The Game of Thrones star on her new role as Jocasta in Oedipus, the age-old preoccupation with how actresses look and why she’s dissatisfied with the screen work she’s offered
As Indira Varma bounces into a meeting room during a break in rehearsals for Oedipus at the Old Vic Theatre in London, I’m struck by how youthful she looks. The Olivier-winning actress is 51 but looks 41, which ordinarily would be fine — except she’s playing Jocasta while Rami Malek is playing her son, Oedipus, and he is 43. I explain my mother-son age-gap concern. “I think we’re playing it that [the age difference] is more than a decade,” Varma says, smiling. She poohs-poohs my suggestion that some greys and wrinkles could be artificially added.
Too many productions are hyped as “eagerly awaited” but the playwright Ella Hickson’s adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy, opening this month, deserves the descriptor. It marks a UK stage debut for the California-born Malek, who won an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018 and was the memorably terrifying James Bond villain Safin in No Time to Die in 2021. Meanwhile, Varma has established herself as one of the UK’s strongest stage actresses playing, variously, Lady Macbeth, Arkadina in The Seagull, Olivia in Twelfth Night and Liz in the Old Vic’s 2019 production of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, which won her an Olivier award….