Samantha Morton on THAT pig scene in The Odyssey: ‘I wanted it to be very sensual’
Samantha Morton talks about Christopher Nolan helping her when she was ‘a little scared’, playing Circe as an ageless character… and humming
It was not in the script. It just happened. And when Morton was done, she looked over to director Christopher Nolan, waiting for him to say something like, “Maybe try it without the humming, Samantha.”
But Nolan did not say anything, so Morton did it again and the music that was swirling inside her head, which she remembers now as a symphony of glass harmoniums and theremin, kept coming out as Circe went about her witchy business, altering her gluttonous guests, who were busy slurping and gulping down her stew.
“These are sounds that can make you go mad, apparently,” Morton says, reclining on her bed at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. “So to transform the men, the magic came not just from my hands but from my sounds.”
Morton unabashedly believes in magic. How else, she asks, can you explain how a girl who was shuttled between children’s homes and a dozen foster families, only to be living on the streets of Nottingham, England, at the age of 14 with a criminal record, is here talking with the press now, sipping green tea at the Chelsea?
“That’s got to be guardian angels and love – and not that I suddenly became good at acting and got a job,” says Morton, a veteran who has been at it for 35 years, dazzling audiences and stealing scenes for the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jim Sheridan and now Nolan.