How Outrageous Star Bessie Carter Gave the Bright Young Things a Modern Spark
They were among some of the first celebrities, really, on all the magazine covers and in the gossip pages that talked about what they wore and who they were at parties with. So I had a lot of the facts, and also, the personal insight. That was so useful in finding her voice and her tone with her sisters. We know their nicknames for each other!
And you had Nancy's books. We see her writing in the series, and how one book in particular fractures the sisters' relationships.
Bizarrely, I narrated Pursuit of Love for Audible five years before. I tried to listen back to the audiobook but I could not do it. That's torture, hearing yourself. The scripts are brilliant, though. Historically, what happened, happened. But [screenwriter] Sarah Williams humanizes the sisters. A great privilege for me was Sarah's great writing and making Nancy the narrator. I get to articulate that wonderful storytelling. But it is challenging. I had a newfound respect for Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Fleabag.
We had the amazing costume, makeup, and hair department…and then you have to let it all go and be truthful to the moment. I don't have to act exactly 1931. The clothes do that, the house we're in does that. I needed to be truthful to the Nancy I was making. I like that moment of letting all of that go and just knowing and trusting that it's in your body and your spirit.
We made a decision quite early on not to speak how the sisters spoke—they all had this very clipped, RP voice. If we did that, we'd lose the audience. That would make it about something else. Yes, they were privileged, they struggled through the crash. But what was most important was establishing them as a family. We did some dialect coaching so that we all had a similar voice, but made sure that we didn't clip it up too much for that upper-class, inaccessible sound.
Did you find yourself relating to her?
I feel like I think we're similar in little ways. I could understand her confidence and her vulnerability—I always think there's a thin line between confidence and insecurity, and you get that a lot with actors—and I like how funny she is. They all had a wicked sense of humor and enjoyed winding each other up. I think that comes out even more with how it's shot—it feels punky, energetic, youthful, bubbly. The score is done by a 26-year-old woman from LA, too—it has this energy.
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