The Passion
Penelope Wilton plays Mary, mother of Jesus
An accomplished and versatile actress, Penelope Wilton has played a seemingly endless range of roles. It has just been announced that she has been nominated for the RTS Best Actress Award for her role in the 91Èȱ¬ One thriller Five Days.
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Yet she confesses she thought long and hard about taking on the role of Mary, mother of Jesus, in The Passion.
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"It is not something you take on just like that," she explains. "When you play someone who is an iconic figure you can't go into it lightly. You know you are going to disappoint 99.9% of people because everyone has their own view of Mary mother of Jesus."
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It was the quality of Frank Deasy's scripts that finally persuaded her to join the cast in Morocco.
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"I thought they were marvellous," she says. "He has made it very alive, very immediate. He has made it feel very new again. It's a story that everyone knows but it has been reinvented."
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Historically speaking, Mary is a blank canvas, Wilton says. "Hardly anything is written about her. In the Gospels she is there for the birth of Jesus and then again for the crucifixion," she explains.
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"Because there is so little written about her she has been used by the church as a figurehead of everything bountiful, loving and accepting. But really she is a mysterious character, enigmatic."
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Liberated by this as she prepared to take on the role, Penelope quickly rejected any idea of playing her in a saintly way.
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"You can't go wafting around in a blue robe looking holy," she says.
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Instead, she drew on the one thing that she knew she would have had in common with Mary as she watches her son come face to face with his destiny on the cross at Golgotha.
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"I could only see it from the point of view that she is a real mother," she says. "Having my own experience of being a mother I drew on that.
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"Nothing terrible, thank God, has happened to my children, but you have an understanding of the way a mother would want to defend her child in a situation like this. The feeling of inadequacy you have when you know there is nothing you can do to change the situation. And then the powerlessness when he is taken away and is tortured."
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As a result, Wilton's Mary is an angrier, more forceful personality. "She's a feisty woman who fights back when she sees her son being tortured."
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Penelope struck up a strong working relationship with Joseph Mawle, playing Jesus. "He did an admirable job," she says. "He is a very fine actor."
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The pair played two key scenes together, one in which Mary tries to persuade him to follow a different path rather than confronting the authorities, the other at Golgotha, where she sees him on the cross.
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"We talked a bit. He had a lot to think about. But you can talk too much and then there is no energy when you get to the set. Sometimes it's best left unsaid," she says.
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She admits she found the scenes at Golgotha extremely difficult to play. "It was harrowing," she says. "You can't look at people being crucified. Even if you know it is just pretend."
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She believes the realism of the drama will move audiences just as deeply when The Passion is broadcast over Easter. What conclusions they draw, however, will be up to the individual viewer.
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"It is one of the most well-known stories ever. The ambiguous quality is that you are able to draw from it what you want. People will either see it as a great story or that he was indeed the son of God," says Penelope.
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"Rightly, everyone will have their own view."
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