Murder By Numbers
Empire|October 2017

How Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd filmed the year’s most harrowing scene

Phil De Semlyen
Murder By Numbers

THATOLDMOVIE adage about never working with children doesn’t cut much ice with William Oldroyd. The director’s debut film, Lady Macbeth, a masterfully chilly adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 19th century novella, saw him —and consider this the mother of all spoiler warnings — tackle one of the most challenging scenes imaginable. In it, Anton Palmer’s young ward, Teddy, is suffocated on a sofa by Florence Pugh’s ruthless heiress Katherine, with some help from her lover Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), to free her from a potential threat to her fortune. It’s gruelling and deeply uncomfortable viewing, and to make it work Oldroyd needed the full cooperation of Palmer, then just seven years old.

This story is from the October 2017 edition of Empire.

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