Gwendoline Christie on making her first family film and still loving Brienne

It didn’t hurt that the film’s director, Phil Hawkins, became known for his 2019 short Star Wars: Origins, an extremely well received slice of fan fiction based around George Lucas's sci-fi saga.

"Because Phil had made a Star Wars fan film that was exceptionally good – it looks like a Star Wars movie, it really does – that interested me, because I’m always interested in the outsiders. The people that can’t get a break…and the people that want to do more." Immediately, Christie, 45, felt a kinship with Hawkins. "Phil and I are fans. I am a fan. I’ll never stop feeling that way."

In the film, Christie plays Aura, a recluse living in the woods who ultimately befriends Robin (Darcey Ewart) to help save her home. Such is the conceit, the film shifts into fantasy when the kids' imaginations take hold, as they envisage their woodland playground – known as The Kingdom – like a medieval world. It means that when they see the hermit Aura, she appears to them like a witch – which accounts for why the 6ft 3in-tall Christie is currently sitting in her costume sporting a long grey wig.

One of the real thrills for Christie was getting the chance to work with actress Naomie Harris, known for her role as Moneypenny in the recent James Bond movies, who plays the villainous Clipboard. "I really wanted to work with Naomie Harris… I’ve always thought she’s great in the Bond films, but she’s so spectacular in Moonlight [which] she was Oscar nominated [for] and I just think she’s a fantastic actor. You take these opportunities when they come up."

For the actress, the film’s environmental message also played strongly to her. "I’ve found that I’ve started to feel a greater attachment to home, to where I live. And, of course, as everybody has an increased awareness of our planet, of climate crisis, I start to find that I’m more aware of those factors, and I care more about them. And so I’ve come into contact with more people that are very attached to the land, and where they grew up, where they live now, what their lives are dedicated to. So there’s been a really wide range of sources for this character."

Christie drew from drama, like Alan Bennett’s play The Lady in the Van, which played on his relationship with an elderly woman who lived in a rusty van on his doorstep for 15 years.

But she also took inspiration from Swampy, the British environmental campaigner, and looked back at the 1997 Glastonbury music festival, the infamous "year of the mud", as she puts it. "I looked at a lot of reportage photography from Glastonbury and protesters around Stonehenge, Greenham Common, and as much documentary footage as I could find."

While Christie has never made a full-on family film before, she’s always ploughed her own furrow. Shows like The Sandman, in which she played Lucifer, Jane Campion’s mystery Top of the Lake, and the Tim Burton-directed Wednesday or arthouse films like Peter Strickland’s quirky In Fabric and Flux Gourmet can be found nestling on her CV. "I’ll do things that speak to me. And when something speaks to you, you can really go right down the rabbit hole. When things align with what you’ve been thinking about, what you’re feeling, what you’re reading about in the news...it’s interesting."

Born in Worthing, West Sussex, Christie trained as a gymnast as a child, but after a spinal injury, she switched to acting. "I started acting at school when I was 11, as soon as I had the opportunity. I did dance, and then at 11, I started acting. I wanted to be an actor. That’s what I wanted to do," she says. "I really wanted to go to stage school and all those things, but I wasn’t allowed to. And in retrospect, I’m very pleased that I’ve had the unconventional path that I’ve had, because I’m interested in so many different kinds of art."

After attending Varndean College in Brighton and Hove, Christie graduated from Drama Centre London in 2005. "It was a classical training with a Method approach. And it was quite radical, really, for its time. And the way in which I was trained was to be an artist. It was amazingly lacking in cynicism. And what that meant was that you were fully invested in an artistic process, but you didn’t really have any idea whatsoever of the commercial world. That was totally an anathema. It’s where I first came across the idea of always be in service of an idea larger than yourself."

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Christie began working in theatre following her time at Drama Centre London. "As someone that has always felt like an outsider… I never felt like an insider when I worked in the theatre. I do find that the screen community is more of my place, but I love doing live work. I really, really do." She also began working with artists too, like photographer Polly Borland, who made Christie the subject of a series of photographs entitled Bunny.

More recently, she collaborated with Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Martin. "To work with people who are artists that haven’t necessarily directed before, and to communicate in a different way, to bring different sensations, to bring my own idea of narrative, to really take on board someone’s idea of narrative who isn’t necessarily a dramaturge…those things are really fuelling to me. To work with different photographers, to work with different designers…it all feeds me."

Christie already has designs on going behind the camera. "I want to direct a film. And there’s all sorts of things that I’m talking about with people at the moment. I’m really taking my time, which is extraordinarily dull and frustrating for everybody, including me, but I want it to be good, and that’s absolutely what I want to do, because I’ve worked so long in image-making and storytelling, and I’ve acted for most of my life, I realise now that I really want to take those skills into a different place."

While it was Game of Thrones that propelled her into the mainstream when she was cast in 2011, reflecting on the show, Christie calls it "unlike anything else" she’d ever experienced. But how was it being in the eye of the storm? "I didn’t pay the most attention to it because I was very, very invested in my character. I had a wonderful character to play that I loved so much and was so rich and there was so much to explore. I love the writing. I love the character as created by George RR Martin. I love the adaptation by [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]. I thought that was really brilliant."

Her love for the character of Brienne of Tarth was particularly strong. "The character fed me for all of those years. The character never once stopped feeding me, and I never stopped working on the character right to the very end, even with things that people were surprised by, like when Brienne smiled when she was knighted. That made complete sense to me that she hadn’t really smiled. This is the time she smiled, because she got the thing she wanted in a very intimate and special way."

Recently, Christie signed on to feature in the second season of Apple TV’s much-praised surreal office drama Severance. But what about Thrones? Does she feel confident that Martin will complete The Winds of Winter, his long-gestating sixth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series that inspired the series? The last novel, A Dance With Dragons, came out 13 years ago, in 2011. "I have every confidence that he will. I hope so. I have great love for George, and he’s been very good to me over the years. He’s wonderful." How’s that for an endorsement?

Robin and the Hoods is on Sky Cinema from Friday 26th July.

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