As a fine interpreter of Shakespeare, Morfydd Clark, a spirited Welsh woman with a nice line in dry humour, already has experience with such unlucky ladies as poor old Juliet Capulet and the doomed Cordelia, from King Lear. Having died many times on stage, she just wishes the playwright’s saddest heroines could have formed some sort of support group.
“Sometimes I wish they could all hang out,” she says with a laugh. “With all of them there’s a sense that they make bold choices and are then bulldozed and killed. Cordelia is incredibly brave and direct. Juliet is the same.
“What fascinates me about Shakespeare is how relevant he still is. The rules and laws that shaped the world he wrote about still surround us. You can’t half-arse Shakespeare. In some modern writing, understatement works, but Shakespeare demands sincerity and deliberateness. Every word matters.”
The versatile, inventive actor, who came to international prominence as an unhinged nurse in Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, a horror film that haunted the pandemic year, is now playing Ophelia opposite Riz Ahmed’s prevaricating worrier in the latest big-screen adaptation of Hamlet.
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The role has drawn the best from some of the greats: Judi Dench in her professional debut, Jean Simmons opposite Laurence Olivier in the latter’s famous 1948 film and, according to 18th-century accounts, Clark’s fellow Welsh woman Sarah Siddons.
Actors have plucked at the character’s feminist undercurrents in more recent years. Clark is also interested in Ophelia’s inability to assert herself.
“She’s obviously in a world where the laws aren’t explicitly against her making her own choices,” she says. “So it was about figuring out why, despite having more agency, she’s still trapped and, ultimately, destroyed by the imagined rules put on her by the men around her.
“There’s something tragic about the way she maintains the walls of her own prison. That’s what I find extra sad, because I think we’ve all, at times, stayed stuck behind imaginary lines we’ve drawn in front of ourselves.”
Clark reluctantly admits that Ophelia, daughter of the windy Polonius and potential love interest of the procrastinating Hamlet, hangs on male validation.
“I got quite obsessed with the tragedy of the ‘pick me’ girl,” Clark says. “She spends her life trying to make sure all the men around her are happy and pleased with her. I think people are much more interested in that when you’re in your 20s. She’s also at this moment of fading relevance to them.”
For all that, Clark has great sympathy for a character who, in the original text, ends up mad and then drowned, dragged beneath the water by “her garments, heavy with their drink”.
She has made a career out of seeming slightly untethered from the dreary world that you and I inhabit. Whether playing a religious maniac in Saint Maud or the immortal elfish Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – perhaps the most expensive television series ever made – she brings to her performances an uncanny, otherworldly intensity that feels less like affectation than genuine magic.
Clark is no less enchanting in person. She really might be a faerie queen. It’s a quality that has made her one of the most distinctive actors of her generation, even as she remains faintly bemused by the scale of her rising success.
Born in Sweden to a “Northern Irish-Glaswegian” father and a Welsh mother, she grew up around the Vale of Glamorgan in a family that treated imagination as a form of spiritual sustenance.
She struggled at school, living with ADHD and chafing against structure, but found refuge in stories. Shakespeare and JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth were favourites.
“I was the type of child that, if I’d been allowed to, I’d sit in front of the TV all day,” she says. “I was very lucky that I was encouraged, and I was born in the early years of audiobooks.”
That sense of imaginative flight has never left Clark. At 16 she left school and trained with the National Youth Theatre of Wales before attending Drama Centre London, where the intense, deadline-driven environment and sometimes stylised productions suited her far better than a conventional education had.
“I’m very dyslexic, and Welsh is very phonetic,” she says. “So I learned to read and write in Welsh first. When I started learning English, around eight, I really struggled. I found Shakespeare as a teenager, and found it was hard. But everyone found it hard, so I didn’t feel ashamed. There was a strange comfort in that.”
Growing up speaking two languages was hugely significant.
“I feel incredibly lucky to have been brought up bilingual,” she says. “It opens different parts of your mind. There’s a different mode in Welsh than in English.”
And, of course, she was born in Sweden. That’s a whole other cultural influence.
“I didn’t pick up the language, but I grew up on Astrid Lindgren,” she says of the Pippi Longstocking creator. “She writes children with huge agency, which really shaped me.”
Clark’s early career was steady rather than meteoric, shaped by stage work and supporting roles on television. Then came Saint Maud and a host of awards nominations, one of which converted into a Bafta Cymru, or Welsh Bafta. Her chilling performance in Glass’s film cemented her reputation for playing women who are anxious, obsessive, unsettling or all three. She credits this remarkable range to her Celtic heritage.
“My dad grew up with folk songs – very tragic bedtime songs – so storytelling was always there, though not performance-focused,” she says. “My grandmother had opera scholarships but became a farmer’s wife and then became the queen of amateur dramatics. I think that’s where it all comes from – plus going to a Welsh-language school where creativity was really encouraged.”
Now comes Aneil Karia’s powerful, modern-day take on Hamlet (which, potentially confusingly, premiered alongside Hamnet at Telluride Film Festival). It’s a gritty, rough-hewn piece that confirms Clark’s belief in Shakespeare’s continuing relevance.
“It makes you examine the world you live in,” she says. “Hamlet, in particular, is about blood, money and the suffering of many to make a few people very wealthy. That felt painfully relevant.”
Hamlet is in cinemas from Friday, February 6th
