Love Soup - There Must Be Some Way Out Of Here
Starts Tuesday 27 September on 91Èȱ¬ ONE
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Trudie Styler plays Irene
Trudie Styler didn't have to think too hard when offered the part of Irene in David Renwick's romantic comedy drama, Love Soup.
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"Producer Verity Lambert described Irene as 'quite mad!'" smiles the Birmingham-born actress, admitting the chance to play a character so far from her own smart, focussed self was a big attraction.
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"It's a very colourful part to get my teeth into and I had a huge laugh in creating her. I was encouraged to really let go with Irene – so I did!"
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And not only is Irene – neighbour of Love Soup's hero Gil, played by Michael Landes – a volatile character who erupts very quickly, but she's also letting off steam for the first time in many years, making her outbursts especially volcanic. But she has good reason…
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"We see Irene happily married to begin with," explains Trudie. "It's been a long marriage; her husband, Bob, is now retired from being a bank manager.
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"He's supposedly been going to the gym three times a week for the past three years and then hey presto, during one exchange of conversation he lets loose the fact that he wasn't at the gym on this particular Tuesday when an old boy keeled over and died.
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"So Irene finds him out in a lie that culminates in the fact that he's actually been seeing a prostitute."
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A fuming Irene throws out Bob and all his possessions – including his wheelchair-bound mother!
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"That was a great scene to play," Trudie laughs. "Let's wheel Granny out into the yard and throw her out along with the golf clubs! It was rather terrifying for me and the actress though. I was so worried, but she was such a good sport, really up for it."
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Irene's extreme reaction is sparked, thinks Trudie, by years of inhibition.
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"She's incredibly repressed and has never really spoken up for what she really wants. She's all surface: she dresses in her neat little pastels and sweet accessories, she's always done the right thing and entertained the guests and cooked for her husband and stayed at home – no children, no pets – and is probably bored out of her mind.
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"I would say that their marriage, even though it has been happy, has become sort of ho-hum and a bit boring and she is ready for some excitement in her life."
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While her husband's infidelity wasn't quite what Irene had in mind, she wastes no time in making changes in her life.
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"She starts to incrementally change her look – she starts getting into black, probably for the first time; her skirts get shorter and her dresses get a little bit more bold; her hair changes a little bit; she has makeovers … and turns her sights to much younger men."
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Worryingly for Gil, he's one of those, being half her age, handsome, single – and next door.
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But he's not the only fish in Irene's sea, as she has her own unsuccessful forays onto the dating scene and even makes a play for her dustbin man.
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"You get a sort of sense that her behaviour is trying to get a rise out of her husband," muses Trudie.
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And it's easy to sympathise with that,, after years of supposedly happy marriage suddenly collapsing around her.
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"We hear Irene saying, which is really the theme of Love Soup, 'Did fate plan out one person in our lives that we would be together with for life like a pair of swans, or is it not like that?'
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"She totally believed that she had that with Bob, and then discovers that she didn't."
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It seems, though, that Trudie has it with her own husband, rock star Sting – the pair have been together for almost 25 years and have four children together. But she insists that, though fate might bring people together, it takes more than that to make a relationship.
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"We know that marriages sometimes are very taken for granted and therein lies the poison," she says.
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"I think it's about communication and working on it; not being afraid to share with each other what the truth of a situation is.
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The difficult talks are the most productive, and I don't think Irene ever had a difficult talk with Bob – it's always been very nice, business as usual, so I don't think she had the tools for it when she needed it. That's why she just erupts."
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It's not just in that way that Irene and Trudie differ. Though she and Sting are extremely wealthy and have houses in London, New York, Los Angeles, Tuscany and Wiltshire, there's no danger of Trudie sitting around all day, bored.
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She has a packed life of her own: she has her own production company which lists films such as Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels among its successes; a keen environmentalist, she and Sting set up the Rainforest Foundation in 1989, for which she is a tireless fundraiser; last year she became an ambassador for Unicef; she has begun to move into directing; and of course she originally found fame as an actress back in the late Seventies.
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"I think I've got attention deficit disorder!" she jokes. "Seriously, I have got a lot of energy and I like to be very active, I like to be in the world doing a lot of things – I love my life, I love living, I like to help out when I can.
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"Being a Unicef ambassador, I get to see war-torn areas of the world where people are suffering and I like to think I can play a small part in helping to relieve that by fundraising and getting the word out. And acting to me is a creative pleasure."
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It's one she has recently returned to after keeping it on the back burner for almost 20 years.
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"I did a series last year for ABC in the US called Empire, which has just gone out – it's a big costume drama about the fall of the Roman Empire for American TV.
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"I had a ball doing that because being around actors and acting for me is such lovely, creative, fun work, so I had my appetite whetted for it again.
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"It had all been very secondary to my life as a producer because I was developing films and getting them under way, which I consider my main daytime job – I work with first-time writer/directors, helping put them on the first rung of the ladder.
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"My latest production is A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints with Robert Downey Jr., written and directed by Dito Montiel who I think is going to rise and shine.
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"And I've also got the taste for directing. I've just directed for the first time – my new love is called Wait, a short.
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"Glamour magazine commissioned four women who don't normally direct – there's me, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jenny Bicks who created Sex And The City and Rosario Dawson.
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"Mine's 15 minutes long and it will go out in November in New York.
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"For me, directing was a different creative approach, more collaborative than I imagined it would be – but I liked that.
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"I like having a team around me and to figure out a way to create a story, it was utterly wonderful for me to have that experience – it's quite lonely being a producer, I find. So now I've got a new bug!"
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