Morven Christie: ‘Payback was a supposedly women-led project, but Jed Mercurio had the final say’

Morven Christie has always wanted to be “opaque”.

“I wanted to be invisible. I just want to be this wafty being that changes to whatever is necessary for that piece of work and have my own life completely separate.”

This “opaqueness” has made her one of the best actors working in British television, but also one of the most elusive. Only appearing on our screens every few years, Christie’s characters are distinct, complicated women with multifaceted inner lives. Whether she’s breaking down and baring her soul or doing the school run, she commands attention even when sharing the screen with the likes of Christopher Eccleston and Vicky McClure. She has a naturalistic, always believable approach to acting that is often hard to find on mainstream TV.

She should be a household name – standing alongside Suranne Jones and Keeley Hawes. But that’s not something she’s interested in.

Until now. Her desire to keep Christie the person and Christie the actor completely separate is beginning to wane. “At the moment, I’m interested in working really close to my own feelings.”

We’re sitting in a London hotel and Christie looks at once comfortable and out of place. Before we start talking, the first thing she does is kick her shoes off. We’re here to discuss Payback, the new ITV1 financial drama in which she plays accountant Lexie Noble, whose life is upturned when her husband is killed in suspicious circumstances and his secretive work for crime boss Cal Morris (played by the legendary Peter Mullan) is revealed.

Soon, Lexie finds herself embroiled in helping Morris maintain his dodgy bank accounts at the same time determined financial investigator DC Jibran Khan (Prasanna Puwanarajah) starts to close in on the gangster. It’s a sofa-gripping thriller.

It’s the first time Christie, 42, has worked in her own soft Scottish lilt – we’re used to hearing her with a northern accent in The A Word and The Bay and it’s something she never thought too much about before. But, she found, filming just 10 minutes away from her home in Glasgow, using her own voice helped her. “Acting to me has always been figuring out more about myself,” she says.

How, then, did Christie use her own emotions in Payback? “I’d had such a weird couple of years,” she says. “I feel like I looked a certain way because I had a miscarriage that year. I know what I’ll see when I look at it will not be the work. It’ll be something completely different.” The grief that overwhelms Lexie in her quiet moments was something Christie was going through herself.

She mentions the miscarriage with a surprising lack of weight, though she avoids talking about it again. Perhaps she never meant to mention it, but Christie has never been one to hold back in interviews. In the past, she has revealed troubling experiences in the entertainment industry, seen her compare the nudity of Game of Thrones to prostitution and rail against the rampant sexism she sees in her job. Today she is not feeling any more reserved.

Christie has very few misgivings about how she is perceived, not about her performances, her looks, or what she says in interviews. “There was probably a time when I did worry about what people thought of me,” she says. “I used to wonder if people thought I was some flag-waving–” she stops herself, and recalibrates: “If I think something, I will just say it. It’s never necessarily barbed. It’s just an observation.”

Despite her forthrightness, Christie is a delight to spend time with; open, honest and full of laughs. There is very little ego on display. That shouldn’t be a shock, she says.

“People are always really surprised when you’re able to not be vain as an actress. I don’t think I think about it very much, but that’s because I’ve really worked on not thinking about it too much,” she says. “When you start prepping for jobs like that you meet with a make-up artist who is like ‘I know you’re supposed to be make-up free, but we’ll do a bit of mascara and-’. I say ‘no, let’s do no make-up’.

“It’s all a bit fascistic, that actresses are expected to project something on to the women at home watching.”

Christie grew up in Glasgow with “no money” and watching a mix of Lynne Ramsay films and Friends. At 15 she left school and after a few years working odd jobs from waitressing to ski instructing, successfully applied to The Drama Centre in London (alumni include Simon Callow, Helen McCrory, Tom Hardy and Michael Fassbender). She built a career starring in Scottish indie films and one-off episodes of Silent Witness and Death in Paradise until she landed a recurring role in Grantchester as Amanda Kendall, love interest of vicar Sidney (James Norton).

Next came arguably her most famous part to date, as no-nonsense mum of an autistic son, Alison, in 2016’s The A Word, followed by her headline act in ITV’s procedural The Bay, a role she left after just two series. “I feel really quite disconnected from it all now,” Christie says when I ask about her career. “I haven’t watched Payback, I probably never will watch it. I won’t read any of the reviews. I filmed it a year ago, I know I gave it my all – anything after that is none of my business. I can’t keep trying to please people.”

That includes saying no to any scenes she feels are unnecessary or exploitative, specifically sex scenes. “I’ve never worked on a sex scene since #MeToo. I’ve never worked with an intimacy co-ordinator,” she says. Sex scenes, and even nudity in general, says Christie, do a disservice to the story. “It rarely adds anything,” she says, “And more often than not it’s distracting because you’re just like, ‘oh my gosh, that’s that actor’s nude body.” She remembers watching the National Theatre’s 2011 production of Frankenstein in which Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch took turns playing the monster.

“Whoever it is had to be birthed out of this skin and crawl naked across the floor. There were two old women sitting in front of me and I just heard them talking about Jonny Lee Miller’s penis. The mystery is gone. I couldn’t stop worrying about him getting a splinter.”

She has certainly experienced the darker, more disturbing side of the coin. “I had an experience on a show years ago where I had a sex scene and the director told me he was shooting me above my chest,” she recalls.

“When I watched it, I saw it was full-” she sighs mid-sentence. “I had to go back and reshoot scenes to get full-frontal breast shots. It was around the early days of Game of Thrones and that sort of thing was expected. But it was brutal. The lighting and the manipulation, it’s all quite unimaginable.

“But what’s really cool is that I’ve spoken to younger actresses who have never experienced any of that toxicity. We’re getting somewhere.”

Will sexual harassment soon be a thing of the past? That is, she says, “delusional”. Days after we meet, the Russell Brand allegations break. “On every set I’ve ever been on there’s always been powerful men,” she says. “And they always treat women differently.”

We discuss how much power women seemingly have on Payback, which is produced by Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio’s outfit HTM Television. “They’ve [the press materials] sort of done a big thing about it being a female team,” she ventures. “It’s not really. There’s Debbie [O’Malley, writer and executive producer] and Madonna [Baptiste, executive producer] but Jed was a big voice, and he overpowered their voices all the time. He’s the big name but he’s also a guy in a supposedly women-led project.”

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Christie later emails to clarify her comments, writing: “All I meant was that Jed had the final say on anything because he was the top of the tree. I absolutely did not experience Jed Mercurio as an egotistical man that silenced women! Jed’s great. Payback just wasn’t a particularly girl-power show. It was much like other mainstream shows I’ve done in terms of the gender balance throughout the creatives and crew.”

Still, working with Mullan, celebrated for his work in Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe and BBC comedy Mum, was a dream come true. “I think most Scottish actors would class Peter as one of their heroes. He’s iconic. Amazing,” she beams, but the differences between the way he was allowed to work compared to her was stark.

“Peter swears like a trooper. He’s like, ‘I won’t do that, this doesn’t work, I’m changing it’ and everyone’s like, ‘isn’t he clever?’ If I ask how we can fix a scene that isn’t quite working, they will go ‘Morven can be quite tricky’. It’s always going to be different. Culturally, we still have a problem.”

Christie points to the IMDb listing for Payback as evidence of this more surreptitious gender imparity. “Jenny [Darnell] was the lead director, but Andrew [Cumming] is listed first,” she says. “I’ve never worked with a director that’s done as much practice Jenny has. She works probably four times harder than any male director I’ve ever worked with. I think that’s kind of true of any female director I’ve worked with, they usually work a lot harder. And they make a lot less drama.

“People would be surprised at how hard most women have to work to get anywhere.”

Payback starts on ITV1 tonight at 9pm