Claire Foy is one of the stars in Women Talking, a film about an isolated Mennonite community where the women and girls have been drugged and raped. Foy is such a good actress, in general, and I’m interested to see what she does next. She usually plays queens and aristocrats, but really her background is working-class, so much so that she’s struggled for years with anxiety because of a big case of imposter syndrome. Foy recently spoke to the Guardian about Women Talking, feminism and The Crown. This is also the first time Foy has addressed, in detail, the fact that she was paid less than Matt Smith for The Crown, a story which came out years ago. Some highlights:

Finding the rage for Women Talking. “I had to not pull back. I had to not want to make her smaller. I’ve seen a lot of angry men in films, with their eyes bulging out, and there’s something OK about that. But angry women obviously get told they’re shrill or, what did someone once say to me? Head girly. I was never head girl. You have to think so much, as a woman, about how you communicate in order to get your point heard. You have to make sure that it’s palatable in some way.”

She didn’t grow up seeing many women being angry. “But you’ve got to get it out, in order to move on. I couldn’t. I just lived in denial that I had any.” She did, of course, have things to be angry about, but she didn’t know how to express it. “I’d be a really rageful driver, or I’d be really passive-aggressive, because I couldn’t say what I wanted or needed.”

She tells her 7-year-old daughter that it’s okay to be angry: “Because she doesn’t need to calm down. If she’s angry, OK, be angry then. Get it out, jump around, really scream. And then it only lasts minutes. Now, this would be ideal parenting. It’s not what I do all the time. Obviously I’m not in control of what’s happening in the world, or to a certain extent, my life.”

On the pay inequity on ‘The Crown’: “I don’t know whether to be honest or not. I don’t know how much shit to cause. [When the producers confirmed it publicly] that was the first I’d heard about it… I wasn’t shocked. I was very upset. Not like, boohoo, crying upset. I was very upset… I really love my industry, and I think it is made up of lots of honourable, incredibly talented, brilliant, imaginative, amazing people…. Sometimes, you see something, you hear something, you notice something, or something happens to you, and you just go, ‘Oh God, what am I doing? Why am I doing it? Should I be part of this?’ I found it really heartbreaking.”

She didn’t want to talk about it at the time: “Suddenly I was getting asked all these questions and being encouraged by certain people involved to be the spokesperson for it. I was like, ‘Absolutely f–king not.’ I just think everybody wanted me to behave in a certain way, in response to it. And I didn’t.” What certain way? She adopts a breezy tone. “‘It’s fine! It’s absolutely fine what happened!’ That’s what I think they wanted me to say. I mean, it’s so hard. I don’t think I should be honest about certain things about it, because I don’t think it would be helpful. It would add more fuel to it. We’re still talking about this, however many years down the line. I know the extent of it. I still went back on the show. If anything, I just didn’t want my experience of the show and what we all did on it to be overshadowed.”

The Crown’s pay inequity had a longer impact: She will say that the row has had “an amazing impact, subsequently. You can’t lie now.” A woman came up to Foy and told her that she had been paid fairly for a job because of what had happened. “She was saying it like I’d done something, and I was like, ‘I’ve literally done nothing at all. A newspaper article, and being really shamed … ’” Did it feel like shame? “No. It felt like all the attention was on me. And it shouldn’t be on me. I’m not the decision-maker in this process. Go and talk to them about it. Ask them what their reasoning is. Ask them why they did that. Ask them to be honest about everything. Not me.”

[From The Guardian]

Despite what she says now, I do think she was embarrassed and angry about the pay issue. I’m trying to put myself in her shoes – she probably wondered how she didn’t know that already, or why she never asked. I’m not saying that’s the correct response, I just think that she internalized the issue and spent too much time freaking out about what she should have done or what she should say now. But she’s right – it’s not about her, it wasn’t like she demanded to be paid less than Matt Smith, it was the producers hiding the financial discrepancy between their two leads.

I also think it’s probably really hard for a British woman to unlearn all of the crazy sexist sh-t in British society about how women should behave and whether or not women are “allowed” to be angry. I’m glad that she’s teaching her daughter to be angry!

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.