Samantha Morton, the Great Shape-Shifter

Is there anything Samantha Morton can’t do? She’s played a Scottish raver, a medieval queen, a mute laundress, a child-murderer, a crime-fighting psychic, and the leader of a postapocalyptic gang of survivors. She’s even about to have a stab at the unlikely role of pop star—fronting a synthpop duo with Richard Russell, the boss of Adele’s label, XL Recordings. “I hope it’s not a midlife crisis!” she says, letting out a husky laugh. “But it’s been just like a dream come true to just get to make some music.”

Earlier this year Morton starred as the cunning 16th-century queen Catherine de Medici in the Starz series The Serpent Queen. But she also crafted gem-like supporting roles in two much-talked about current movies. In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, she has just one riveting scene as the ex-wife devastated by the deterioration of her ex-husband. In She Said, Maria Schrader’s adaptation of the Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey investigation into Harvey Weinstein, Morton plays Zelda Perkins, a former Miramax employee who accused Weinstein of exposing himself to her and trying to rape her coworker, before signing, and then breaking, an NDA. Weinstein has denied all allegations.

She Said represented something deeply personal for Morton, both because she’d crossed paths with the real Perkins and because she’s wrangled with plenty of industry abuse and misogyny in her own career. “I’ve been in situations that hopefully would never happen again today,” Morton tells me by video from London, where she’s shooting the upcoming Paramount+ series The Burning Girls. Her hair is scraped back from her face rather severely, but her appearance is softened by an irrepressible smile and a frilly white blouse that could be a leftover from one of her many costume dramas.

“I haven’t gone on the record talking about those instances and I think the fact that Zelda did…” She shakes her head as she tries to find the right words to talk about Perkins and other whistleblowers. “The reality of living through that for those women must be painful and vulnerable and frightening. You’re going to risk everything to speak your truth, and to protect others, to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. Not everybody deep deep down has that conviction or those morals they might think they do.”

Morton has publicly discussed some of her Hollywood disappointments, like losing out on a leading role in the 2005 Miramax movie The Brothers Grimm, despite the wishes of director Terry Gilliam. “Harvey had said, apparently, that I was unfuckable, so I wasn’t going to be cast,” she says with a shrug. She believes that Weinstein’s disdain for her has a nasty backstory, however. 

“We have to go back to when Harvey saw me in a [1997] movie called Under the Skin,” Morton says, recalling that he offered her a part in a Miramax movie that she found misogynistic. She turned it down. “I was told, ‘You don’t say no to Harvey…he will never employ you again. And he will make your life a misery if you don’t do this film.’” After that, she says, “Every movie that I was in that the Weinstein Company or Miramax picked up distributed, or I was potentially going to be involved in, if a director wanted to cast me, I would then end up with a letter from said director saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m not able to cast you.’” Or if she was cast, she says, Weinstein would have her face and name obscured in the marketing materials. “It’s interesting when you look at the actors that have taken the roles that I’ve turned down—where their careers are at, and where mine is at, and who did the cover of Vanity Fair,” she says quietly.

“I was bullied by many, many producers, not just Harvey Weinstein. I have been fired because I wouldn’t get my breasts out. I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t sleep with my leading man.” A smile creeps over her face as she remembers a questionnaire she recently filled out for the Screen Actors Guild about abusive experiences in the industry. “It was like: Has this ever happened to you? Yes, yes, yes, yes.” She mimics checking box after box. 

“I’ve had to come to terms with a lot of my treatment, but what do we do about it now?” she asks, her grin morphing into a grimace. If she comes forward with specifics, she says, it will hang over her husband and children, not to mention the perpetrators’ families. But she’s glad she can even contemplate it. “It’s interesting that we’re even having this conversation. It’s amazing that we’re having this conversation.”

Morton’s chaotic childhood—she grew up in and out of children’s homes and foster families in the UK—gives her a broader context for all this, along with a skepticism about quick fixes.  “Having grown up in care, the social services and the police were in cahoots, knowing that there was abuse happening and just protecting each other. It keeps happening,” she says. “So we have to call it out and do our best to protect people and, and hope that change within these systems can happen, you know?” As a troubled teen, she found an outlet in a local youth acting workshop. By 16, she had moved to London, where she was cast in a string of British TV series such as Cracker and Band of Gold, playing pregnant teens and young prostitutes. Within a few years Morton had become a rising star in the booming independent-film world of the 1990s, working with the likes of Lynne Ramsay (as despairing wild child Morvern Callar), Jim Sheridan (as In America’s radiantly hopeful immigrant mother) and Woody Allen (a mute old soul in Sweet and Lowdown), and nabbing two Oscar nominations along the way. 

She moved to New York in the late ’90s, when Aronofsky was first forging his uncompromising reputation with Pi. “It was on my bucket list that I’d love to work for him,” she says. When the script for The Whale came along, she was offered the chance to audition either for Mary (the ex-wife of Charlie, Brendan Fraser’s schoolteacher character) or Liz (the caregiver, ultimately played by Hong Chau). The latter was a much bigger part, but she opted for Mary. Now a single mom, Mary stews in sadness and resentment at her ex-husband, who left her for a male student many years before. “I had never played someone who had issues with alcohol, so that was a new role,” she says. “And I’ve worked in theater, but had not been in a film that’s based on a play. So that was interesting to me—the concept of the [confined] space that we had to work in.” Finally, it was the prospect of working with Fraser that cemented her interest in the movie. “He has integrity, and he was a very, very earnest person. Very safe and kind. And all those ingredients made it a no-brainer. Like: Yes, please!”

I ask her what it was like to film the surprising moment of physical connection between Mary and Charlie. “The entire experience was very moving and very kind of in the moment,” she says. “When you’re playing someone that hasn’t seen someone they love for a very long time, because of pain, anger, heartache, rejection, hurt—the whole thing was very sad. She loved him very, very much, and he left her, and her pride was hurt that he left her for a young man.” She says her performance was “anchored in alcoholism—she was drinking heavily due to the pain of everything, not really managing her life very well.”

At 45, Morton finds herself gravitating toward creating her own projects. Along with the album she’s finishing, Morton is working on sequels to The Unloved, the semi-autobiographical 2009 movie she directed about a young girl abused within Britain’s child-welfare system. She’d intended it to be the first of a trilogy, but even after it won UK’s BAFTA award, she has struggled to get the ball rolling with the second installment, which is called Starlings. “It is about when you leave the care system when you’re just thrown out to fend for yourself at age 16––and in my case, put in a homeless hostel.”