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Sophie Winkleman InterviewsPage 1 - Page 2 "Playing Up", Evening Standard Magazine, 1 February 2008One's playing a princess, the other's doing Pinter - Sophie Winkleman and, overleaf, Charlie Cox are the ones to watch for 2008. Lydia Slater meets Freddie Windsor's lady-in-waiting who's having a trial run in The Palace. Sophie Winkleman, actress and new royal squeeze, kicks off her boots, tosses back her mane of glossy brown hair and settles down to consume a large pile of cake with a happy sigh. "In Lithuania, all I ate was pork," she says, blowing her nose vigorously. "You don't realise how much fun London is until you've been away. I even love the congestion charge." Sophie has spent the last five months in Vilnius (or "Vile-nius" as she calls it) filming The Palace, a drama about the lives of a fictional British Royal Family, which has provided the year's first juicy television controversy. The director of Mediawatch UK has described it as "offensive". The eight part series, set in a facsimile of Buckingham Palace, which its makers have optimistically likened to The West Wing, follows the fortunes of young King Richard IV and his struggles to rule while fighting off backstabbers from above and below stairs. Among its stars are Jane Asher, who plays the widowed Queen Charlotte, Roy Marsden as the King's private secretary and Anton Lesser as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Sophie, 27, has the plum role of Eleanor, the King's jealous older sister, who aims to rule in his place. "I usually play rather dippy characters, so to do someone calculating and Cruella-ish, with long nails, is brilliant," she says. "It was a really fun part." And even with a cold, in jeans, socks and Reiss jacket, her statuesque figure and fierce dark features lend her an imperious quality, as do her loud, plummy tones. Sophie is aware of the brouhaha already surrounding the series but feels it's misplaced. "People think it's a satirical look at our Royal Family but it's nothing like them," she insists. "There are four siblings to begin with, and King Richard is very unlike William." Although with an opening episode that features the two princes chugging tequilas in a West End nightclub, and then shows how their lives are transformed by the sudden death of a parent, it's easy to see how the confusion might arise. And one delicious irony, which must have had the series' makers dancing jigs of glee, is that Sophie is currently dating the royal rebel turned financial analyst Lord Freddie Windsor. "It's not awkward, really, because I got the part before I started going out with him. It's just a coincidence," she says. "I would have had to think about whether or not I did it if the drama had been satirical or based on the real Royal Family, but it's not. So we find it quite funny; it's not a problem." On the contrary, playing Princess Eleanor may well have provided her with some useful insights. "I think it must be rather difficult being shoved into the public eye at all times and having to go through human things under an often critical gaze," she says thoughtfully. Perhaps that's why, since the glamorous pair started dating last year, they have managed to stay below the paparazzi radar, and it's been noticed that the famously hard-partying Freddie has been distinctly more circumspect about his social life of late. "It's great," is all Sophie offers, rather shyly, about the relationship. Sophie comes from arty North London stock. She was brought up in Primrose Hill and attended City of London School for Girls, where Romola Garai was a contemporary. Her parents are Cindy Black, a copywriter and children's author, and Barry Winkleman, who publishes The Times atlases. Her half-sister is Claudia Winkleman, from her father's first marriage to journalist Eve Pollard. However, she insists that her half-sister's career had nothing to do with her own decision to be an actress. "My mother always wanted to make sure I had things to do in the summer holidays, so she forced me to audition for the National Youth Theatre and I instantly got the bug." At Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she studied English, she was a star of the Footlights and won a Perrier Award nomination for a play she took to the Edinburgh Festival. Since leaving university, she has worked non-stop, mostly in television. She's best known for her role in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show as Big Suze, the incredibly posh girlfriend of Robert Webb's character Jeremy. She also played the older Susan in the 2005 film of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Although her role was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it excursion, she managed nevertheless to create mayhem on set. "We were horse-riding in a scene and I fell off. I was lying there feeling all embarrassed, because I'd said I was an absolutely brilliant horsewoman, so I didn't open my eyes. Everyone piled around and they were feeling my pulse - you know the way American's are absolutely paranoid because of the insurance. And then I felt it was too late to open my eyes because I'd look so weird, so I just pretended I was dead." Carted off to hospital in an ambulance, she was kept in overnight for observation and compounded her crime by confessing to a nurse, who informed the film's director. The next day, Sophie was given a stern telling off by the director. "It was a really stupid thing to do," she wails, blushing a delicate pink. "All that waste of time and money - I'll never be hired in America again." Not that she needs the extra work. This year, after The Palace (which may run to second series if it's well received), she will be appearing in a further series of Peep Show, is working with Harry Enfield, and rewriting a script about gambling. Her major project is making her own film, Hopeless Romantic, which she co-wrote with the comedian Ben Miller (who is currently starring in ITV's spoof Moving Wallpaper) and in which Thandie Newton has expressed an interest. Naturally, this leaves her little time for the sort of up-all-night social life that her beau used to favour, but it seems that Sophie's own tastes are rather more stay-at-home. She has a small flat in Chelsea, where she likes to bake cakes - "You can't go wrong if you use lots of butter" - and whiles away the hours playing Scrabble and Ex Libris with her friends. "I absolutely loathe clubbing," she tells me. "I can't see what's fun about it." Princess Michael ought to be delighted with this princess in training. The Palace is on ITV1 on Mondays at 9pm. Sophie Winkleman Interviews - Page 1 - Page 2 |
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