It’s a film that refuses to fit any category. The story of a devout farmer’s wife in 17th century Shropshire who goes through a personal revolution in an England still suffering the aftermath of civil war, Fanny Lye Deliver’d is, however, more relevant to the UK in 2020 than its Puritan costumes suggest.
Directed and written by Thomas Clay, it tells the story of the eponymous Fanny Lye (Maxine Peake) who, along with her husband, gives shelter to a pair of strangers, played by Freddie Fox and Tanya Reynolds. As the reason emerges for the couple turning up at the farm, they also start to change Fanny’s life for ever, encourage her challenge and question the nature of her marriage to former soldier John (Charles Dance) and go in search of a freedom she’s never known before.
Freddie Fox talks to us about what the film has to say to contemporary audiences and the challenges that went with shooting on location in a cold and muddy Shropshire, especially when it came to his first – naked – appearance. He also reflects on his on-screen confrontations with Dance, a friend for some years.
Congratulations on the film. A film I think that is really quite hard to categorise. I know [director] Thomas Clay has described it as a puritan western. How would you describe it?
A sort of hallucinogenic puritan western, perhaps? I think Thomas’ description is very accurate but I think what makes it special is… normally you think of westerns as being quite broad in tier scope and sweeping and epic, whereas I think this is a chamber piece – a chamber piece that focuses on relatively untouched – not that it is complete untouched dramatically, of course there are films about the English civil war and that middle period of the Cromwellian protectorate that then led to the falling of that regime and the start of the Charles II monarchy again. It’s quite an untouched subject in cinemas and one that is very rich. I think there’s so much about the period that has come to define our lives today, and Thomas makes that very clear in the film – that our values and sexual freedoms, religious freedoms, were forged in that moment of history. A moment that I, certainly, wasn’t taught about at all at school, and I’m very glad I had the opportunity to do a bit of digging into it now as a result of researching the film.
So how did you come to get involved in the project? What was the appeal of it for you?
I think the initial appeal, I think for any actor, is getting a job [laughs], and yes, wanting to work first and it was a job that came up very suddenly and there was a huge amount to learn for the audition – the space of about 24 hours. I read the script as fast as I could he day before and realised how brilliant it was and how unusual it was, and in a way, because I live down in Dorset, or I have lived much of my life down in Dorset, how the character I was playing was from Salisbury which is in Wiltshire very nearby. I had a grasp of the accents instantly. I thought, this is something I can give my best shot so I stayed up until about four in the morning trying to learn the lines, get the lines into my head before the audition the next day. So initially it was that I needed to work and then later it became extraordinary luck to work with an auteur on a really cinematic, proper indie project which don’t come alone very often.
You say it was all last minute. Did that limit the time you could spend on research because you said you didn’t really know too much about the period.
Somewhat. I did my best as fast as I could. I was playing a soldier coming back from a war who had some traumatic effect from that conflict and a bitterness associated with it – so I watched a couple of documentaries on soldiers that had come back from other wars at other times in history. John Ford did some very interesting documentaries about shell-shocked victims coming back from, I think it was Vietnam. I watched a few of those but again, given the time, in a funny way, it was sort of a luxury to be thrown into it because you have to go completely on instinct and often that’s when you give your best work when you don’t over-think it too much. Added to which, I was very lucky to have an amazing chamber cast around me – Maxine [Peak] and Charles [Dance] obviously, veterans and legends in their own way, quite rightly considered so, and Tanya [Reynolds] who was an up and comer like me. Charles I have known for many years and I’ve been in a couple of things with him before, so I could go to him a lot for advice and e could soundboard ideas off one another immediately. In fact, we ended up living together on the shoot, in a cottage. We rehearsed those longs scenes, all in old English, of which was done in one long take in the cottage like it was a theatre rehearsal, and had the benefit of history and friendship behind us to make it easy.
When you’ve known somebody and worked with them for some time, lie with Charles Dance, what’s it like when you’ve got to be really quite nasty to him?
It’s always nice to do things you’d never do in normal life. That’s the joy of our job, in a way. You get to explore these shadow sides of personality that you don’t inhabit in your own life in the same way. We sort of relished the violence, actually. Like all filming, on one level it’s a terrific game, and on the other it’s very serious, and I think when you’re playing a game with your friend, and try to make it as plausible and believable as possible, there’s always a great deal of fun.At the end of the day it is make believe.
I felt that there was a definite ambiguity to your character, Thomas, because he’s not all that he seems to be and he’s got absolutely no qualms about lying to get his own way. Did you actually see him that way as well?
I think I saw him as a good guy. I know he’s got a Michael Haneke kind of anti-hero quality which is deeply selfish and devilish in some ways but one tries to take the side of your character and saw him as trying to look after a vulnerable person he was with, and doing that any way he needed to. Trying to emancipate a woman from what he saw was a dictatorial regime than his. An emancipator rather than a selfish guy in the throws of endless lust.
You’ve talked about how you’ve worked with Charles Dance on building that on-screen relationship. What about with Maxine and with Tanya as you’ve got very different relationships with all three of them.
With Charles, I felt very protected, in a way. He’s known me for so many years. I took an immediate confidence kick from that – that I had a friend, so I think that I consequently tried to make friends with the others as fast as I possibly could because we had to do so much in such a short period of time after our introduction. Charlie gave me confidence and we were able to knock things around – and we really disagree on a lot of things as well but I felt confident enough to do that with [him], whereas the others I had a reverence of them and so, it descended into a friendship very quickly and both of them are still very good friends. I feel very lucky, because usually on jobs you move on, like ships in the night after you finish shooting, but actually, with those I’ve stayed very close.
You mentioned earlier that you were brought up in the countryside. This was shot in Shropshire. It looks incredibly cold and muddy, I have to say. Was it really as challenging as it looked?
In a word, yes. Certainly none of the mud is CGI-ed. Or the frost, or the water, or the bugs. Without wanting to sound squeamish, I was brought up in the countryside and I wanted to be a fisherman for years when I was a kid – playing with fish guts was something that I was kind of, at home with, ever since I was about three or four. Even by my fairly tolerant standards, it was a real challenge and the shoot extended by several weeks. Because Thomas’ process was incredibly meticulous, and I think that shot-for-shot I think it’s one of the most beautiful film I’ve been in, without doubt. As you know, when a film rolls over by a week, it’s pretty unusual – when a film runs over by two or three, unless it is a huge film where they’ve got the money to burn, it’s highly irregular. Everyone was prepared to go the extra mile because the footage that was coming back was so good. The pressures of time, the pressures of weather, the set flooding several times – other people having to go onto other jobs – pushing those back, particularly crew having to come off the job, others having to be brought on because the shoot kept extending was challenging without doubt, but worth it for the final result.
When we first see you in the film, I guess that’s when you really felt the cold?
Yes. I forget that I was naked for most of the film. In answer to your question before about the actors who got to know each other quickly when one of your first scenes is running through a farm yard buck naked with someone you’ve never met before – you have to make friends fast.
The boundaries go down really, don’t they?
There’s no mystery anymore. It was why we could make friends so quickly and we laughed so much.
When you look at the film in a broader sense, it’s about one person’s revolution which takes places after the national upheaval. I just wondered how relevant you felt the film is to right now, especially as we seem to be living in such rapidly changing times.
Again, it just goes to show what we’re going through now has happened before in its own way and I think the fast answer to your question is that yes, it is highly relevant. When we made it, which was over four years ago, which was just when MeToo broke – when we finished the film, the movement had begun – and we thought gosh, it has a singular relevance now, but of course, a sponge has sucked up more relevant water induced from the surrounding environment and I hope people see that hen they watch the film, but also remind themselves that we owe an awful lot to the men and women of the seventeenth century, who were prepared to flout very harsh corporal punishment in order to exercise their rights and their feelings as human beings. I’d say it is an ode to the times, yes.
The film is coming out on digital but it did get a big screening at the London Film Festival. I just wondered how the audiences reacted to it?
It knocks you across he face undoubtedly. I’d not seen a film quite like it before and I think the general reaction was one of real positivity – seeing the relevance of it in today’s environment – seeing the beauty in the way Thomas did it and his ambition for a low budget British film, which is always impressive when so much care has gone into shooting it on film, making sure we present it in a beautiful film format when it was projected. Present it with a love of cinema. It has cinema written all over it, even though it is a chamber piece, and I think the audience really appreciated that it was presented in such an almost historically cinematic way.
Fanny Lye Deliver’d is released on digital on 26 June. It is also available on Curzon Home Cinema from 24 June to 5 July as part of the programme for Ed Film Fest At Home.
