Kristin Scott Thomas Lands Role In ‘Cherry Orchard’ Play

EXCLUSIVE: Kristin Scott Thomas enjoys how she provided Scarlett Johansson, the star of her directorial feature debut My Mother’s Wedding, with a humungous Royal Navy warship to symbolize a woman working high up “in a man’s world.” With a wry smile, she says, “I think that my Naval links helped a lot.”

During a sit down with the grand dame of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses and BAFTA winner for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Scott Thomas also exclusively reveals that she’ll return to the stage in a West End revival of The Cherry Orchard, playing a woman who’s been brought low in a man’s world.

We begin with My Mother’s Wedding.

There are echoes of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in Thomas’s semi-autobiographical movie starring Johansson, Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham as siblings with dispositions as strikingly disparate as those possessed by the Prozorov sisters. Scott Thomas played Masha in director Michael Blakemore’s memorable Playhouse Theatre production of the famous play in 2003, opposite with Kate Burton, Madeleine Worrall and James Fleet. The latter is another alumni of Four Weddings and a Funeral, and he has a key role in My Mother’s Wedding, which Vertical Entertainment is releasing in US theaters today.

As for The Cherry Orchard, the West End and Broadway producer Sonia Friedman confirms to Deadline that Scott Thomas will play Lyubov Ranevskaya, the Russian aristocrat who loses her prized estate to a man her family had once exploited. He will go on to destroy her family’s past, and doom its future.

Scott Thomas played an acclaimed Arkadina in Ian Rickson’s richly textured The Seagull that played London and Broadway nearly two decades ago. Friedman says that Rickson will reunite with Scott Thomas to direct Conor McPherson’s new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard. No dates or theater yet, although I understand rehearsals are likely to start around easter in time for the play to open in the West End next summer.

If it blossoms in London then The Cherry Orchard will more than likely transfer to Broadway. 

Sisterly love

While the siblings in My Mother’s Wedding are markedly different to those in Three Sisters, there is, as Thomas notes, “A lot of gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, humor in it that is reminiscent of the humor that you can find in Chekhov.”

In the movie, which was shot mainly in the England county of Hampshire, Johansson plays Katherine, a Royal Navy captain, the commander of an aircraft carrier. Miller takes on the role of Victoria, a frivolous movie star, while Beecham is Georgina, an NHS nurse with an errant husband. They all have kids of their own.

They meet for the third wedding of their mother, Diana, played by Scott Thomas. Her previous husbands were both Royal Navy pilots who died in crashes and the heart of the film explores the often-muddled memories the daughters have of the men they still worship.

The flashbacks, poignant monochrome counterpoints to the present day live-action scenes, are realized using stop-motion hand-painted glass animation by Iranian animator Reza Rishi of Paris-based Pasteque Productions.

Scott Thomas is herself a navy brat, with a father and step-father who were both Royal Navy aviators that perished in the skies. She melds the effects of her own childhood tragedy into the screenplay she co-wrote with the distinguished journalist, John Micklethwaite, who’s also her husband.

A lot of people with sisters will enjoy it, Scott Thomas suggests, “Because we managed to capture the tight binds that they’re all trying to escape sometimes – they’re all trying to kind of get out of them and then scratch back. That is thanks to the actresses who just went straight in there and found their own little kind of world.”

Smiling, Thomas adds how “very touched” by how her ”girls”  managed “to communicate that love and sometimes friction and compassion and irritation that comes from having sisters.”

Proudly, she declares: “I always call them my girls.” That didn’t always quite work during filming. On set she’d inquire, “Are the girls ready?” and would be told, “No, they’re women.”

Scott Thomas thought of Johansson for Katherine as they’d worked together before on The Horse Whisperer and The Other Boleyn Girl. “I’m quite used to playing her mother, and it was very sweet how she responded, because I sent her the screenplay and she literally said ‘yes’ the next day. It was fantastic. She said, ‘We’ve got to do three films together as mother and daughter, so that was it.”

They had to move “very quickly” because both had commitments, Scott Thomas recalls. She was to do more Slow Horses with her pal Gary Oldman, while “Scarlett was doing one of the Jurassic Parks or something.” The writers strike was still on at that point, and it was the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, “so it was all quite fraught, I would say,” adds Scott Thomas.

Sienna Miller was very much on her mind, even though they’d never met. “I always knew I wanted Sienna,” says Scott Thomas. “How did I know? I watched her, and I just knew she would understand this character and just lean into it.”

Casting director Lucy Bevan had mentioned Emily Beecham not long after Scott Thomas had seen her in Emily Mortimer’s television adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Cast also includes Freida Pinto, Joshua Maguire, Mark Stanley, Samson Kayo and Thibault de Montalembert.

Outlawed

Having cut her teeth being directed by the late Prince in 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon, and subsequently landing roles in 69 more features, there were a few things Scott Thomas wanted to outlaw now she was in the director’s chair for the first time.

No running lunches for starters.

“What happens is that you as an actor are trying to perform in a complicated scene and you’ve got people in the background who you can see out of the corner of your eye eating curry out of a box,” she says, shuddering at the very idea. “No, can’t do that, with the smell of food coming onto the set. I said we need a lunch break.” 

The lunches turned out to be a bonus. “I needed to be able to regroup in the day because I was acting and directing and I needed to be able to sit down and talk to my DP [Yves Bélanger] and talk to my first AD [Zoe Liang]. I needed to be able to do that to recalibrate, because this is the first time I’ve done it.

“I didn’t know if I was going to be very decisive, if I was going to have to change the camera angle… I didn’t know how I was to be, so I needed to have time in the middle of the day when I coould have a little mini conference with my HoDs.”

And how decisive was she, I asked, intrigued.

She considers the question for a moment then responds. “I certainly got more decisive as time went on, as I learned how to do it. What I found incredibly difficult at the beginning – and now it just makes me throw up my hands in horror – is that I kept sort of asking permission, as in, ‘Do you think I could have this or get her to do that? Would you mind?’ And they’re saying, ’You are the director. Tell us what to do.’

“Because I was so used to being in the other shoes, it took me a while to really fully grasp how to ask people to do what I wanted them to do and how to express what I wanted rather than being apologetic about it.”

Could her initial deference be related to having studied at the prestigious Cheltenham Ladies’ College, I venture to ask. In part, she concedes.

“But also I think it’s part of my makeup and who I am. When you’re an actor, you are being told to do a lot of things, and that’s possibly one of the reasons we choose to be actors. It’s within quite a narrow set of boundaries and you are being directed, so it becomes a partnership between you, the director and the other actors.”

Then suddenly, she continues: “When you are the director, you are the one who is having to drive. That took me a couple of weeks to kind of fully understand. Luckily, I had a fantastic director of photography and a fantastic first AD, and, of course, my principal cast, who were well seasoned and completely brilliant. Film sets are second nature for Scarlett, Sienna and Emily. They’re not frightened by lots of people in shorts holding large poles, looking at them.”

The aircraft carrier

My Mother’s Wedding also includes the unexpected wow factor in the ginormous Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales used in scenes involving Johansson’s naval commander. How did she pull that off, because it’s the real thing, I ask.

“That was my amazing film producer, Finola Dwyer, who managed to do what she does, which is get the impossible,” she marvels. With a wink, she adds, “And I think that my Naval links helped a lot.”

Scott Thomas remembers trying to think of what Johansson’s character could do that “possibly do that would be a woman in a man’s world.” This would need to be a job that was, “Mostly quite difficult, running something really huge with a massive responsibility.”

They thought about making her the leader of the country, but then people might’ve confused such a politician with hopelessly failed British Prime Minister Liz Truss. “No, definitely not that,” she utters as a look of horror crosses her face.

Eventually Scott Thomas considered an aircraft carrier pilot. “I remember writing that thinking, ‘That’ll never happen,’ but then it did.” The lesson, she says, Is that you should always aim for exactly what you want.”

The ship’s 700 crew participated in the filming. “It was amazing,” she says reliving the thrill. “They were all very happy to see Scarlett, of course, and she looked so fantastic in their uniform. They were all in their best uniforms, standing for ages on that deck where it was freezing. They were amazing. That was the real McCoy.”

All is shipshape in that moment on HMS Prince of Wales, and it’s epitomized by words Thomas’s mother character uses when she reminds her “girls” that she “brought them up “to be women, not just daughters.”

I ask Scott Thomas to expand on that thought. “Well, I think that’s what growing up is, isn’t it?” responds Scott Thomas. Then she laughs and says that line had nothing to do with her. After explaining what she was after, she had instructed her writing (and life) partner Micklethwait to ‘go and write things.’ “And he came up with that line.”

Reading those words – “be women, not just daughters” – floored her. “That was something that I suffered from as a developing person,” she explains. “Because I only had one parent, what I tended to do was think of her as being the be all and end all of everything. If it didn’t get past her, it was no good, so I had to seek her approval at all times, even into adulthood. It was only really when I started having children of my own that I managed to pull away a little bit from that.”

But she and Micklethwait were struck by the idea of having your parents still being very overpowering. “A lot of people who are born to children of people who are very, very successful find that can be a real handicap, because they’re always comparing themselves to their parents, and that’s why I think that line is so good,” says Scott Thomas.

Originally called North Star, the title was changed to My Mother’s Wedding, which led Scott Thomas’s own mother to wonder whether it was about her. “She said, ‘All my friends will think it’s about me.’ I said, ‘Well, it isn’t, it’s fine. It’s just the name.’”

Sadly, her mother, Deborah, died before the film was completed.

“But she knew all about it,” says Scott Thomas. “We went to visit her while we were filming. That was lovely. I’m very sad she didn’t get to see it, as I know she would’ve had a really good giggle and she would’ve been very touched by it. 

“But what she said to me, I thought gave me a sort of permission. She said, ‘I’m really happy that you are able to create something to make something out of what happened to you when you were little.’ Obviously parents feel that they are responsible for anything that happens to you, even if it’s nothing to do with their responsibility. My mother desperately wanted to protect her children, but just did not know how to do it. It was too much, too quickly and too young for her.”

Scott Thomas recalls the reaction to the tragedies that were bestowed upon her in the 1960s and ’70s “when attitudes towards children and towards mourning, towards grief and towards mental health were totally different,” underlining one of her film’s key sensibilities.

Scott Thomas has been working hard to promote the film. She wasn’t able to do that when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in the middle of the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023. The circumstances meant it “got a bit drowned out,” she says. “That was a very sad moment for us.”

However, she says it has now “all come together incredibly well” thanks to Rich Goldberg, Mitch Budin and Peter Jarowey’s indie distributor Vertical, which acquired North American rights for a theatrical run back in February, as we revealed at the time.

The experience hasn’t shied Scott Thomas away from another turn in the director’s chair, although, for now, because her next project is in early stages of development and desires to keep it under wraps. Meanwhile, she’s preparing to film French comedy Camembert, which is about family and inheritance.

Feebly, I wonder whether she has been cast as the grand fromage? “No, I’m not the big cheese,” she protests. A moment later she realizes with delight what I’m hinting at, and agrees, “Actually, I am the grand fromage!”

Indeed, Season 5 of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, in which Thomas intelligence service boss Diana Taverner, a slippery grand fromage if ever there was one, streams from September 24. ‘Lady Di’, as she’s called, oversees the outpost domain controlled by Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb.

Around the same time, she’ll gather with Oldman and the regular cast to start shooting Season 7 of the increasingly popular spy show based on Mick Herron’s ingenious novels, the rights to which were smartly snapped up by Oldman and his longtime manager and partner Douglas Urbanski – after which they partnered with See-Saw Films to make the series.

“It is a very strange experience to be playing something in long form television, as it’s the first time I’ve ever done this,” says Scott Thomas. “It’s not like a movie where each character has an arc. You just keep delivering the same thing. I prefer making films for that reason.”

However, she’s quick to spell out that working with Oldman is “such a treat,” adding: “Actually all the people I’m working with are such a treat – I’ve made a friend in Sophie Okonedo and that’s worth it for that. It’s amazing to have these people, the camera work is so brilliant, the writing is exquisite and the directing is really good. It’s like being in a jewellery store – it’s so beautifully made that you think, ‘Wow, I’m really privileged to be part of this.’”

She and Oldman “get on a house on fire,” but they don’t film many scenes together. “So it’s always like, ‘Oh, we’ve got Gary today. Hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray,’” she trills of the days they cross paths.

When they’re on call, Scott Thomas and Oldman like to sit together with a cuppa, chatting away about their shared adoration of the stage, and other topics, as he dunks a cookie into his tea. Does she dunk, I ask, politely? “I’m not really a dunker, no. Being an actress, I have to try and not eat biscuits on set. But Gary…”

As ever, leading men rarely concern themselves with how they look – young or old they don’t worry about how many biscuits they chomp, nor does society deem their age or looks as much of a concern. “It’s weird, isn’t it,” says Scott Thomas. “I don’t think we’ll ever know why, but it is very deeply, deeply, deeply annoying.”

“You just ask for better, nicer lighting. That’s what I want: Nice, kind lighting,” she states, her face positively glowing.