Born Equal
Anne-Marie Duff plays Michelle
Waiting at King's Cross station, heavily pregnant, bloodied and bruised, proved a profoundly unsettling experience for actor Anne-Marie Duff. She was filming a scene for Dominic Savage's Born Equal in which her character, Michelle, has fled her abusive husband and arrived in London, where she knows no one and has nowhere to go. But, with the drama's naturalistic style of filming and skeleton crew, many of the commuters streaming past her would not have known that.
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"It was fascinating and sad, really. Someone on the station staff came to ask if I was alright but that was it – no one else stopped," she says.
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"You think about it and you swear to yourself that you'd stop if you ever saw a young woman in that state. It was strange, it was like putting the world under a microscope."
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In a sense, that is exactly what Savage's latest film sets out to do, exposing as it does the vast social inequalities that exist in cities across Britain where the fabulously wealthy and those with nothing live side by side.
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"As an actor, you don't often get the opportunity to tell stories that have such pertinence," says Duff (35), who describes her decision to join the project as a "no-brainer".
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"It's a film that's really about something and that was important to me. But what's beautiful about it is that, although their world is very difficult, all of the characters are, in essence, good people – it's just their circumstances or their life experiences that have made things hard for them."
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Nevertheless, the actor, best known for her roles in Channel 4's Shameless and 91Èȱ¬ One's lavish period drama The Virgin Queen, says that playing Michelle was one of the most emotionally draining experiences of her life.
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"When Michelle flees her husband, she leaves her whole life behind and it's almost like dealing with a bereavement. Walking away from a part of yourself and leaving all your goods and chattels … you don't know who you are, especially with a child," she says.
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While researching the role, Duff contacted Women's Aid, a charity that runs refuges around the country that offer a lifeline to women and children who have experienced domestic abuse.
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"I went to a refuge and the women there were exceptionally helpful. I was very privileged to hear their stories," says the actor.
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"We talked about the nitty-gritty of what it's like to be in a relationship that is physically and emotionally violent, and what that does to you. It was almost Kafkaesque. You talk to these women and they all have very similar stories – it's like they can hold up a mirror to each other's experiences. It was very helpful for me."
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She soon realised that all of the women she met had "eventually come to the end of something".
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"It was about going as far down as you can go and suddenly, I guess, a very primal urge kicks in to save your life or the life of your child."
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For Duff, who lives in London, where the film was shot, one of the most heart-wrenching scenes is when Michelle finds herself alone with her daughter, Danielle (Gemma Barrett), for the first time in a temporary B&B for the homeless and dispossessed.
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"Just before that scene, I had been talking to a real housing officer, a fantastic woman, and some of the statistics and facts she told me were absolutely terrifying.
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"I asked how long it would take for someone like Michelle to get out of the hostel, to get their own place. I was thinking, she's pregnant and she has a child, so it can't be that long.
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"And she said: 'Well, you're looking at about three and a half years.'
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"It was a shock. You think to yourself, we're all only a couple of steps away from that. If you lost your family, if you went off the rails, if you became ill… It really doesn't take a lot for your imagination to make the leap."
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Duff, who was born in London to Irish parents and grew up in Middlesex, was a teenage bookworm who was encouraged to join her local youth theatre to help conquer her shyness.
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She found she loved acting and, after leaving school, trained at London's Drama Centre.
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Her first professional job was the lead role in Uncle Silas at the National Theatre and she has rarely been out of work since.
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She has notched up accolades on the stage in King Lear, Collected Stories opposite Dame Helen Mirren and Peter Gill's Days Of Wine And Roses, and on screen in films including Sinners and The Magdalene Sisters, as well as TV's Charles II, Shameless and The Virgin Queen.
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Working without a script for Born Equal was, however, a new challenge for Duff.
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She describes her first improvised scenes with Robert Carlyle (who plays Robert, a man Michelle meets in the hostel) as "both terrifying and empowering".
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"I didn't know Robert and Dominic made a point of us not meeting before the filming, so we didn't have any shared preconceptions. So we got to know each other slowly, which was quite good, really.
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"But it was weird on the very first day of filming because all we had to do was walk past each other in the corridor. There was all this fuss about not seeing each other and then there you were – it was a bit of an anticlimax!" she laughs.
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"It was a good way to work, though. You have to be very on your toes and Robert was lovely to work with.
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"In some ways, it was more frightening improvising with Gemma [Barrett], who was playing my daughter and is only six.
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"I found it very hard getting upset or being a mess in front of her, because I was always terrified of crossing some line. But, thankfully, she's very sound and comes from a really great family, so it wasn't complicated for her – she knew we were pretending."
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Duff believes that the relationship that develops between Michelle and Robert reveals a great deal about the kind of people they are.
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"You know for Michelle that it's a fantasy, really – she's clinging to a life raft. I think, for both of them, it's more a sense of just trying to find somebody," she says.
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"I also think that these hostels can be strange little microcosms. They suddenly become your whole world and Mother Nature does weird things in situations like that.
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"You know, it happens when you work in offices or on film sets, too: you might start a job not being very attracted to people but, at the end of it, you find you're very attracted to someone you wouldn't normally be..."
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Coincidentally, Duff met her partner, Scots actor James McAvoy, on a film set – on the hit series Shameless, in which they played young lovers Fiona and Steve.
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The pair are famously tight-lipped about their relationship but, having just played a woman who is eight months pregnant, Duff does reveal that she is currently feeling "even more broody than ever".
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"I had to wear all this padding and it was great – it's lovely having a belly. You get to practise being pregnant!" she laughs.
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"It looked so good, as well. The paramedic we had on set one day told me I should be sitting down and asked how long I had to go, and even the midwives were impressed when we were filming in the maternity ward. Yep, the belly was a big hit all round!"
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