Bridgerton star Polly Walker interview: ‘There was no sisterhood in Hollywood’

‘I’m not quite sure how I’ve pulled it off,” says Polly Walker. “To land two such juicy roles in two of the biggest shows on TV in my 50s has been thrilling.”

The shows in question are the UK’s most-watched drama of the century Line of Duty (in which Walker played poisonous glamour-puss Gill Biggeloe) and Netflix’s hit Regency romance series Bridgerton, in which she’s having “enormous fun” as the scheming Lady Portia Featherington. When Bridgerton’s first season aired on Christmas Day 2020, it offered a delightful dose of escapism during the drab routines of the pandemic. It was watched by a then record 82 million households around the world.

In both shows, Walker has smouldered with a mature sexuality that sees her meeting the male gaze with deep-seated confidence. Her character seduced the uxorious Catholic Superintendent Hastings in Line of Duty by placing one cool palm on his chest. In the new series of Bridgerton, Lady Featherington is the only older member of the cast to engage in one of the show’s trademark forbidden flirtations. She bats her false eyelashes at her dead husband’s cousin, Lord Jack, while finagling his engagement to her daughter.

“There’s not a lot of room for the exploration of mature love in the marriage mart world of Bridgerton,” she tells me, over the phone from her home in London. “But it’s so good that they’ve shown that people over 25 have feelings, desires and needs. Things don’t pan out in quite the way Portia expects. But I’m glad she’s shown as a woman, not just as a mother.”

When I tell Walker how spectacular she looks in the show, she jokes that “a corset will definitely boost your assets, that’s for sure!” Although she says that, as the kind of woman who prefers to wear a tracksuit, she finds the gussying up hard work. “I cannot bend at all in the middle wearing that corset. If I drop my script or my pencil I have to depend on the kindness of whoever’s passing to pick things up.”

Although Walker can downplay her allure with humour, the 55-year-old actress is delighted to be generating such heat on screen. She remembers her first agent, signing her up as a hot young thing with the promise: “You’re an ingenue now. It’s all going to be so easy. But I want to be representing you when you’re 40.” Back then Walker thought: “Forty? Eugh! I can’t even imagine being an actress at that age. How would that be interesting?! Now I’m in my 50s I know: oh yes, it is interesting.”

The second season finds Walker’s character developing in interesting directions. “There are obviously shades of the pantomime dame to Lady Featherington,” she mulls. “But she’s a fiercely intelligent woman who has really come into her own.

“She’s been widowed and she’s fighting to make the most of the opportunities to thrive and survive as a single mother in a man’s world. Although women were not educated about finances at that time, she’s the brains behind keeping her family afloat and I think she smashes it.”

Walker can relate. Although she has been happily married to actor Laurence Penry-Jones (brother of Rupert) since 2008, she tells me that “for many years I struggled as a single mother in an industry that was not geared to support women bringing up children [she has a son and a daughter from a previous relationship]. It was difficult for me to stay in the game. I often thought about quitting.”

Born in Warrington in 1966, Walker is the child of a hotelier and a teacher. One of four siblings, she yearned to become a ballet dancer and trained at the Rambert School, but her ambitions were thwarted by injury and she transferred to drama school at 18. She trod the boards with the Royal Shakespeare Company before landing the starring role in ITV’s adaptation of Lorna Doone in 1990 and gaining an international audience in 1992 with her role as a terrorist in Hollywood thriller Patriot Games.

Her first child, Giorgio, was born in 1993 and she recalls: “I was in a corset [filming Restoration with Robert Downey Jr and Meg Ryan] 10 weeks after giving birth. That wasn’t a pleasant physical sensation. But what hurt more was leaving my baby. I remember hearing babies crying all the time when there were no babies around. I thought I was going mad. It was tough.”

Walker gave birth to her daughter, Delilah, in 2000, and didn’t feel able to take a break. “When I hear of people taking maternity or paternity leave I do feel envious,” she says. “Today I hear a group of actors have set up childcare so that people can go off to auditions. But nothing like that existed for me. I relied heavily on my sister and my parents.” She says she sometimes took the kids to work with her but “they were not welcomed on film sets”.

She notes that in “those more treacherous times” she received no support from older actresses. “There was no sisterhood when I was starting out.” In fact, Walker often encountered rivalry between women of the sort dramatised by Bridgerton’s sparring matriarchs. She was particularly stung by the cruelty of “one huge female star” when she was shooting in LA in her mid 20s. “I’d been dressed in this amazing Azzedine Alaia suit and she took one look at me, shook her head, and said: ‘No. Your character wouldn’t wear that.’ I was sent back into my caravan and put into a much dowdier outfit.”

Walker’s career began to pick up pace again when, aged almost 40, she starred as the devious, seductive Atia (niece of Julius Caesar and lover of Mark Antony) in HBO’s swords-and-sandals soap opera Rome. Hailed by one entertainment website as “the biggest bitch a TV series has ever produced”, Atia wielded her sexuality as a weapon, used her own children as pawns and, memorably, whispered an earnest wish for her enemy, Cleopatra, to “die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop”.

Today Walker says she often hears that “people see Atia as a forerunner of the strong, strategically minded female characters in Game of Thrones. Complicated, wicked, vulnerable.” But the actress says she hasn’t needed to use any Atia-esque cunning to remain in the game. She attributes her longevity as a screen siren to “high standards when it comes to scripts, refusal to be involved in misogynistic projects and not paying too much attention to celebrity.”

Walker describes herself as a “survivor”, though she “feels sad that I had to rush my children into growing up and becoming independent. But I think they’ve turned out OK.” She pauses. “I actually took them to the Bridgerton premiere at Tate Modern and it was the first time we’d ever done anything like that together. They’ve always seen their mother and ‘Polly Walker the actress’ as very different entities. But it was so lovely to see them enjoying it and celebrating our journey together as a family.”

‘Bridgerton’ is on Netflix now