She has played Doctor Who’s time-travelling assassin River Song, the legendary warrior queen Boudica and a sorceress lusting after a vampire in A Discovery of Witches, but Alex Kingston’s latest role is perhaps the most outlandish of all. Before becoming ruthless tabloid editor Sheila Bellowes opposite Hugh Bonneville’s eponymous news presenter in Steven Moffat’s excellent four-part comedy-drama Douglas is Cancelled, she had never picked up a red top in her life. When a helpful neighbour left a pile of them outside the Oxfordshire cottage where she lives with third husband, television producer Jonathan Stamp, she could only get through “two or three pages”.
“In fact, I don’t even do interviews with that paper anymore,” says the 61-year-old, declining to name thetabloid which surely inspired her character Sheila’s employer, while having lippy applied in the sort of frosted-glass office made infamous in her co-star’s BBC satire W1A. Kingston had her own brief period of paparazzi scrutiny in 1995, when news broke of an affair between Francesca Annis and her first husband Ralph Fiennes.
If Kingston were to be interviewed by Sheila, what would be her first question? She laughs and grimaces. “They’re really not interested in me now, but probably something like: You’ve been married three times, which husband was the best kisser? Or she’d produce a photo of the cellulite on my thighs and say: let’s talk about your skincare regime. That’s the sort of level, isn’t it?”
The series itself is no less forthright. When a social media post alludes to Sheila’s husband Douglas having made “an extremely sexist joke” at a wedding – “exactly the sort of joke that women in this business have heard countless times,” reckons Kingston – the online rush to judgement begins. Meanwhile Douglas’s canny co-presenter Madeline Crow (Karen Gillan) considers whether to mobilise her 2.3m followers in support or condemnation.
The show is as mischievously entertaining as Kingston herself, a warm, instinctively self-deprecating presence whose ability to find vulnerability in women of great strength and authority has become something of a trademark. While nothing like Sheila, Kingston does share her quick wit. When I ask whether she, like Douglas, has ever done anything regrettable at a wedding, she responds drily, “Marry my first husband…”
While Kingston, who is absent from social media, remains blissfully ignorant of whether online mobs have ever come for her, the spectre of cancellation still looms large. “Cancel culture is terrifying,” she says. “Sort of fascistic, really. I don’t think people realise how dangerous cancelling people is, what that has meant historically.”
“My generation is treading on eggshells, not knowing whether what you say will unintentionally hurt somebody. I get really confused about pronouns, for instance. I’m just not confident with how and when to use them. There is no empathy or sympathy, opinions are immediate and black and white. I hope we’ll start coming back to a place where people can be kinder to each other, both in thinking about what they’re going to say and hearing what’s being said.”
This solicitousness is typical of Kingston who, if in doubt, advocates compromise. On the idea of lived experience, she hopes “we reach a balance where parts are open, potentially to everyone, but within the right context. Sometimes, if you want to be historically accurate, you’ve got to face the reality of what that would have meant in casting terms. People should be allowed to explore roles they would not have been able to explore before and also not be deprived of roles or even of writing roles because they don’t actually physically apply to them. We need a sensible, fertile middle ground.”
Ditto the art of the cancelled artist, which Kingston spent Sunday lunch discussing with her daughter’s boyfriend. “He was writing a piece at college on exactly that question. If I were to watch a Charlie Chaplin movie now, I couldn’t not be affected by knowing what was going on behind the scenes with the young women he’s acting with, because it’s telling a very different story to the one I’m watching.”
“Woody Allen, the same thing. I had a massive crush on him when I was young and watched his films obsessively, but I can’t now because they’re so often about an older guy chasing a much younger woman. It’s staring you right in the face. With Harvey Weinstein, say, he’s not on screen so in a way I can forget about him and just watch these brilliant films. For me, it’s whether what’s gone on will alter how I experience the film.”
Kingston grew up the daughter of a butcher and an art teacher, making her screen debut aged 17 as Grange Hill bully Jill Harcourt. She counts herself fortunate to have negotiated her early career avoiding any of the horrors exposed by #MeToo. “Casting couch culture still existed when I came out of drama school. If you were a young girl, you’d likely encounter something at some point – I have friends who did – and, if you were on the up, people might question how you got there. I was too naive to read the signs and in a weird way that protected me, because I never went for ‘the drink in the pub’.”
Kingston had countless exposing scenes in Moll Flanders, the role which earned her a Bafta nomination and a fruitful new career path as ER’s Elizabeth Corday. Nowadays, such demands would require intimacy coordinators and, while she is relieved such provisions are in place for her drama-student daughter Salome (“although she’s very ballsy, she can look after herself”), she regards her own blasé attitude with fondness.
“I was a life-drawing model so I was very used to being naked around people. After one of Moll’s earliest sex scenes, the first AD [assistant director] jumped into bed and the three of us had a post-coital fa*g together because we thought it was funny. You couldn’t do that nowadays, which is probably a good thing.”
The day after we meet, Kingston flies to Comic Con in Texas, where she will be greeted by hordes of devotees of River Song, companion/nemesis/partner of three Time Lords. Has she watched the new Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa? “I’ve been too busy to watch anything that needs my focus and attention,” she confesses, having just finished a well-received run as Lady Elizabeth in The Other Boleyn Girl at the Chichester Festival Theatre. “I’m behind on Ncuti and the whole new world of Disney Plus. The fans will bring me up to date, no doubt.”
Those fans have clearly made an impression: she is, for example, very happy to row back on her 2015 suggestion that the Doctor “has to be a guy”.
“I’ve met so many fans who identify completely with Jodie [Whittaker]’s Doctor, so I was wrong to be sceptical. I suppose I thought that because that’s how it had always been, that it was much more the world for little boys growing up. That also was totally wrong, because the genius of the show is that it’s such a broad church. The ingredients that always need to be present are humour, love and a twinkle in the Doctor’s eye. If it gets too serious or preachy, people will sit back. It’s got to have that joy, and with Russell you’ll always have that.”
While she hopes to revive The Other Boleyn Girl and is preparing for a new series about the Mitfords, these days there is the siren call of village life, with its apiculture and campanology, to contend with. “I broke a stay the other day because I didn’t pull in the right way,” she says, looking mortified about her forays into bellringing.
“When I started acting, we were coming into the Thatcher years and nothing felt secure in terms of work,” she concludes. “Even now, I always think I’ll never work again, so I’m constantly saying yes to any old job. Sometimes I wish I’d been more ambitious, but at the end of my days, I’m not going to be looking back, going: God, weren’t those roles fabulous? I’m going to be thinking about life with my family. That’s the really important thing.”
Douglas is Cancelled begins at 9pm, June 27, on ITV and ITVX
