Denise Gough: from enfant terrible to queen of the West End

Two years ago Denise Gough was in professional ‘Siberia’ — now she’s the toast of stage and screen. Ahead of her return to the National, she talks to Nick Curtis about her wild past and why she’s glad fame came late
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Kate Davis-MacLeod
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis3 February 2017

Denise Gough enters a Kensington café wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘IMMIGRANT’. ‘Well, I am an immigrant,’ grins the slight, blonde, 36-year-old actress, the seventh of 11 children from a working-class County Clare family. ‘I am a white, English-speaking immigrant who has been allowed to use the NHS here and the jobseekers’ allowance when I needed it, and who got a full scholarship to a drama school. I came here looking for a better life and England allowed me to do that. Now it throws awards at me and puts me in magazines. I am an example of how, if you support immigration, then the immigrant gives back.’

Gough, who became a sensation in People, Places and Things — first at the National Theatre in the autumn of 2015, then again when it transferred to the West End — now sees such vocal political statements as her duty. She has turned up to awards ceremonies in T-shirts calling for equal representation of men and women on stage and screen, bemoans the lack of arts provision for working-class kids, speaks up if the casts or crews she works with are overly white, and says she only just stopped short of writing ‘Repeal the 8th’, the slogan of campaigners for Irish abortion rights, across her face before the ES photoshoot. Above all, if she sees young actors, to whom stardom has come suddenly and early, being arrogant or egotistical, she will tell them: ‘Don’t be an a**hole. My mother and father raised 11 children, my father worked as an electrician, there are people living in tents — so get over yourself, do you know what I mean?’

Stardom did not come early to Gough. For years after drama school she struggled with bit parts, rejection and unemployment, being told she was ‘too pretty’, ‘not pretty enough’, or ‘too scary’. Nobody cared what she thought or felt. Theatre nerds knew she was a potent and protean performer whenever she was allowed to stop waitressing and act. In 2012, she was nominated for Outstanding Newcomer, aged 32, by the Evening Standard for her electrifying, disconcertingly sexual performances in Desire Under the Elms at the Lyric Hammersmith and Our New Girl at the Bush Theatre. But two years after that came her year ‘in Siberia’, when she was totally broke, tried and failed to get a job as a cleaner and ended up looking after her sister’s kids in Hackney.

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Kate Davis-MacLeod

Then she was cast as the self-destructive actress/addict Emma in Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things, an exploration of the lies that substance users tell themselves and others. It was a grandstanding powerhouse of a role that she grabbed with her hands, teeth and nostrils (she snorted a huge line of sugar in the audition). She speaks of Emma as a possessing spirit, and that’s the way it looked from the stalls. She was nominated for Best Actress by the Evening Standard and won the corresponding Olivier and Critics’ Circle Awards. Addicts approached her on the street and told her she had helped them get clean. I saw her last show at the National, a matinee, and she came out at the end like Muhammad Ali after a world title win.

The play opened doors that were previously closed. This year, she not only shares billing with Andrew Garfield and Russell Tovey in the National’s milestone revival of Tony Kushner’s 1980s Aids-crisis drama, Angels in America, she also plays the title character in Conor McPherson’s BBC2 thriller Paula opposite Victoria’s Tom Hughes, and stars alongside Idris Elba, Daniel Mays and Freida Pinto in Guerrilla, a study of the British black power movement by John Ridley, the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave. Forget Siberia: this is the year Gough becomes a star.

‘People, Places and Things changed my life,’ she says, simply. ‘It changed the landscape of my career. That has a huge effect when you have been broke for a really long time and found it difficult to get in the room with people, and suddenly you are really shiny. I am so glad it happened now and not when I was 23.’ Fame at an early age can be ‘infantilising’, she adds, whereas today she is under no illusions.

In BBC2’s Paula
BBC/Sophie Mutevelian

Both those television projects had to fit in around Angels in America, though. Gough regards the theatre as her natural habitat, and if the screen world turns its back because she’s too mouthy (or, by the sexist standards of TV and film, too old) she will retreat there. ‘The National is home,’ she says, and the chance to work with visionary director Marianne Elliott on Kushner’s play there was a no-brainer. First performed in 1993 and subtitled ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’, Kushner’s two-part epic is a sprawlingly inspired survey of gay America in the 1980s, taking on politics, Aids, religion and sexuality.

‘With someone like Donald Trump in the White House, we need to be telling stories about the parts of society that are misrepresented, under-represented or not represented at all,’ Gough says. ‘Angels is a good place to start. It’s bold, brash and completely out there.’ Her character, Harper, is an agoraphobic Mormon housewife addicted to Valium and married to closeted gay lawyer Joe (Russell Tovey). ‘Valium is gonna be a walk in the park after People, Places and Things,’ she grins. ‘F***in’ hell, I’m just gonna waft around.’

Gough was raised a Catholic by teetotal parents — a pragmatic decision, she says, as they couldn’t have afforded to raise their 11 kids and drink as well. She stopped believing in God ‘as soon as I was told I was an evil child by a nun’. There was no theatre within reach of her home but she was struck by the acting bug, as if by lightning, when she ad-libbed while playing Miss Hannigan in a school production of Annie, and heard everyone laugh. She left school at 15 and moved to London to be with a boy, ‘which lasted about three weeks’.

In a previous, brief interview she told me her teenage years were ‘wild’ and ‘messy’. Are we talking drink, drugs — what? ‘Yeah, yeah all of that,’ she says briskly, then grins mischievously. ‘I was wild, a wild teenager, and that is all you are getting: but if this wasn’t going in a magazine we could talk for hours.’ She had rough times. She told another interviewer about begging and picking up fag butts to smoke when she first arrived in London. She tells me now that she often found herself in dangerous situations, ‘hanging out on Coldharbour Lane at three in the morning’.

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Kate Davis-MacLeod

The anger that turned her against the nuns and propelled her to London kept on burning, even when she won a scholarship to the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts. ‘I didn’t feel I fitted in my body and felt really odd all the time,’ she says. ‘I shaved my head, then went through a phase of having dreadlocks. Anything to detract from being looked at like a pretty girl. And it kept me safe, being an angry girl; if I’d arrived in London as a broken ingénue it would have been a very different experience. But something about being young and Irish and bolshie meant that I found people who looked out for me and kept me alive, I guess.’

Denise Gough: in pictures

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Gough’s current poise arguably make the years of rage, rejection and frustration worthwhile. She doesn’t drink at all now, hasn’t smoked for four years and meditates daily. She has a boyfriend, who helped her decompress after People, Places and Things. ‘He’s a lovely man and he’s been brilliant, and that’s all we need to say about him,’ she says. Is he in the business? ‘Yes he is. I am not telling you anything else.’ Was he around during the year in ‘Siberia’? ‘I’m not telling you any more. Shut up. God. No, no, no. It’s too nice, do you know what I mean? There’s enough that gets given. You have to keep some things back.’

She rents a flat in Hackney, and waxes lyrical about its restaurants, especially Okko in Broadway Market. Her sister Angie, who works with organisations that introduce children to the arts for free, lives nearby and Gough is an enthusiastic auntie to her kids. Another sister, Kelly, is also an actress in London. Her huge crew of siblings also includes a dentist, a doctor and a heart surgeon, which gives her perspective on the small-town life she abandoned and the rarefied atmosphere in which she finds herself now.

‘They did good, my parents,’ says Gough. ‘They raised a whole family of very successful people and we’ll look after them. All our medical needs are taken care of in this family. We’re all useful apart from, you know, me. But I am treated better than my heart-surgeon sister and my doctor sister for pretending to do what they do rather than they are for actually doing it. It’s very important, telling stories and all that. But we’re not saving lives.’

‘Angels in America’ opens 4 May. Each week hundreds of £20 tickets will be released for the ‘Angels’ ballot presented by Delta for the following week’s performance (nationaltheatre.org.uk)

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