'I imagine having a fantasy dinner party with them all...”

Harriet Walter, star of docudrama Brian and Maggie’, sits down with Helen Coffey to talk politics, playing horrible’ women, and the influence of misogyny on our screens

- Helen Coffey

“People are always saying I play horrible women!” says an amused Harriet Walter. It’s hard to argue with this assertion; after all, she has something of a track record. There’s the odious Fanny Dashwood in Ang Lee’s beloved 1996 Sense and Sensibility, and ice queen Lady Caroline Collingwood in the smash-hit HBO show Succession – not to mention her scenestealing performances as Russian assassin Dasha in Killing Eve and emotionally distant mother Deborah Welton in Ted Lasso. In short, the veteran British actor has spent much of her 45-year career playing very nasty women indeed.

“I sometimes imagine having a fantasy dinner party with them all...” she muses, and we both pause for a moment, picturing that surreal, painfully awkward social gathering with a kind of horrified fascination. “To me, they’re all horrible in very different ways.”

The latest in the lineup is a real humdinger: Margaret Thatcher. Walter plays her opposite Steve Coogan in a new two-part Channel 4 docudrama, Brian and Mag e, written by Olivier Award winner James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears (he of State of the Union and A Very English Scandal fame). Adapted from a chapter in Rob Burley’s 2023 book Why is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? and based on real events, the show is a dramatisation of the game-changing 1989 televised interview between Thatcher and journalist Brian Walden, aired three days after the resignation of Nigel Lawson as chancellor. Thatcher visibly floundered under Walden’s unrelenting questioning, and the encounter is widely believed to have been instrumental in her subsequent political fall from grace: she resigned a year later.