Lesley Manville’s Broadway Debut Was A Classic: Tony Watch Q&A

Lesley Manville might just be a prime candidate for a new Mandela Effect: Surely many of us would bet the going equivalent of a farm in our certainty that the great stage actor has a long and distinguished Broadway career.

We would lose the farm, but at least the distinguished part of the statement is true. Her first and so far only Broadway turn – as Jocasta in Robert Icke’s rapturously received update of Oedipus, costarring Mark Strong in the title role – was widely praised and is a very strong contender in this year’s Tony Award race for Best Actress in a Play. The “long” part of the Broadway equation is an open question – and one that Manville addresses in this conversation with Deadline.

Perhaps best known, at least in the United States, for her storied association with film director Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvey, Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake, among others) and, most recently, her series-stealing performance as Princess Margaret in Netflix’s The Crown, Manville’s numerous London stage credits have made her a reigning royal of the British stage. In 2015 she was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE), and in 2021 was promoted to Commander (CBE). One more and she’ll be Dame Lesley.

In this candid Tony Watch interview, Manville seemed closer to the freewheeling Princess Margaret than the more stoic members of the Royal Family, sharing her thoughts on what made her onstage chemistry with Strong so riveting and so tactile, and all accomplished without the assistance of an intimacy coordinator. She also talks about what took her so long to get to Broadway, and how it felt, night after night, to work her way to one of theater’s most shocking and violent denouements. We can thank or blame Sophocles for Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ bloody self-blinding, but it was Icke’s adaptation and direction, and the performances of his exemplary cast, that made this season’s Oedipus feel stiletto sharp, up-to-the-moment and surprisingly unpredictable.

Let Manville explain how they did it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

DEADLINE: Let’s just jump right in. I was surprised that this was your first time on Broadway and your first time acting with Mark Strong. Your chemistry with him was just amazing.

LESLEY MANVILLE: Well, that’s in the rehearsals. You can’t just buy that. It’s not there on Day One. You have to have those five, six weeks of rehearsals for that to grow and develop and become something. You have to find it. How do I make these lines work? How do I make this speech work? We knew we had to create this very complicated relationship, very complex relationship. So that’s time. And yes, this was my first time on Broadway. I’ve played New York before. I played the Public Theater way back in the day when Joe Papp ran it. Top Girls, I did there. And I’ve done BAM twice. I did a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, and I did Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But never on Broadway.

DEADLINE: Let’s circle back to your chemistry with Mark Strong. I know people who had to Google to see if you were actually married.

MANVILLE: I’d met Mark a couple of times socially. We had done a film together but had no scenes together. But Rob [Icke, director]was obviously convinced that he got it right with the two of us, and I think he did. The rest of it, it’s just… I don’t know that some things can be analyzed or torn apart and explained, because all we did was develop this couple moment by moment by moment, line by line by line, scene by scene by scene, and then as the weeks of rehearsal go by this whole cocktail of ingredients gets put together and the whole thing starts to emerge.

And of course along the way you’re talking about their relationship, you’re talking about the fact that they’re clearly crazy about each other and that she’s very much there with him politically. She’s very much his equal. He relies on her. So you just layer it all on. You know, we were comfortable enough with each other that we chose not to have an intimacy coordinator. And for us, that was the right decision. Over the weeks, you just get a bit more tactile and then you feel OK to hug them, in character, and give them a kiss on the cheek. And then of course there are some big sexual moments in the story that I suppose initially we did kind of choreograph in a way. But once they were choreographed and once we knew what we were going to be doing, you can then play them and make them a bit more and bring them to life. But there’s no secret. It’s just a good rehearsal process, trusting your actor and trusting the director’s eye.

DEADLINE: Have you noticed a difference in the response of the New York audience since you were here last? Lots of people are going to recognize you now from The Crown as Princess Margaret.

MANVILLE: I suppose so. But you know, I’ve been working for many, many decades. But I think you’re right in suggesting that certainly the last 15 years of my career have taken a real kind of upward trajectory. The Crown is such a high profile series. And Princess Margaret was such an amazing part to play. But also, you know, with things like Phantom Thread with Paul Thomas Anderson, they’re all very good projects that gave me a really, really great platform.

I think my impression was that New York was quite hungry for a really meaty play like Oedipus on Broadway. I think when you say Oedipus, it makes people think of something that’ll be at an Off Broadway theater, but because we’d had such enormous success with it in London, Sonia Friedman and our London producer and Sue Wagner and John Johnson in New York really saw that there was an audience for it. And maybe we did get the BAM audience, the Public Theater audience, but whatever audience we got they loved it and were hungry for it and so it was a pleasure to to bring it to them.

DEADLINE: Had you been waiting for the right thing to come along for your Broadway debut?

MANVILLE: I’ve never been offered Broadway and turned it down. I’d never been offered something and said, No, I don’t want to do that. I’d have probably jumped at it. But actually, I don’t mind that it’s happened now. You could argue that it’s a bit late and why didn’t it happen sooner, but listen, it’s happened when it’s happened. Honestly, Oedipus is one of the theatrical highlights of my career. I couldn’t be happier that it ended up being Oedipus that was my first Broadway show. And obviously I’m flattered beyond belief that it’s culminated in a Tony nomination for not just me, but seven nominations for the production, which is staggeringly good.

DEADLINE: Let’s talk about The Scene. The remarkable moment at the end of the play when your character, Jocasta, reveals something that we didn’t know about her before. Actually, most of us know the play – which we call “Ed-i-pus,” and you call “Eed-i-pus.” Tomato, tomato – but because this production was so modern, so immediate, in its approach that it still surprised when it got to where it was going. How did you get into your that frame of mind every night?

MANVILLE: There’s no preparation you can do for that. You just have to let the two hours of the play take you there. And you’ve got that fantastic device of the clock on stage as well, which I think the audience kind of gets quite tense about because they think, Come on, there’s only 30 seconds left and we still don’t know. But you can’t prepare for it because when that play begins Oedipus is on the brink of becoming the new leader. Jocasta’s on the brink of becoming the new First Lady. Life could not be better. They’re going to get out of their smart clothes, have dinner with the kids, kill the two hours waiting for the results to be declared, and then begin their life as the new leaders. That’s what they think is going to happen.

But then Oedipus’ adoptive mother turns up and there’s revelation after revelation after revelation. And Jocasta tells him something that she’s never told him, even though they’ve been married for 23 years. She tells him the true story about her marriage to the previous leader, Laius, and that she had his baby when she was 13 and the baby was taken away from her, a baby that she never saw. She doesn’t know if it’s dead or alive. She tells Oedipus all of this. And that is honestly, I believe, one of the greatest speeches I’ve ever had to do. And that is all credit to Robert Icke’s writing in this adaptation.

It’s also a credit to Tom [Gibbons], who did the sound design. We had such a sophisticated sound system with a hundred speakers in the auditorium so I could really speak that speech as if I was being filmed. That made it very special, to have everything build up to this revelation at the end when his mother comes and says, Actually I’m not your real mother. I adopted you. We found you in the woods. It’s like a train that you just can’t stop. And the audience gets so drawn into it. And the clock’s ticking away. And then Oedipus and Jocasta have to get changed to present themselves, and so we just got changed on stage in silence, two people not able to look at each other in the way that they’ve been looking at each other for 23 years. An extraordinary piece of writing and I knew when I read it years ago that this was absolutely, unquestionably, unequivocally a play I simply had to do.

DEADLINE: It’s extraordinary not only in the writing, but in the performances and in the direction, because as I say, even though we know how the classic version of the play ends, there’s a sense with this adaptation that maybe it’s going to be changed. We don’t really know, and yet, as soon as those hints start coming about the baby in the woods, the scales start falling from our eyes, and then it’s just this sense of dread. Are they going to go through with it? And you just string us along so beautifully. Were there different audience reactions for every performance of that scene, or was it fairly uniform?

MANVILLE: I could certainly feel the audience with me. I mean, unless somebody had a really bad cough, you could hear nothing during that speech. And that ending, you could feel the audience thinking, They’ve been married for 23 years, they’ve just found out they are mother and son. Should they be
kissing? Is it okay because they’ve made three children? They’ve clearly already done a lot of kissing. The audience doesn’t know what they think, their moral compass is all shot to pieces. We created a couple that were very recognizable. They are each other’s best friend, they argue, they laugh, they’re clearly very hot for each other, they’ve still got this great relationship. So I think that all contributes to the audience’s dilemma of how to feel when the big revelation happens. But, yeah, it was a shocking, shocking scene.

And also that moment when I crawl off of him, when we’ve been rolling over the floor and then we kind of think without saying anything, We can’t do this. We can’t. We cannot have sex because we’re mother and son. I remember Rob [Icke] said to me, Just crawl off him, and I thought, Well what do you mean? Just roll off him? He said, No, crawl off him like a kind of sliding off his body. And of course it looked like I was rebirthing him and that was a very potent image for the audience. Rob really is a genius, and I don’t use that word flippantly. He’s a proper genius.

DEADLINE: I apologize if this is going to sound like a very actor-y question, but in terms of portraying the grief, well, it’s more than grief here. Jocasta is gobsmacked with grief and shock and who knows what. Where did you pull that from?

MANVILLE: It goes back to what I said earlier. You can’t prepare for those scenes because they’re happening in real time. The whole two hours of the play is real time. So I can’t be in my dressing room at the beginning thinking that at the end of this play and during that speech, which was nearly 15 minutes long, I’ve got to go to this dark place, there’s going to be tears. You can’t prepare for that because the opening of the play is nothing like that. It’s jolly. They’re happy. The kids are there. They’re eating Shepherd’s Pie, his favorite meal. So you can only deal with those [dark] moments in the moment. The power of the language of that speech did it for me every night, and that’s Rob’s writing. There was never an evening where I did not fully get there with that speech and the emotion of it, just saying the words, imagining that scenario, imagining being that 13 year old girl being put through this horrendous ordeal, and just hearing the language and saying it. I had to tell a story. I could do it in the most economical way because of the microphone I was wearing. I could just speak it. I didn’t have to think of projecting up to the gods. I could just speak it and every single member of the audience wherever they were sitting would get it. It was about being in the emotion of the moment and you certainly couldn’t prepare for that, because it’s in real time.

DEADLINE: As for being in the moment, unfortunately some people in the audience would rather look at their phones. I know it’s become accepted at curtain calls but honestly it still drives me crazy, especially during the show. Do you ever get distracted? Do you let yourself get distracted?

MANVILLE: They were doing it at the curtain call. I just had to get over it, really. I just had to say, This is what they’re doing. What am I going to do? Because you don’t want to spoil it for all the other people who aren’t on their phones, who are just there going, Oh, my God, I love what I’ve just seen, and they’re just thanking you by applause. So you don’t want to spoil it for them. I had to just get over it. It’s fine. It’s fine.

DEADLINE: I suppose. But even as an audience member I just think, Why can’t you just absorb all this that you’re seeing?

MANVILLE: I couldn’t agree more, but, you know, there’s more people than you and me in the world.

DEADLINE: Talk a bit about what you’re doing now and what you have coming up. When are you going to be on Broadway again?

MANVILLE: Well, it’s funny because only the other day somebody was offering me something but obviously I can’t talk about it. But somebody actually was.

DEADLINE: Just a little hint.

MANVILLE: Somebody was offering me a play on Broadway. So that’s all to be considered. Right now I’m at the National Theatre in London doing Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which I started immediately after I finished Oedipus. I got the red eye home and came straight to the rehearsal rooms here. I’ve got another couple of weeks here – I’m speaking to you from my dressing room at the National – and then later in the year I’ve got a film with Joel Coen coming out which I’m itching to see. I had a wonderful time working with him and Frances McDormand, his wife who was also the producer, so that’s coming out later in the year. [In addition to Manville and McDormand, the film, Jack of Spades, a period drama set in 1880s Scotland, also stars Josh O’Connor and Damian Lewis.]

DEADLINE: I don’t think I congratulated you on your Tony nomination, so congratulations. Did you have a chance to see any of the other nominated shows on Broadway?

MANVILLE: No, because we were all doing the same performance schedules, but just before we opened, I managed to see my lovely friend Laurie Metcalfe in Little Bear Ridge Road. That’s all I got to see, but it was so lovely to see her. And I’m very glad to see that she’s nominated for Death of a
Salesman.

The Broadway production of Robert Icke’s adaptation of Sophicles’ Oedipus began previews October 30, 2025, at Studio 54, opened November 13 and ended its limited run on February 8, 2026. It has received seven Tony Award nominations: Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Mark Strong), Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Lesley Manville), Best Direction of a Play (Robert Icke), Best Scenic Design of a Play (Hildegard Bechtler), Best Lighting Design of a Play (Natasha Chivers) and Best Sound Design of a Play (Tom Gibbons).

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