Anna Gunn leapt up with lightning speed and sliced her arm through the air, in one fluid motion, as if parrying an opponent.
It was not some kind of martial arts move — the actress was, in fact, demonstrating how to split open a coconut, a skill she will be needing when she opens in Tennessee Williams’s The Night Of The Iguana at the Noel Coward Theatre this summer.
Gunn, who won acclaim and major awards for her seminal television roles — Skyler White in Breaking Bad, and Martha Bullock in Deadwood — laughed and said: ‘I really have to get on with my machete training...Anna Gunn with a machete could be dangerous.’
It was clear from that little display of physical dexterity, in the middle of the lounge at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, that Gunn has a flair for the theatrical. In fact, she’s a top-flight thespian who has acted on and off Broadway and in Los Angeles, where she has often trodden the boards.
Anna Gunn leapt up with lightning speed and sliced her arm through the air. The actress was demonstrating how to split open a coconut, a skill she will be needing when she opens in Tennessee Williams’s The Night Of The Iguana at the Noel Coward Theatre this summer
She once played Isabella in a production of Measure For Measure there, back in 1999, for the late Peter Hall. The director told his cast not to be intimidated by Shakespeare, Gunn recalled, telling them (Bard purists might want to look away now) that their accents were ‘much more naturally the way Shakespeare intended the verse to be spoken’.
The cutlass action at the Chateau had to do with Anna’s upcoming role: she’s playing Maxine Faulk, the ‘affable and rapaciously lusty’ proprietor of the Costa Verde hotel, set atop a jungle-covered hill in a remote part of Mexico, in Williams’s 1961 drama, which many regard as his last great play.
Maxine makes rum-cocas for her guests; and needs a big blade to slice open coconuts.
The production, which starts previews at the Noel Coward on July 6, will be directed by James Macdonald.
In addition to Anna, it stars Clive Owen as Reverend Shannon, a defrocked Episcopal minister, and Lia Williams as Hannah, a spinster of no particular parish, who pushes her wheelchair-imprisoned 97-year-old grandfather (Julian Glover) here, there and everywhere.
Gunn won acclaim and major awards for her seminal television roles — Skyler White in Breaking Bad (pictured), and Martha Bullock in Deadwood
It is Gunn’s professional London debut. Professional, because when she was 19, she did a summer drama course over here. After watching a season of plays in London and Stratford featuring the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton and Greta Scacchi, she was hooked.
Maria Aitken, the acting teacher and director, wrote her a letter of introduction that landed her a key role in The Beggar’s Opera in Chicago. Gunn still has the letter, and knows its contents off by heart.
Although celebrated for her screen work, theatre is her first love. And Maxine in The Night Of The Iguana is a juicy role.
I confess, I didn’t automatically see her in the part which Bette Davis originated on Broadway — and Gunn agreed that ‘normally, people would think of me as Hannah’.
But she’s hooked on Maxine now, and is in the process of creating a playlist for her (she’s thinking Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday) — something she likes to do for all her characters.
Gunn sees the play as a ‘beautiful story of redemption, forgiveness and grace’.
‘You’ve got this triangle of Shannon, Hannah and Maxine,’ she explained. The women offer different paths to Shannon, a man struggling with a weakness for booze and under-age girls.
On this particular night, at this particular hotel, there are German guests and a bus load of schoolgirls. ‘To be a woman on her own in the 1940s, running a place like that,’ Gunn mused. ‘I’ve been to Mismaloya [where the film version is set]. You can still only get there by boat. It’s still remote. And Maxine runs everything on her own. She has helpers, but she’s running it.’
The discussion prompts me to mention the powerful personal essay she wrote in 2013 for the New York Times, about the indecent level of abuse she suffered on social media, and in print and on TV, after the illogical hatred of Skyler in Breaking Bad spilled over into a loathing for her as a person.
‘It’s the double standard thing,’ she told me. ‘You’ve got this guy Walter White, who’s doing horrible things. No matter what Walt did, people kept on going “Yay!”
‘But that wife is such a nag, because she keeps telling him not to do these terrible things. He’s allowed. She’s not. I was being told: “You be quiet!”’
We chatted about how Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar was recently savaged by the New York Times (unfairly, we felt) because she was tough on her staff.
