The Duchess Interviews

Promoting their new film, stars Keira Knightly, Hayley Atwell, Dominic Cooper and director Saul Dibb discuss life, sex and the woes of London real estate.

On a panel table prepared for Keira Knightly, Dominic Cooper, Hayley Atwell and Saul Dibb, there could be no mistaking where the star of the press conference would be sitting, as I joined a line of sheepish journalists in adding my dictaphone to the constellation of recording devices arranged around Keira’s seat. We were gathering in one of the plush screening lounges of the Soho Hotel to hear director Dibb and his three young stars discussing their new film, ‘The Duchess’, a period drama based on the life of Georgiana Spencer, later the Duchess of Devonshire, as adapted from Amanda Foreman’s acclaimed biography.

If Keira has ever been subjected to formalised media training, she has clearly met it with cheerful abandon. Where co-stars Hayley and Dominic show a degree of careful reservation, the leading lady has none, and it makes her a delightfully spontaneous interviewee. Her face and mouth leap into action before she’s necessarily thought the answer through, leading to hilarious moments such as her response to the very seriously posed question of ‘What can the film tell young teenagers today about love and marriage?’ Without as much as pausing for breath, Keira responded with a flabbergasted ‘Oh christ…’ before rallying magnificently with ‘I don’t know… don’t get married at 17?’ Which, to be fair was about all that could be said, under the circumstances, and was done so with refreshingly gay abandon.

Interestingly, Dominic proved more desirable in real life than as the film’s Lord Grey. Having apparently conducted the majority of his research from the back of a Twinings box, does not quite excuse a very restrained performance, lacking in the magnetism one would expect from the man who lured the Duchess of Devonshire away from her marriage, and almost from her beloved children. As himself though, Dominic was perfectly desirable, if not downright charming. Besides his candid discussion on sex scenes and the difficultly inherent in undressing women of aristocratic attire, he proved himself to be a sensitive soul, bemoaning his unsuccessful attempt to elope with the Lady Georgiana, as though the failure were all his own. He fixed such an accusatory stare on Keria that she actually found herself apologising profusely, before catching herself and playfully belting him one instead. Dominic was a good sport all round, really.

Hayley meanwhile came across as quite the opposite of her more famous co-star, answering all questions carefully and with great thought, and always in that magnificently rich voice of hers, which contrasted (not unpleasingly) with the higher range of the impulsive Keira.

And the fact that the three young stars had enjoyed their time on set together was entirely evident from the cheerful banter which characterised the press conference, albeit at times to the embarrassment of Saul, when they roamed tangentially onto subjects including the manly skin coloured nappy Dominic was forced to don for his and Keira’s steamy sex scene. Well, not so steamy, given that Lord Grey did not manage to undress Georgiana during the allowed screen time, and his Lordship was, apparently wearing a nappy. Keira confessed that when Dominic had bounded on set wearing the offending item she had utterly collapsed with laughter, to the point that her long-suffering director was left trying (without, we imagine, immediate success) to haul her back into line by insisting that ‘this is serious’ and that she must pull herself back together.

Another journalist asked whether, in light of Keira’s be-clothed frolics in both ‘Atonement’ and ‘The Duchess’, it was easier to do sex scenes with clothes on? To which the young star had the grace to blush and valiantly strike out with a definitive ‘Um. Yes. No. Help, what would be the right answer to that?’ Dominic waded in to the rescue with his opinion on the matter, that in the case of the costumes for ‘The Duchess’, any attire which takes two hours to sew the actress into constitutes a very difficult article of clothing to attempt to remove to take a woman to bed out of. Ergo we assume that clothes complicate the physical practice of sex scenes, while skin coloured nappies on men leave the women unable to keep a straight face.

Keira and Hayley’s dresses not only took two hours to be sewn on each day, and about half the time again to remove (and that’s without even starting on the length of time the wigs took to prepare and strip), but were almost to a collection too wide to permit access to either film trailers or, worse, any available bathrooms. Once does not like to consider the imaginable consequences therein.

Naturally the female populace of the press were devastated that the delectable Ralph Fiennes was unavailable for our survey and interrogation, so we rounded on Saul instead of any juicy tidbits. If you have seen ‘The Duchess’, you will know that Ralph’s Duke of Devonshire is responsible for almost all of the lighter moments, albeit entirely unintentionally, as his ‘emotionally constipated’ (his own words) character grapples with the intricacies of the most basic human relations and dialogue. Interestingly, Saul explained that he and Ralph never discussed intentionally producing these comic gems, but that their hilarity was born entirely from the actor’s own extraordinarily intuitive performance.

Time flies, we’re down to the last question, and far from being another foray into the risque, a journalist asks for an example of extravagent spending from each of the panelists. Rather than revealing goss-worthy spending sprees though, the answers very quickly spiralled into a general damning of London housing prices. Hayley’s only extravagence was the purchase of a modest flat (although she also confessed to buying a car from E-Bay, on a whim); Dominic said he was optimistically contemplating going to the moon on the Virgin shuttle – but was in fact more likely to splash out on a (modest) flat; keeping on the same theme, Keira’s extravagence was apparently the purchase of her London flat (hardly a mansion, but ‘very nice’); and Saul gloomily sighed that as he had three kids, he didn’t know what an extravagance was. Seems like the mansions and millions remained with the on-screen characters of ‘The Duchess’…