She hates having to keep still: “It’s torture.” On aeroplanes, she is always in the aisle, bobbing up and down. She has an inner restlessness, an energy looking for the right outlet – one that even eight hours of rehearsing hasn’t quieted. With the beanie, a body warmer and a cup of builders’ tea, the acclaimed actor looks as if she is on a break at a construction site.
She is working on a stage adaptation of Eurotrash, Christian Kracht’s novel about a mother, played by Hunter, who is accompanied on the final trip of her life by her son, played by Ben Whishaw. As the pair come to terms with their dark past – and Europe’s – they must confront what Hunter describes as a “hinterland of silence”. In this case, it stems from the family’s Nazi ties, but Hunter believes “people will relate to it … in that every family has silences”.
Working on the play has got her thinking about her own mother – and about the actor Marcello Magni, the co-founder of Complicité theatre and the love of Hunter’s life, who died in 2022 at 63. We are talking in a rehearsal studio in south-east London, surrounded by fur coats, tweedy suits and flattened Toblerone wrappers (the play is set in Switzerland). Hunter, 69, is known for her deep, cigarette-fuelled gravel, but in private she is more softly spoken.
At work, her voice is protean; she plucks at words and leaves them vibrating. She can oscillate between a boom and a squeak (as King Lear at the Globe in 2022), a whisper and a caw (as all three witches in Joel Coen’s 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth). On TV, she is steely as Eedy Karn in Andor and as Sue’s gruff best friend in Ann Droid.
But the silence in Eurotrash? It’s not healthy.” Four years ago, Hunter ended her own long silence by clarifying that the life-changing injuries she suffered at 23 were not the result of a car accident, as was widely reported, but a suicide attempt. It was a sort of “coming out”, she says: “To come clean and make the plea for people in trouble to reach out and break silence … and rediscover the miracle that life can be.” She wants others to know that suicidal feelings “can be healed and it’s not something to be ashamed of; anyone can fall through the loop”.
She continues: “I don’t think people want to die. I mean, of course you do. But then if you can just be …” She inches a hand along the table towards me, grips my phone and turns it fractionally.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
