Claire Foy is no stranger to challenging roles. She's played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, fated Tudor queen Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall, and astronaut Neil Armstrong's wife Janet in First Man. But All of Us Strangers, a haunting new romantic drama from director Andrew Haigh, is the first time she's played the mother of a man nearly a decade older than her.
In the film, Fleabag's Andrew Scott plays Adam, a screenwriter struggling to pen a script about his deceased parents, who were killed in a car crash when he was 12. Looking for inspiration, he returns to his childhood home in the suburbs and finds his parents (Foy and Jamie Bell) exactly as they were before their deaths. The trio begin to reconnect, slipping into old dynamics and chafing against lost time in equal measure.
"People do whole films against a green screen where there's nothing there. So much of [acting] is an imaginative process where you have to convince yourself to be in some suspended reality or believe something's happening that's not happening," Foy tells 12DOVE and the Inside Total Film podcast.
"To be fair, though, I think Andrew did all the work – he did so much of his physicality and the way he was behaving around us made it so easy for us. Jamie and myself are both parents and so I think there was a shorthand there for us, which was lucky. But I love him. He is a truly amazing person and to be his parent was a very prideful thing. I felt very proud of the man that he was."
All of Us Strangers arrives in UK cinemas on January 26. For the full interview with Foy (and a chat with Scott and co-star Paul Mescal), tune into the latest episode of the Inside Total Film podcast, out now.
