t experience even a fraction of what Amy Winehouse would’ve experienced.”

Conlon shuffles over to our table again, with her middle-aged son this time, who helps run the Dublin Castle. He’s just come from the gym, she tells us, and pushes him forward a bit so he can ask Abela for a selfie. She obliges—but it’s not clear if she fully enjoys it.

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