No, Brenda Blethyn didn’t retire after the final series of ITV megahit Vera – but even she wasn’t prepared to sign up for a new film role the second she left the set for the last time.
“I was on my way home from Northumberland, I’d just finished shooting Vera after 14 years, and I’d got a call from my agent asking if I’d be interested in a film role”, she told Zavvi. “I couldn’t have been less interested, I just wanted to go home – and then I was told Andrea Riseborough was in it and that Paul Andrew Williams was making it, which changed everything.”
“I read the script and decided there, as I absolutely loved it. It was an imminent process, as filming started a week later; it might have not even been made if I hadn’t read it right there and then”.
Williams says that getting Blethyn on board his genre-defying low-budget drama Dragonfly was “fate”, as he was struggling to find someone who could play Elsie, the widowed protagonist who is housebound after a nasty fall. Her son (Jason Watkins) has hired agency care workers to look after her rather than visit himself, but this changes when lonely neighbour Colleen (Riseborough) comes into her life.
On paper, Colleen sounds like a tabloid stereotype; she doesn’t work and is on benefits, and her pet dog looks like it’s willing to pounce on anybody it passes. But Williams’ script doesn’t vilify her for this – instead, he turns this around on the audience, making us assume the worst at face value, weaponising the way even the most progressive viewers might unconsciously respond to her at first.
“She’s really lonely, because she’s the sort of person that people would be afraid of being friendly with, especially because she’s happy to talk”, Williams told Zavvi. “Nowadays, if someone talks to you on the tube, you immediately think f**k off, but it never used to be like that; we could have conversations with strangers that didn’t feel like there was an ulterior motive, or an underlying threat, which we’ve lost as a society.”
It’s a perfect setup for a slice-of-life drama about an unlikely intergenerational friendship, which gives both performers the chance to play outside of their comfort zones. Blethyn, however, stressed that she wasn’t just keen to play a role that was the polar opposite of her small-screen detective; “I’m someone with zero ambition as an actor, I’m just hoping that good material arrives in my lap!”
The tie that binds the neighbours together is their shared loneliness, which comes from Williams’ own personal anxieties.
“I’m someone who hates being left on my own for too long, as I struggle with loneliness; if I’m away from my family or friends for a period of time, suddenly I’m giving myself a massive head examination! Having someone to talk to, and to feel needed in some capacity even if it’s just to talk to someone else, is vital, because that feeling of being alone is just horrible.
“In the case of Elsie, she can’t go out much, but she also doesn’t think of approaching people to help her. She doesn’t think anybody would want to speak to her, so she doesn’t go out looking for it.”
“I believe Paul started developing this story during the pandemic”, Blethyn added, “when nobody else could visit their friends or family unless they lived in 10 Downing Street, and I think that’s what woke many of us up to the fact many people are struggling with loneliness, with or without a pandemic.
“It is a problem, but so is people watching this and only thinking of the loneliness of Elsie, as Colleen is also on her own, and her only friend and lifeline is a dog. When I was reading the script for the first time, I responded to her like Elsie did, because we often make judgements about somebody and discover we got it wrong.
“I think it’s probably true of her son as well; he doesn’t visit very often, but we have no idea what his home life is like. We can make judgements about everyone in this, but I think what is great about Paul’s writing is that he makes us believe they’re all acting with what they think are their own best intentions.”
If our sympathies are most easily with Elsie from the offset, then that’s largely because Williams took inspiration from his family when developing the character, taking traits from both his mum and nan.
“At first, I was thinking of these characters as normal people and wanted to capture the banality of how the average person acts when they’re on their own, even if it’s just through a task like making a cup of tea. You observe people acting like that the most when you’re growing up, so those memories were a starting point.
“But also, Elsie’s house is very deliberately designed like my nan’s was, and I think that’s resonated with a lot of viewers; this feels like a lived-in British grandparents’ home. The only thing I had to change from the script was that she initially had an electric recliner chair – it surprisingly took an age for Brenda to get in and out of it within a scene!”
Without spoiling the direction of Dragonfly, the third act takes a turn into psychological thriller territory, arguably even horror territory considering a genuinely unexpected jump scare within Elsie’s home. If you’ve seen Williams’ previous films – such as his Neil Maskell thriller Bull, a stripped-down gangster thriller that slowly becomes supernatural – you should expect such genre-bending, but neither he nor Blethyn view the film in those terms.
“Would you say that if you got on a train in Peterborough and something unexpected happened on that train that was turning it into a horror film?” laughed Blethyn. “The slow changes in tone happen in the most ordinary situation and that is what happens in daily life when we’re exposed to everyday horrors too.”
“I try not to think of genre, because life itself is unpredictable”, Williams added. “This movie has a jump scare, but it wasn’t until after we made it and started screening it that I even realised it does – the reason it takes a turn for the horrific is all because of character choices.
“When I make a film, I’m never trying to think beyond the moment – the performances, music and camerawork are all aiming for what that story requires in any particular scene. I never think about switching between genres, because I operate from a place where something terrible can happen at any moment!”
As her first post-Vera role, Dragonfly is a surprising choice as Blethyn recently said in an interview that she hates seeing violence in films and TV, and the bloody threat of it lingers over the film’s second half.
“This isn’t the sort of violence I don’t like”, she confirmed. “It’s James Bond films or other action movies where things get gratuitously blown up that I'm not a fan of – and I don’t like too much sex on the screen either, although I need to stress I’m not a prude by any means!
“I did 14 years and 56 episodes of Vera, a show all about murder, but you’d rarely actually see it as it was a family show. In fact, most of our avid fans were children, they’d come to the set with their parents and make drawings of Vera to give to me, which is funny because on paper it could sound like a violent show, you just never see anything grotesque onscreen.”
“The violence is all in the feeling”, Williams added. “It was designed so you don’t see much at all, but feel the weight of it.
“Although, I do have to disagree with Brenda. The extreme stuff here might be implied, but I do very much like watching sex on the telly, and lots of violence too!”
Dragonfly is in UK cinemas from Friday, November 7
