Elliott Forrest: (voiceover short P&P scene) She's best known to American audiences as Elizabeth in A&E's hugely successful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for which Jennifer Ehle went on to win a British Emmy. Now making her Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Thing, she's been nominated for a Tony Award. Before we speak with her, let's take a look at this highly acclaimed play.
Scene from the play:
Henry and Annie on the couch.
Annie: Kiss me.
Henry: For Christ's sake.
Annie: A quick one on the carpet then.
Henry: You are crackers.
Annie: I am not interested in your mind.
Henry: Yes you are.
Annie: No I'm not. I've lied to you. I hate Sundays.
Henry: I'd thought I'd cheer you up with an obscene phone call, but Max got to it first so I improvised.
Annie: I might have come around anyway. Hello Henry, Charlotte, just passing, long time no see.
Henry: That would have been pushing it.
Annie (laughs): I'm in a mood to push it. Let's go, while they're chopping turnips.
Henry: You are crackers.
Annie: We'll go, and it will be done. Max will suffer. Charlotte will make you suffer and get custody. You'll see Debbie on Sundays and in three years she'll be at university and won't give a damn either way.
Henry: It's not just Debbie.
Annie: No, you want to give it time. Time to go wrong, change, spoil, then you'll know it wasn't the real thing.
Henry: I don't steal other men's wives.
Annie: Sod you!
Henry: You know what I mean.
Annie: Yes, you mean you love me, but you don't want it to get around, me and the Walker Brothers. Well, sod you.
End of scene.
Eliott: Jennifer Ehle, thank you so much for coming here.
Jennifer: Thank you for having me.
E: You know you have a lot of fans here since Pride and Prejudice was on this network and did so successfully here.
J: That's wonderful.
E: We'll talk about that in a little bit, but let's talk about The Real Thing first. You're on Broadway right now. This is the first time you've been on Broadway?
J: Yes, my debut.
E: Your debut. What's that like stepping out there the first day, the first time on a Broadway stage?
J: I didn't really think of it like that. I guess I should have. I love this play. This is the third theater we've done it in and the one big theater I liked best. We did it in another big theater in London which I did not like so much, so I was just so relieved to be in that space. It's lovely, the Barrymore, and it's been... it didn't really hit me that I was on Broadway until after we opened.
E: (laughs) Surprise. It seems so timeless. It seems so current, this play, The Real Thing, but it's actually 18 years old.
J: Yes.
E: Were there any changes made in this script?
J: Not really. Tom took out a couple of jokes that he thought were guilding the lily and took out a reference to a VCR, a video recorder that had, I guess they'd just come out around the time in the early 80's.
E: Cuz I'd read that Stoppard had said that he doesn't really go into rehearsal in which he doesn't make some changes, so I was curious how changes he actually made. Not many then.
J: No.
E: Just a few things.
E: And was he around, was Stoppard around during the rehearsal period?
J: He was.
E: Tell me about working with him.
J: Well, he didn't say much. He was there at the beginning of the 3 times we've rehearsed over the last year. He was always there for the first sections of the rehearsals. Yeah, he didn't say much really.
E: What do you want us to know about the story if people don't know this play at all? Is there a way you can describe it a little bit?
J: No, it's just a play about love and language and um, I don't really know how to describe it without giving it away.
E: In typical Stoppard style, a lot of love and language.
J: A lot of love and language.
E: Like Shakespeare in Love, which he also wrote, or Arcadia, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it's usually about words. He likes to play with words. I asked you earlier about this. I don't know if we found this out. I looked it up. I told you I could not find the answer to it. Meretricious. This is the great thing about a Stoppard play. You sort of come with a dictionary to try to figure out what the heck he's talking about. What does the word mean again?
J: I think meretricious have something to do with harlot in Latin, but um...
E: We'll have to look it up again.
J (laughs): I don't need to know because my character wouldn't know.
E: Do you like doing plays about plays, about actors, about acting?
J: As a genre? It just depends on the play really. Not particularly, but not particularly not either. I just love this play. I've loved since I was fourteen when I first saw it and I learned sections of it when I was fourteen and I've just been passionate about it ever since.
E: Since it about a playwright obviously by a playwright, how much is it autobiographical and how much is whimsy?
J: I don't know. I don't think that much of Henry the playwright character is actually Tom. I don't see how it could. It certainly couldn't be Tom now and it even couldn't be Tom at the time when he wrote it. Because it is a character examined from every angle and all the characters pointing out flaws that are so deep within the playwright that it couldn't possibly just be a self-portrait at the time that it was written. Who knows, maybe it was Tom ten years before he wrote it and he had the self-knowledge to then look at it that way. But I think he just decided to use the world of theater to tell a story of language and love and I think it just happens to be a playwright.
E: Do you relish those moments? I mean this is a great comedy, and you know when you deliver the next line let's say, the audience is going to go crazy. Or are you totally into the character and you're not aware of it? Or are you aware that this is really going to get a great reaction?
J: I find that if I think ahead about anything before I do it, it will fall flat, completely flat so I try not think about it and I certainly never try to think, 'Oh this will you know, they'll like this or this will get them'. So it's a strange mixture of trying to know the timing to do something, and then completely forget it, and not sort of stay so immersed in the character because you can't. I think in theater if you're not aware of the audience, you are acting in a bubble and it's not. They are part of the experience.
E: Do you have to wait for them in certain instances? You certainly have to be cued into them at some point.
J: Yeah.
E: Talk to me about the cast a little bit. This is a little bit of an unusual arrangement. It's very rare that an entire British cast can come over to the United States and set up shop on a Broadway stage. You had to make some special arrangements.
J: Well, I'm not British, so it's not an entirely British cast.
E: The rest of the British cast.
J: (smiling) The other six.
E: You were born in North Carolina, right?
J: Yes.
E: But an original British cast who had done this in London.
J: I'm not sure how it worked, They had done an exchange of some kind, I think and Side Man has gone over to the West End. I don't know what all went on because -
E: They make some trades.
J: I guess. They didn't need to for me so I never knew what was going on.
E: One American and the rest of them.
J: Um
E: What is the real thing?
J: Oh gosh, I don't know. Haven't a clue.
E: Really? Not a guess.
J: Um, no, no, I think in the play it puts forward all the time, what could the real thing be? Is it the first infatuation? Is it just can't get enough of each other? Is it wrapped up in each other? Is it great sex? Is it somebody who you think could be possibility that you don't follow up? Is it what happens years down the line when the first flush of lust is gone? It tries to examine all those things.
E: Tonight is the Tony Awards, they'll be given out. You've been nominated for a Tony for best actress for this play as has you mother.
J: (big smile) Yes.
E: Rosemary Harris. Did you ever dream that you'd both be nominated in the same year and be up against each other? How unusual is this?
J: No, no, I've never had that arrogance. No.
E: What happened when you got the phone call? Who called you to tell you that you were nominated?
J: Brian, our lovely publicist for The Real Thing called and left a message saying that I'd been nominated, and I didn't know that anybody else had.
E: You didn't know the roster at that point.
J: No, I didn't know anybody so I called Stephen Dillane and congratulated him without actually knowing he'd been nominated, but I assumed he would have been and he had been.
E: He plays the lead.
J: He does, in The Real Thing. And then I called my mother and spoke to her sister because she was still asleep. I said, "Please wake her up and tell her, for goodness sakes."
E: And is that when you found out that she was nominated?
J: I think I'd found out by then. I must have called somebody and said, "Who else?"
E: Were you stunned when you found out that you both were nominated?
J: I was stunned when I found I was. I wasn't stunned when I found out she was. I was completely gobsmacked, yeah, about myself.
E: You mentioned earlier that you're an American. Your father is an American, but your mother is British.
J: Yes.
E: Did you always want to act? Did you always want to follow your mother in this? Your father is a writer; did you ever think you would go in that direction?
J: Yes, that's all I wanted to do is to write.
E: Really?
J: Yeah, I'm not quite sure how I ended up doing this, but it's going okay, so I'm going to stick with it for the moment.
E: And do you dabble with the writing as well at the same time?
J: I do a bit, yeah.
E: Let's talk a little bit about Pride and Prejudice if we can. It was on this network. As you know, it was a huge deal. At the time, it was the most watched show on A&E.
J: Wow.
E: Was that surprising to you that it was so well received in the United States?
J: I was unaware that it was actually well received anywhere. I was at the Royal Shakespeare Company doing three plays for an extremely long time. I was not aware of the success that it achieved in England until much later and I wasn't aware of the success it achieved in America until way after the fact. I did a bit of a Rip Van Winkle really. I just woke up a couple of years later and realized that we'd made a hit.
E: You had made a hit. You have a lot of fans.
J: (smiling) Apparently, yeah.
E: People love it and watch it when it's played again, buy the video and that sort of thing. And people are emailing me about you being here because of Pride and Prejudice.
J: That's amazing.
E: Do you like corset and bustle roles?
J: I don't know. I don't think you can define them like that. There aren't any other Elizabeth Bennet's, there's just not. If every part that involved a bonnet were Elizabeth Bennet then I would staple a bonnet to my scalp, but they just aren't. She's one of the best female parts ever written.
E: And it started a whole Jane Austen thing.
J: Well, that all actually happened at the same time. I think Jane's card came up at the same time. They were making Persuasion, which I thought was just wonderful. At the same time, they were doing Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility was already in the works. I think her number just came up.
E: It was a pretty big mini-series. I'm curious what you remember from the shoot? How long was the shoot?
J: Five months.
E: That's a long time to commit to that kind of character and work and being in the country.
J: Um (nods)
E: Was it fun for you?
J: I was very tired. I loved pretending to be her. That you sort of you know, but when you're actually filming you get to about act five minutes a day.
E: And you wait the rest of the time.
J: But they were a fantastic five minutes every day.
E: Let's talk about another movie you have out, Sunshine. Your mother, Rosemary Harris is also in this movie.
J: Yeah, we play the same part.
E: You play the same part, right. Did you talk to her about that and try to do similar things?
J: No.
E: It's an epic. It goes on and on and on. This is really an incredible movie. It spans an enormous time period. It's been a couple of months since I've seen it. I saw a screening for press early on. It covers over a hundred years, I think.
J: It covers about eighty years I think.
E: I promised I wouldn't say this, we were thinking it should be called You Can't Kill Ralph Fiennes.
J: (laughs)
E: Cuz he plays himself...
J: He plays three characters.
E: Three characters, he plays the father, then the father dies and comes back as his own son. He just keeps coming back. Every time you think you're not going to see Ralph Fiennes anymore he comes back so, I was joking that's what they should call it. My wife was more than thrilled to see Ralph Fiennes.
J: I was going to say that maybe they should use it in the advertisement.
E: Was that good? Did you enjoy that film as well?
J: I loved it. I loved it. It was the best filming experience I've had.
E: And after this, after The Real Thing, after New York, what are you going to do?
J: No idea.
E: No idea. No plans? Are you going to rest a little while? Tired seems to be a theme here so are you going to rest?
J: I have no idea, no idea what's going to happen at all.
E: Have a good long run on Broadway. Good luck tonight at the Tony Awards.
J: Thank you.
E: Thank you Jennifer for coming in.