“It’s bewildering to me that people of my generation still have an issue with their children being gay,” says Lesley Sharp. “Back in the 1970s, when I was in my teens and my two best friends were gay, it felt there were a lot of us marching against homophobic legislation. We marched for gay rights, equality. Now I’m confused. All those people who felt the same way… where have they gone?”
She suspects we see too many homophobic parents on screen these days. That’s why the 65-year-old Full Monty star feels it’s “refreshing” that she gets to play the part of “the really loving and supportive” mother of a gay son in Harry Lighton’s critically acclaimed debut film, Pillion. Based on Adam Mars-Jones 2020 novel, Box Hill, the tender-awkward comedy drama tells the story of timid traffic warden Colin (Harry Melling), who’s recruited into a strict BDSM relationship by charismatic biker hunk Ray (Alexander Skarsgård).
Yearning for love and thrills beyond the safe confines of his family home, Colin is seduced into a world where – as naive sub to Ray’s experienced dom – he must lean into pain and humiliation and work out if that pleases him.
But – with Colin’s naked buttocks exposed to the grey-blue light of the Bromley suburbs – this is no 50 Shades fantasy. And while he’s cooking Ray’s meals and sleeping on Ray’s floor, his kind, doting mother Peggy (Sharp) is dying of cancer. Her terminal prognosis means Ray breaks one of his BDSM rules and agrees to attend a family dinner at Colin’s house, resulting in British cinema’s chewiest scene of the year. Ray speaks sharply to Colin. Peggy calls out the dismissive way he’s behaving and Ray tells her firmly that “this relationship isn’t about making YOU feel comfortable”. Ouch.
“He’s got a point, hasn’t he?” mulls Sharp via video call from her home in North London. “But so has Peggy. She is worried that Ray is not the kindest, most enabling partner and she wants to see her son happy. Her problem is not that her son is gay, but that he is not being uplifted by this man at her table.” She smiles, bright blue eyes twinkling behind outsize specs. “I think it’s fantastic to see such a complicated dynamic on screen. I love the nuance and ambivalence.”
Although she’s a cautious interviewee – “There is such a danger of being misinterpreted” – Sharp leans towards her laptop camera to mull over the ethics of BDSM relationships. She notes that, throughout the film, “you’re always asking: ‘Who has the power in this relationship?’ While it appears it is the dom, the sub is also very powerful. It doesn’t work without him.”
She notes that by “immersing himself” in the theatricality of Ray’s leather and chains lifestyle, “Colin is working out what his parameters are,” she explains. ”It’s very sweet when he comes to the realisation that while he enjoys all the BDSM stuff he would also like days off. He would like to be able to hold his boyfriend’s hand in the cinema. The poignant thing is that Ray is not capable of that level of intimacy. He finds it too painful. Alexander does so much in that part by not saying anything, not doing anything. I found that incredibly moving.”
Born in Manchester in 1960, Sharp was adopted at six weeks old and lost her adoptive mother to cancer aged just 15. But she waves off any suggestion that playing a terminally ill woman took her back to that time. “It was a long time ago,” she says. But she humours me when I suggest her teenage passion for acting – like Colin’s adventures in BDSM – took her out of her comfort zone and helped her define the edges of a truer self at a time of personal tragedy.
“I found my happy place in the theatre,” she nods, carefully. “It made me very nervous and alert. But I felt alive on stage. There is nothing quite like the moment of connecting to a piece of writing, the people on stage with you and the audience. It’s like magic.”
After studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the early 80s, Sharp gravitated to gritty, British cinema and TV roles in which you could always feel the cleverness clicking away behind those round blue eyes. She starred in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) and the Jimmy McGovern-penned Priest (1994) before being Bafta nominated for The Full Monty (1997). More recently, she starred alongside Suranne Jones in Sally Wainwright’s brilliant police procedural – her precursor to Happy Valley – Scott & Bailey.
Was she never tempted by the more jazz handsy side of the theatre? “Some people love that whole showbiz side of things,” she says. “I went to see Oliver! a couple of weekends ago and watching them selling those songs was fantastic. I love watching musicals. But it’s not something I think I could do and it’s not something I would particularly want to do because my interest is more into going deep into why characters do what they do. I love being in a rehearsal room and delving into intent, figuring things out.”
Sharp was delighted to feel that rehearsal room charge filming a second season of ITV thriller Red Eye this year. She returns as cool headed MI5 boss Madeline Delaney – “the methodical, moral centre of the piece”, says Sharp – who’s on a small government plane to the US when her minions call to say the Russians have planted a bomb on board with her. Instead of panicking, Delaney calmly seeks information in an attempt to defuse the device herself.
“Normally when you shoot for TV shows, the work is dotted about two to three days a week in different locations,” says Sharp. “But because we did six episodes with five of us on the plane, it felt like being in a little theatre space. All of us locked in that little box going through the events in sequence. I think that feeds into the intensity.”
Observant, owlish Sharp projects much of Delaney’s collected reserve in our interview today, but she assures me that “the composure you allude to is nerves”. She’s been unsettled by interviews in the past, finding the subsequent articles cover ground not included in the conversations. “These are very strange situations,” she mulls. “Me talking to you… the way we are all out there on the internet”. It clearly makes her uneasy.
In her real life, she tells me she is “nothing like Madeline Delaney. She is beyond most human’s capability in terms of the way she runs her life. I couldn’t defuse a bomb.”
In a more mundane way, though, she does live with the constant threat of explosions… from her 13-year-old border terrier Miggins. “My dog is truly awful!” she laughs, loosening up around a non-controversial topic as though her strings of her tension have been cut. Although Sharp tries to decompress between jobs by practising yoga and joining friends for dog walks, Miggins will regularly sabotage outings.
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“She’s very grumpy and you can never tell who she will take a dislike to. A lurcher will look at her the wrong way. Another day she won’t like the cut of a poodle’s jib. She’s an agent provocateur and incites our younger dog to evil-doing. Even if I am pushing her in a pram” – because she snapped her cruciate ligament – “she can get the other dog wound up…”
Sharp shakes her head. “It’s really quite embarrassing. If you have a dog that doesn’t behave well, it’s very shaming.”
‘Pillion’ is in cinemas now. ‘Red Eye’ series two begins on New Year’s Day at 9pm on ITV1
