The actress has moved on from Downton fame – taking on a fourth-wall-busting Ibsen adaptation, and blowing the whistle on industry sexism
‘The problem with theatre,” says Jessica Brown Findlay, “is that sometimes it can feel like this exclusive club for which you need a PhD in order to become a member.” By way of explanation, the actress – who found fame as the forward-thinking socialite Lady Sybil Crawley in Downton Abbey – tells me about her recent slip during rehearsals for Thomas Ostermeier’s fourth-wall-busting adaptation of An Enemy of the People, in which she’s playing a doctor’s wife.
“There’s a bit of audience participation in the show – it’s quite a radical reworking – and I started talking about the fifth wall,” she says, unabashed. “Everyone looked at me, and someone said, ‘Er, what’s that then… the ceiling?!’”
Yet if her lack of a drama-school education has left her a little shaky on theatrical jargon, there’s no sign that it’s impeded her career. In October 2012, more than 11 million people watched her Lady Sibyl die from childbirth-related complications halfway through Downton’s third series. Now 34, Brown Findlay has worked more or less non-stop ever since, including a trio of plays with the visionary director Robert Icke, among them his 2017 Hamlet, for which she received rave reviews as a deranged Ophelia opposite Andrew Scott’s introspective Danish prince.
But the actress, who won a whole new fanbase in Paramount’s 2022 romcom The Flatshare, still sees herself as an outsider. “For years as an actor I felt, ‘Oh, I’m not really allowed to do theatre,’” she says. “I was always told, ‘It’s not for you… you need more experience before you can do that.’ And if I’ve felt like that, imagine how ordinary people feel about going to see a play?” She says audiences have no reason to fear the new production of An Enemy of the People, Ibsen’s whistleblower drama about a doctor who exposes a water-contamination scandal in a local spa, only to face opprobrium for ruining the town’s reputation. For one thing, the lead role will be played by Matt Smith, the star of Doctor Who and The Crown. For another, Ostermeier’s staging – conceived for the Berlin Schaubühne and already a proven hit across Europe – kicks the play firmly into the 21st century, with a glam-rock soundtrack and a pivotal new town hall scene, in which the doctor, having been persecuted for telling the truth, unleashes a tirade against the ills of modern society, to which the audience is invited to contribute.
In 2014, when the production last played in London, the public’s grievances included the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron. What does the actress expect today’s West End audiences to rail against? “I’ve no idea,” she says. “Perhaps everyone will be terribly British and not say anything at all.”
In person, Brown Findlay fizzes like a Roman candle. She gesticulates wildly as she talks, and wears her feelings close to the surface. “I’m definitely the sort of person who cries easily,” she says, cheerfully. Yet she also has a steely focus. Before she accepted the role of Sybil, she refused to commit to more than three years, to avoid becoming typecast – although, she admits, the show continues to exert a gravitational pull: “I still get texts from friends saying, ‘OMG, I just watched you die online!’”
She followed Lady Sybil with hugely varied parts: a self-absorbed young stepmother in the BBC’s The Outcast; for Icke, Oresteia, Hamlet and Uncle Vanya; a courtesan in ITV’s acclaimed 2017 period drama Harlots; Lenina in the 2020 adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. She has, I suggest, a strong instinct for reinvention: after all, she trained as a ballerina in her teens and imagined she’d have a career as a dancer until a botched operation terminated that dream when she was 19.
“If you are a woman, people tend to think, ‘Oh, this is the height or the limit of you or the shape of you,’” she says. “ ‘I can see what you are good for, but you can’t go here, or there.’ So I’ve tried to take parts that are as far removed from people’s perception of me as possible.”She didn’t want anyone thinking, after seeing her in Downton Abbey, that all she was good for was English rose in a floppy hat. Although, for a while, they did. When, for instance, Icke cast her in his 2016 Uncle Vanya, some critics suggested she was too pretty to play Sonya – a hard-working, modest-looking, unhappy young woman who nurses an unrequited love.
“Obviously, this is not a sob story,” Brown Findlay says with an embarrassed laugh. “But when you are a young woman yourself, and you know that there is much more to you than the fact that parts of your face happen to be symmetrical, it’s irritating to be told you can’t explore a character who feels alone or unloved or unattractive or trapped. Those are all things that have nothing to do with how a person might look.”
These days, Brown Findlay, who grew up in Berkshire, lives in east London with her husband, the actor Ziggy Heath, and their one-year-old twin sons. Her next project is Playing Nice, a baby-swap drama on ITV, in which she stars opposite Happy Valley’s James Norton. “Fortunately, our babies are the spitting image of each other, so that was not something I needed to worry about,” she says with a grin.
Becoming a mother has, she believes, helped her maintain a healthy distance from her professional self-image. “I can think, ‘Yes, I’ll put on a pink dress on the red carpet at eight months pregnant’” – as she did for the Venice Film Festival in 2022 – “because I know, two days later, my life will look very different.”
She fell into acting almost by accident, only deciding to pursue it as a career while studying fine art at Central St Martin’s. “Because I’ve weaved my way through various art forms, it means I put fewer of my eggs in that basket. I don’t think of my career – God, what a ridiculous word; I hate how I can sound in interviews sometimes! – as something that particularly defines me.”
And yet, under financial pressure to fill seats, serious West End plays, such as An Enemy of the People, increasingly feel the need to cast actors with a celebrity profile, and Brown Findlay is all too aware “that to be in rehearsal rooms such as this one, where amazing work is happening, you need to be someone who people are talking about. So it’s very conflicting.”
Downton Abbey was one of her very first jobs and, she says, “When you are on everyone’s telly every Sunday, it can catapult you into the spotlight very quickly.” Have she and Smith compared notes on how they dealt with that sudden level of living-room fame? “I don’t think we are in the same orbit when it comes to that,” she replies, laughing. “We’ll probably see the difference when we open – Matt will be spending hours at the stage door after the show, while the rest of us will be down the pub.”
Celebrity brings with it a darker side: in 2014, Brown Findlay was one of several well-known actresses, including Jennifer Lawrence, to fall victim to a data hack that saw private photographs and videos leaked onto the internet. She doesn’t want to talk about that today – “I feel I’ve done that quite a bit, and it ends up defining things,” she says apologetically – but she is keen to say how much easier it now feels to speak out about things that would previously have been taboo.
“When I was younger, I was warned against using the word ‘feminist’ during interviews, because people thought it was too political,” she says. She has also had to resist the pressure to wear more revealing outfits. “I’ve had people in the industry say, ‘You owe us a “side boob”. You signed on with one in the contract; we want to see it.’ Now, it feels easier to kick back.” There was a time, she says, when she would doubt her right to blow the whistle if “someone is being inappropriate or exploitative. Will I get fired if I speak up? Will I get labelled ‘difficult’? “It wasn’t that women were waiting for permission to say these things, because we f—ing weren’t. But now, if someone is manipulative at work, I’ll say something. And I am definitely trying to no longer be the sort of person who says ‘sorry’ for absolutely no reason the second she walks into a room.”