Add Kaos to your watchlist. You always know when Janet McTeer is in a scene. When her Hera, wife of Jeff Goldblum’s Zeus, appears in Olympus, everyone starts looking nervous – not least Zeus, if she’s caught him on one of his sexual adventures.
The classically trained actor with Golden Globe, Olivier and Tony awards to her name, dominates the room simply by being quietly indomitable. “One of the reasons I’m quite still and controlled is because Jeff is magnificently neurotic and Nabhaan is totally eccentric, and I have all of my scenes, more or less, with them,” she says of co-stars Goldblum and Nabhaan Rizwan, who plays Dionysus. “I just decided, ‘If that’s where you are, then I’m going to be the calm, still centre who occasionally throws out, ‘That’s enough!’ ” McTeer has been stealing shows for a long time, most recently, on television, in a two-season stint in Netflix crime series Ozark as an American lawyer who met her end rather abruptly.
“It’s funny, because of Ozark a lot of people think that I’m American, but I grew up in Yorkshire,” says McTeer, who was born on Tyneside, moved to York with her family when she was six and now lives in the woods of Maine with her husband, the American poet Joseph Coleman. “I never used to think of myself as very English until I came to live in America, and then realised just how very English I was.” McTeer, who married Coleman in 2010, forgets Thanksgiving dinners (“It’s not in my DNA”) an.