Preparing to play a fictionalised version of Rebekah Brooks in ITV’s The Hack, Rosalie Craig studied footage of the former Sun editor turned News International chief executive being questioned in parliament in 2003.
Brooks was editor of The Sun when its reporters were alleged to have stolen information from the phones of celebrities.
As the kind of woman who “drives past great parking spaces because I worry people will see me muck up the reverse parking”, Craig was astonished by Brooks’s coolness under fire as she was asked about the allegations.
Craig noticed that “in a situation that would have left most of us flustered”, Brooks’s “pace of speaking was calm and measured… She’s just: charm, charm, charm offensive”. The 45-year-old actor shakes her head in mingled awe and horror.
“Even when the evidence is absolutely against her she can see a way around it… Somebody like Rebekah Brooks absolutely thrives in that kind of situation. That’s where she gets her adrenalin hit, her happy place – being able to control and manage those situations.”
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Brooks was found not guilty of phone hacking at a criminal trial in 2014. But she is framed as a villain making money from the stolen secrets of others in The Hack, which centres on the phone hacking scandal, and how it revealed that employees of the News of the World engaged in phone hacking and police bribery from the 90s until the paper’s closure in 2011.
Craig is a musical theatre megastar – she broke ground as the gender-swapped Bobbie in Marianne Elliott’s 2018 take on Sondheim’s Company – but slips effortlessly between genres, from comedy to drama (her TV credits include the Johnny Flynn-led Lovesick and last year’s Moonflower Murders on BBC One). She boggles at the elite Chipping Norton-set world in which Brooks, whose parents ran a tree pruning business in Cheshire, came to operate.
Does Craig know any of the actors who were hacked? “Gosh no! Do you?” She’s an actor. I’m a journalist. It’s likely we’ve both brushed up against a world in which secrets might have been illegally swapped, bought, sold or covered up. “It’s not news is it,” Craig mulls, “that there’s another realm entirely going on elsewhere. And yet we are still shocked when we discover it. When you look under the rock and think: ‘Oh my god!’”
The total control Craig personifies as Brooks is balanced by her other big telly role this month, in Sally Wainwright’s new BBC drama, Riot Women. The show follows the rebellious tale of a group of older women in Yorkshire forming a punk band for a local talent competition. Craig plays wildchild Kitty, one of the unlikely creative masterminds behind the band.
While Brooks’s power lies in keeping a lid on things, Kitty’s an explosive character who acts out in the wildest ways.
In an early episode we see her taking savage vengeance on an ex lover by smashing up his luxury car with a sledgehammer. Craig tells me that getting to stomp all over the roof of a high end motor felt “A-MAZING!”
“They planned to detonate something to make the windows shatter,” she says. But when that didn’t work on time, Craig heard Wainwright bawling: “Just smash them!” She cackles into her cortado as we speak in an airy coffee shop in London’s Soho.
Craig stresses that although the comedy we see in the Riot Women trailer makes the show look a little whimsical, a bit of a menopausal Full Monty, “it gets way, way darker and more serious, just as you’d expect from Sally Wainwright”.
Wainwright’s double Bafta-winning Happy Valley was the crime drama that proved viewers wanted to watch Sarah Lancashire’s no nonsense 50-something heroine wrestle with relatable domestic turbulence as well as the criminals on her patch.
This new drama is more of an ensemble event, with a cast led by – refreshingly – women actors in their fifties and sixties. There is Tamsin Greig as a retiring copper, Amelia Bullmore as her uptight sister, Lorraine Ashbourne as a hippy publican and Joanna Scanlan as a weary teacher at the end of her rope.
As members of the “sandwich generation”, they’re struggling with difficult adult children and ailing elderly parents. They’re cracking on but lacking time and space for their own emotions until they meet the younger Kitty in a local bar, karaoking along to Hole’s 1994 grunge howl “Violet”. Her red hair a Medusa muss, her mouth gashed wide following a drunken brawl in a supermarket, we hear her bawling along with Courtney Love’s female rage: “They get what they want, and they never want it again…”
“God, that felt good, really attacking songs like that!” says Craig, whose vocal skills I have more associated with the tender, twisting ballads of Tori Amos’s musical The Light Princess, and that gender-swapped Company.
She grew up in Nottingham – the daughter of an architect and a teacher – “writing heartfelt songs on my piano. But now I get what all those boys with guitars in garages were doing now, just yowling into a microphone. It’s very liberating. An exorcism.”
Craig’s Kitty is such an explosive presence on the screen that I’m slightly thrown by the petite and sleekly groomed actor who pulls out the chair opposite me with tastefully manicured burgundy nails. She’s not surprised I need to recalibrate my expectations. “Sally said that Kitty’s a character who brings her own climate with her, who can shift the weather of a room just by entering it…”
But while Craig tells me her parents used to joke about “the red mist” of childhood tantrums provoked by “maths, the texture of clothes or by feeling indecisive”, she can’t remember the last time she acted out.
“I don’t shout much, as me, these days. But we don’t as we get older, do we?” She straightens her silk scarf. “I’m now more likely to do something more meek like scream into a pillow.” She winces. “My daughter Elvie [who she shares with her fellow actor husband Hadley Fraser] is eight now and – just like me at that age – she can get really stressed out about what to wear before leaving the house. Maybe she is doing my anger for me…” Playing Kitty has made her think we should be doing more anger for ourselves. “Maybe I’d like to start screaming on top of a mountain!”
But having embodied both messy Kitty and coolly superior Rebekah Brooks recently, can Craig now tap into bits of those characters in her own life when needed? She laughs. “I’m much more confident now I’m in my forties anyway. I used to go into auditions thinking, ‘What do they want?’, and now I’m more able to say, ‘This is what I think, this is what I can do with this part.’ I am willing to take a bold stab at things.”
In Riot Women, Kitty is struggling with perimenopause – which is causing extreme bleeding when she has periods. “She’s always looking for tampons,” says Craig. “The intimacy coordinator on the show asked me if I was comfortable doing a scene where Kitty wakes up covered in blood. She said: ‘You don’t have to do it.’ I said, ‘I absolutely want to do it!’ We all go through it. We’ve all lifted the duvet and thought: ‘Eugh’.” She says it’s “great that we are all talking about perimenopause now. My mother’s generation didn’t talk about it. It’s only looking back that I realise there was a definite patch when that must have been going on”.
But Craig stresses that Riot Women isn’t a menopause show. “That’s something that is going on in it,” she says. “But if we have a message it’s that women have so much more life to live post menopause. It is not over. Just because you’ve got the demands of teenage children and parents who are dying…” She leans across the table, getting fired up. “None of that means you have to give up on yourself. Why wouldn’t a 50-year-old woman want to pick up an electric guitar? Why wouldn’t she want an active sex life or a brilliant new friendship?”
Women over 40, Craig believes, “really know who they are and what interests them. The thrill of discovering new people – discovering yourself – definitely produces oxytocin in a way they might not have felt for quite a while”.
The Hack is streaming now on ITVX. Riot Women is out on 16 October on BBCiPlayer
