I t would be rude to Jeff Goldblum and David Thewlis, among others, to say Janet McTeer acts everybody off the screen in the fiery, funny, purposeful new Netflix show Kaos. So let’s just say that, whenever she’s on screen, you’re never not watching. She plays Hera to Goldblum’s Zeus.
“They’ve been Gods and they’ve been together for, like, 1,000 years,” she tells me by Zoom from her home in Maine. “There is a level of, you know, married life, ‘Oh, you’ve had a prophecy, don’t worry darling.’ Very blase.
” There is a combination of wit and steel in McTeer’s performance that fans of Ozark (in which she played Helen, the lawyer) will recall – except brought to a new height by, well, her godliness. By about episode two, you realise something else: that Hera is both puppeteer and sexual linchpin of the show. “I was 63 yesterday,” McTeer says, laughing.
“It’s really nice to know you can still be in that role.” Despite TV evolving, both in the #MeToo sense and in its notion of the female shelf life, this is still unusual. “So often, the matriarch, the wife figure, they’re in the background.
They’re not overlooked, they’re important, they’re marvellous – as long as they’re where they should be. Even now that’s true.” But Hera is all foreground, all agency and sexual destiny, all authority; not selfish exactly, but definitely not selfless.
“She’s very, ‘Now listen . I’m OK sitting here in my kaftan, but if anybody messe.