'COMPUTER- GENERATED ACTORS? IT'S TERRIFYING'

Ruth Wilson fears for screen stars, but as she returns to the West End stage, she says theatre is in fantastic shape — and things are looking up for women of a certain age, too

- BY NICK CURTIS

The sexuality of women is always weaponised or used against them,” says Ruth Wilson. “Whether you've slept with men or not, it’s sort of dangerous either way.”

The 43-year-old star of His Dark Materials, Luther and The Affair is talking about her role as Josie in Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Almeida — her first play since the astonishing 24-hour performance The Second Woman at the Young Vic in 2023, which won her a special Evening Standard Theatre Award.

Josie retains a pure love for the drunken, whoremongering Jim Tyrone (played by the fine American character actor Michael Shannon), but plays up to false reports that she’s slept with countless men. “A girl who has had many sexual encounters might get slut-shamed,” Wilson says. “But the rumours about Josie are men taking pride in conquests even if they're not true.

“The play is about the lies people tell themselves, and whether they can bear their own truth. Men lie about what Josie has been up to as much as she does herself. Really, it's about two people looking for some honest connection, some intimacy, but it's impossible for them to find that because they've got so many layers of armour.” A play about lying might be even more relevant today than one about slut-shaming, we agree.

The production came about by happenstance. Wilson's professional and personal life is transatlantic. As well as shooting The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp in the Midwest in 2013 and The Affair around Montauk, LA and NYC between 2014 and 2019, she appeared on Broadway in Constellations opposite Jack Gyllenhaal in 2015 and as Cordelia to Glenda Jackson's King Lear in 2019. She has also for some years been in a relationship with a Manhattan writer whom she chooses not to name or discuss, although she refers more often to “my boyfriend” than in our many previous interviews and also says “he’s over here more now”. (More on the Trumpian reasons for this later.)