Truly, madly, explicitly

I saw Intimacy only a few hours before I was due to meet Kerry Fox. As I came out of the cinema, a number of questions were already taking shape. How come it had taken a French director, Patrice Chereau, to deliver one of the most honest portraits of street-level London in recent years?

And what does it take for an actress to put herself through the demands of such a film, in which sex is depicted as a raw, direct and emotionally brutalising experience? But most of all, how to ask such intimate questions of a woman you’ve never met before, even when the alibi of her playing a fictional character is to hand?

Fox plays Claire, a married woman in early middle age who meets Jay (Mark Rylance), a 40-ish barman who has left his wife and child. Every Wednesday, they convene at Jay’s squalid lodgings for bouts of loveless sex where no names are spoken and few words exchanged.

Inspired by some recent controversial writing by Hanif Kureishi, the film has already received much press coverage detailing the explicit sexual content. The epithet “explicit” is, strictly speaking, accurate. Which is to say that, in at least one moment, where Claire fellates Jay, the sex is, quite clearly, for real.

Fox is late and when she shows up, the 34-year-old actress has her 11-week-old son, Eric, and her mother in tow. It’s a situation that lends itself to comedy and it crosses my mind to ask Fox’s mother what she made of her daughter’s latest film. But her mother takes up a position out of eye-line and the snoozing baby is set at Fox’s feet.

She is relaxed and amiable; there’s little of the “chronic diffidence” other journalists who’ve interviewed her have remarked upon. Having won the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival for Intimacy, Fox is clearly proud of the film.

“It was better in many ways than I’d imagined it could be,” she says. Her voice is light, the cadences of her native New Zealand further softening it. “It’s a terrible confession to make as an actor, but I never really thought that I had a whole picture of Claire as a character like I had with other characters,” she says.

“Everyday, I’d come to work in a state over whether I’d do the right thing by her. I spent most of the time not knowing what I was doing. Part of that had to do with the way that we’d agreed to do it, to give myself over to Patrice and to trust him completely. That was sort of the agreement I made with myself, that I wouldn’t get too precious and, as a result, I really surprised myself and did work that I never thought possible.”

As an actress, Fox has character rather than glamour and you get the sense of what this means when you meet her. Her face keeps changing the more you look at it, nuanced by a tilt of the head and the piercing presence of strong, blue eyes.

Born in Wellington, she floated through a number of university courses before drama school. After working in Australia for a few years, her extraordinary performance as Janet Frame in Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table both put her on the map and then left her in role-less limbo for well over a year after the film’s success. Parts for “a fat girl in a cardie” were few and far between, it seemed, but they followed nonetheless when she relocated to Europe after toying with the idea of going to Hollywood.

She was the breast-flashing, amoral medical student Juliet in Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave and the hardened hack in Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo. She now lives in London with her partner, the journalist Alexander Linklater, who has written of his misgivings about Fox’s decision to act in Intimacy. Now the film is finished, Fox admits: “I’ve no idea where to go next.”

So why did she take the role in the first place? “I was very interested in the question of intimacy and what that means. How to become intimate with somebody. How to know somebody.” Her replies are thoughtful, slightly quizzical. “I just recognised that it was really important in my life and in my relationships. Patrice and I talked about how it would be good to do an extremely truthful film about a sexual relationship, about how we’d never seen a film like that.”

I ask her about the sex scenes. “It’s funny talking about it now, because I seem to have the really strong sensation that I had taken the images from life, from things I’d witnessed and then used. Not necessarily my own experiences but other people’s. There was no handheld camerawork in the sex scenes. But you weren’t sure if the camera was on your face or on your hand. But you knew it wasn’t up your bum!” She laughs. “Which was important for me.” The laugh extends into an earthy bark. “With this particular film, we talked so much beforehand because we knew it was going to be such a big deal and that it could be very difficult. So before I went into it I was incredibly clear about it. When I watched it I was eight months pregnant and was just laughing and thinking, ‘Imagine doing it now!’ In the past, I would certainly hold on to aspects of the character and find it very difficult to let them go. Not with this one.”

How did she and Rylance prepare for these scenes? “Just by agreeing to do the job. We talked about being good to each other and kind, open and honest. And that we must always tell each other exactly how we feel. If you’re working with someone of the calibre of Mark it makes you a better actor.” Rylance, who took the role after Gary Oldman balked at its demands, is extraordinary.

She says that she has always wanted to be an actress: “You can cause an effect on people; you can actually change something within them. Maybe it’s my naivety that makes me think that it can make them think about humanity and their own experience of other people. To me, this film is about being open and honest, even though the characters are unable to do that.”

I got the feeling from the way she spoke about the character that Claire was something of a self-confrontation for Fox, that she had something to work out for herself at a certain stage in her life that this film and this character — a failed actress in a failing marriage — could offer. The other side of Kerry Fox. The person she’s not.

The interview draws to a close and I steal a glance at the actress’s mother. She looks utterly bored. And Fox’s son has slept soundly throughout.