Hot Milk’s Fiona Shaw on why she’ll never play a queer romantic lead

Rose, the debilitated mother played by Fiona Shaw in new, sweltering summer drama Hot Milk, is cantankerous, steely, and suffocating. But please, don’t tell Fiona Shaw that.

“I love Rose. A lot of people don’t like Rose, but I like Rose,” the 66-year-old says in her sharp yet soft Irish lilt, a light rebuff softened with a laugh. 

Hot Milk lands in UK cinemas today (4 July), having arrived in US theatres a week ago. Led by Collette screenwriter and first-time feature director Rebecca Lenkiewicz, it’s an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker-nominated novel of the same name. It’s the type of ubiquitous text that, if you haven’t read it yourself, you’ve probably loosely heard of, or seen dotted about about Tube carriages over the past decade. 

Rose’s daughter is Sofia, a brooding mid-twenties anthropology student played with quiet rage by Sex Education star Emma Mackey. Sofia has taken her wheelchair-bound mother to coastal Spanish city Almería, in search of a mysterious elixir from a mysterious man named Doctor Gomez (Vincent Perez) that will cure her of the mysterious illness that has bound the pair together by necessity.

For all the care Sofia is forced to offer, Rose – who is beleaguered by past trauma – snaps and spits, insidiously chipping away at Sofia’s barely-formed sense of self. Sofia’s trip to Spain offers her one escape: enigmatic, glamorous seamstress Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), with the pair clattering through an on-off, somewhat secret sapphic summer romance.

“Her ailment has made her an absolutely torturous mother I’m sure,” Shaw admits over Zoom, donning an open chequered shirt and round glasses. As a veteran thesp of stage and screen, I get the sense that she lives deep inside all of her characters, and wants to strip them back to basic humanity. Case in point: she spent so long perfecting a twitch Rose has as a by-product of her ailment that Shaw kept on twitching post filming. 

“All drama is an extension of or an exaggeration of situations that exist all the time. People stifle each other all the time. In Rose, in a way she has an excuse to, you know? She’s helpless and absolutely needs her daughter and may not have resolved her childhood difficulties, but I barely know a parent of my age who has done that. She may lack self knowledge, but I mean again, I’m not sure I know that many people who really have that knowledge,” Shaw says. “So she’s a very heightened, ordinary person.”

Shaw goes one step further: she thinks Rose is brave for her determination to get to the bottom of her illness; an unlikely heroine of sorts. “Bravery is not riding on a horse with a sword,” she says. “I think bravery is coming up from your knees and standing, or trying to. That’s bravery. I think she’s very brave. So, there’s a lot of qualities I really admire in her.”

Perhaps Shaw admires Rose as hers are characteristics she’s had to inhabit time and again. She was irascible as Aunt Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter blockbusters, stony and guarded as MI5 agent Carolyn Martens in the BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe winning Killing Eve, and shielded an unknown past as fellow Rose, Rose Aguineau, in season four of True Detective. In case those titles don’t spell it out clearly enough, when Fiona Shaw is attached to a project, it’s essentially an emblem of top quality.

Despite being almost 40 years her junior, her co-star Mackey is slowly garnering a similar reputation. One of the breakout stars from Netflix smash Sex Education, she’s gone on to star in 2023’s culture-shaping Barbie, and is currently filming J. J. Abrams’ new untitled fantasy film alongside Jenna Ortega. Mackey was drafted into Hot Milk last minute, after The Lost Daughter’s Jessie Buckley pulled out due to scheduling conflicts. 

Ahead of filming, Shaw and Mackey spoke about potentially renting a flat together in Hackney, so the pair could work on building a mother-daughter bond. It wasn’t possible in the end, but on set in Greece, they got into character through little shows of affection.

“Emma kindly every day would wheel me to the set. I would come out of the caravan in my wheelchair so that, for the day, we were in that situation rather than demonstrating or pretending,” she recalls. Navigating the chalky Greek terrain was tough in a wheelchair, “but that’s what would have happened, so you have to go along with that”. Watching the pair together was “moving”, Lenkiewicz told PinkNews earlier this year: “They really connected and were kind of thrown in together. I think both of them had such brilliant takes on their own character that they were instantly mother and daughter.”

Sofia’s fractured relationship with her mother is only part of her story in this cinched summer sizzler, yet Shaw wasn’t privy to any of the sweaty scenes between Mackey and Krieps. She puts it down to, if not quite method acting, then something of the sort. “Things like other actors’ relationships, it’s very important you don’t know them,” she stresses. It makes sense: “Rose doesn’t know them, so I was never present for any of them.”

She adds: “Even though you read the script, of course, and you have to know it very well… it’s really important to not know things. You have to not know what the [character] doesn’t know. And so I take that as far as I possibly can.”

I ask Shaw a little more about the temperamental dynamic between Sofia and Ingrid. While Ingrid helps loosen Rose’s grip on Sofia, their relationship too is temperamental. It’s one of the film’s more slippery, and thus interesting, biting points.

“It’s a mismatch,” Shaw says of their faltering romance. “Or blind or idealised or, you know, all sorts of things that happen in the conceptual framework between you and anybody else that you…” she trails off. “A lot of love is narcissism. If you think they’re beautiful is [it] because you kind of feel you then get some of their beauty? Or if they think they’re really intelligent, you’re getting their intelligence? Because you might be just getting their nonsense.” Receiving wisdom from Fiona Shaw feels like receiving wisdom from a mythic sage; you know it’s advice probably worth holding onto. 

When I spoke to Lenkiewicz, she described Sofia and Ingrid’s connection as “instant”. I wonder if she agrees with this sentiment. Or whether Shaw, who realised that she is a lesbian later in life and married writer and economist Sonali Deraniyagala in 2018, the same year they began dating, believes in the concept of love at first sight. Perhaps, at this point, I’m just mining our mythic sage for more wisdom.

“I question a lot of those words there that you say,” she responds, with a smile but furrowed brow. Shaw is warm, frequently funny company, but with a firm edge that comes with almost 45 years in the business. Shaw began her career in theatre 1982 – she has two Olivier Awards, and a Tony nomination – and has performed plenty of Shakespeare. “I think Shakespeare believes it. He says that people love each other before they even know,” she offers. She references Shakespeare’s As You Like It, for which she won her first Olivier Award in 1990, playing youngster Celia, who falls intensely and uncontrollably in love with wicked heir Oliver on first meeting him. 

“I mean, love at first sight can end in tragedy or can end in very happy marriages. So, whether it’s love, but something – recognition – does happen with people even before somebody opens their mouth.” Another example she pulls from somewhere in her life: she once knew of someone who fell in love purely with the sound of someone’s voice. “I bet a psychologist would have great fun unpicking that, or maybe not be able to unpick it,” she laughs.

As an LGBTQ+ star, Shaw has certainly orbited LGBTQ+ projects other than Hot Milk. In Lenkiewicz’s Colette, she played the mother of the titular, queer character (played by Kiera Knightley). She was Elizabeth Philpot, the friend and confidant of Kate Winslet’s Mary in 2020’s queer romantic drama, Ammonite. There are whole articles exploring Killing Eve’s Carolyn as a lesbian icon. Yet she’s always circling; at this stage of her career, has she any interest in playing a queer, romantic lead?

“I mean, queerness – gayness – is part of society. I think it’s right that it should be reflected on our films and our plays,” she says. Then she beams. “But I can’t tell you the relief of being older so that your sense of beauty – it doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes have vanity – but my one sense of beauty or desirability is not the thing that I’m hired for now. It’s for my skill. So I’m very free from that.

“It’s irrelevant to me now – I’m not dead! – I just mean it’s unlikely to be the function that I have in a [project]. I’m not going to be the romantic heroine,” she says. “Although, you never know.”

I flick through her résumé one last time. Fleabag. Andor. Happy Days. Hedda Gabler. Enola Holmes. I think she can play just about anyone she wants. 

Hot Milk is out in UK and US cinemas now.

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