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”) and has a preference for creating “swathes of flowers, very English meadow” in her garden.
But her real bugbear is tea. “I can’t drink tea in a restaurant here,” she says. “They don’t know how to make it.
They use coffee water, and it’s not right – it’s just wrong.” As a teenager she got a job in the bar of the Theatre Royal in York, where a young Gary Oldman, up north in rep, suggested she apply to Rada. The career that followed has been garlanded with praise, not least on Broadway where she has twice been nominated for a Tony, winning once.
Last year McTeer was back in England, appearing at the National Theatre in the title role of Phaedra , a Greek myth where a woman lusts after her stepson, Hippolytus. There is a similar energy in the first few episodes of Kaos , with a prowling intensity in Hera’s treatment of her stepson Dionysus. Not many female actors approaching 63 (we’re speaking just before her birthday on 5 August) are allowed to take sexually charged roles – older women’s desires are often whitewashed by the so-called creative industries.
“Doing Phaedra I was thinking, ‘Oh, Lord, I thought these days were over,’ ” she says. “But being asked to do Hera, you do think, ‘Wow, how great!’ I’m all for it. The other thing about being older, perhaps particularly as an actor of the female kind, is I’m incredibly protective of younger actors of any gender.
Because, at one’s great age, if something doesn’t work you can go, ‘This isn’t working, this isn’t right, and frankly I don’t give a sh*t about your opinion, but I’m not having this.’ You don’t care any more, in that sense. You’ve got the power.
That’s where I am in my life, and I’m happy to use that.” One reviewer called her performance as Phaedra “mesmerisingly Amazonian”, does she see herself that way? “I’m six foot, I’m strong, I’m kind of Amazonian,” she says. “I always have been.
And I have quite a deep voice. All of that gives me a power and a strength; I’ve not had to transition from being a 30-year-old ingénue. That’s hard work for some actors and actresses.
If you’ve been in a place where a lot of your world has been about the way you look, when your looks go, part of your world goes with it. I’ve never really been that. In a way, the older I get, the easier it’s been for me.
” Had she and Goldblum met before? “No, we hadn’t. We got on brilliantly, we just had a ball. Zeus and Hera obviously adore each other while also being deeply irritated with each other – they’ve been married for a thousand years, if you can imagine that! As the series goes on their relationship gets more complicated.
Also, it’s good fun playing people who do terrible things.” Some of those terrible things are particularly cruel, one involving a baby. Did the script make her and Goldblum flinch at all? “It was difficult for us at the beginning to get our heads around that, it really was,” she says.
“But by the end, all I could think of was, ‘These human people, they’re just ants.’ I would squash an ant in my house and not feel bad about it. My function in the piece, and all the gods actually, is to not give a sh*t about the little people.
” Watch her work on screen and in the theatre and McTeer appears to be in her prime; she doesn’t disagree with the suggestion. “I can’t bear it when people send you birthday cards saying, ‘Oh, you might be old, but wine gets better as it gets older,’ ” she says. “I can’t be doing with all that sh*t.
And when people make jokes about, ‘Oh, I’d better check your ID to make sure you’re old enough to buy that wine!’ Oh, shut up. You only say that to old people. I don’t buy any of it.
Beauty and sexuality and gorgeousness and attractiveness and power – all those things increase as you get older in my opinion. “Of course, there will come a point where one fades. My father passed away at 97, out for a walk.
That’s what I want to do. But by then maybe I’ll have a cigarette and a glass of wine in my hand, and long red fingernails. I have this idea that when I’m 95 I’m going to start smoking and drinking and behaving really badly.
I’ll carry a cane and slap people on the back of their legs in the supermarket.”.
