It would be rude to Jeff Goldblum and David Thewlis, among others, to say Janet McTeer acts everybody off the screen in the fiery, funny, purposeful new Netflix show Kaos. So let’s just say that, whenever she’s on screen, you’re never not watching. She plays Hera to Goldblum’s Zeus. “They’ve been Gods and they’ve been together for, like, 1,000 years,” she tells me by Zoom from her home in Maine. “There is a level of, you know, married life, ‘Oh, you’ve had a prophecy, don’t worry darling.’ Very blase.” There is a combination of wit and steel in McTeer’s performance that fans of Ozark (in which she played Helen, the lawyer) will recall – except brought to a new height by, well, her godliness.
By about episode two, you realise something else: that Hera is both puppeteer and sexual linchpin of the show. “I was 63 yesterday,” McTeer says, laughing. “It’s really nice to know you can still be in that role.” Despite TV evolving, both in the #MeToo sense and in its notion of the female shelf life, this is still unusual. “So often, the matriarch, the wife figure, they’re in the background. They’re not overlooked, they’re important, they’re marvellous – as long as they’re where they should be. Even now that’s true.” But Hera is all foreground, all agency and sexual destiny, all authority; not selfish exactly, but definitely not selfless. “She’s very, ‘Now listen. I’m OK sitting here in my kaftan, but if anybody messes with me, trust me, I will stand up and fight.’ That’s what’s wonderful about her, she’s a slow burn.”
McTeer grew up in Newcastle, trained at Rada, and people of a certain age (mine, 51) will remember first really noticing her in the Lynda La Plante drama The Governor in 1995, in which she played a prison governor (all authority, less of the kaftans). The guys on the TV desk in my first job used to call her “the thinking man’s Helen Mirren”, and we used to say: “Helen Mirren is already the thinking man’s Helen Mirren” – because this was before you were allowed to say: “Thinking men don’t compartmentalise women by their effect on a thinking man.”
McTeer is more struck by the sexism of the 80s, because she happened to see a documentary the night before “about 80s television: newscasters and journalists, women talking about how hard it was, pushing the ceiling. Being let go at 35 for not being as pretty as they had been. The idea, then, that Charlie [Covell, the creator of Kaos] would write a part for a 60-year-old woman who is the sexual power at the centre of the piece, is just blissful.”
McTeer went officially international after her Olivier award-winning performance as Nora in A Doll’s House in 1996. Talking about that Ibsen play, McTeer describes how much society has changed for women just over her lifetime. “I was brought up to be a wife and a mum. To go off and do what I have done, living my life the way I have lived, it was very much not what I was brought up to be. I’ve earned my own money, done my own thing, had my own views, but it was always considered strange. So when I see these younger women who have been brought up to be whatever they want to be, I hope that helped; I hope we helped them along that path.”
I went to A Doll’s House with my mum, and it made such an impression that I don’t just remember McTeer’s face as Nora walked out on her husband, I can remember what my mum was wearing. Anyway, that show transferred to Broadway, where she won a Tony and all the other awards going, and the New York Times reviewer called it “the single most compelling performance I have ever seen”, which – let’s be clear – theatre reviewers almost never say, because they know they can’t say it twice. After that, McTeer had officially launched in the US, and soon after won a Golden Globe and got an Oscar nomination for the 1999 movie Tumbleweeds.
She has lived in Maine with her husband, the poet and fashion consultant Joseph Coleman, for around 15 years. She turns round her iPad screen to show me the landscape, and hopefully a deer, and then she drops her iPad, but I pick up, loud and clear, that she loves it there. She is emphatically not, however, in a tending-her-garden, do-the-odd-bit-of-work phase of life.
“When you’re young, you’re trying to work out who you are: ‘What am I thinking? Who do I love? How do I make money? Is there a God?’ You spend your first several years trying to answer all of that, and then you end up in the nesting phase, having to juggle school, bake cakes for the cake bake, politics. And then you get to the point of being an empty nester and your focus becomes the next generation, what are you leaving behind, what’s the state of the world. You become more political, more avid, I suppose.”
It’s an approach that suits Kaos very well. It’s a romp and it’s cheeky, but it is also extremely political and pretty timely. “Charlie’s take on Greek mythology is such an allegory of the world we live in now – it sees the gods from a completely different angle. They are, for want of a better phrase, part of the 1%. We spent a long time, Jeff and [actor] Nabhaan Rizwan and myself, sitting around going, ‘If you’re the 1%, who are you? What do you think? What do you believe?’ Because getting your head around killing lots of people – no spoilers – is quite hard.”
Kaos has been compared to Succession, in the sense that we see a lot of (omnipotent) siblings who hate each other. But it also joins that show in thinking critically and creatively about billionaires; as if they were not just strange creatures living luxurious lives on another star, but people whose decisions affect us all – which can be a problem because they’re sociopaths.
“I think some of the 1% really don’t care about anyone else. They don’t care what it costs ordinary people for them to maintain their life. As long as they’re making a lot of money, as long as they get what they want and they maintain their lifestyle, they will do whatever it takes to protect that. People don’t matter. In that sense, people are just sort of ants. And that’s how I tried to think as Hera – they are just ants under your finger.”
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What a Netflix show can do that a hard-hitting long-form investigation into, say, the mind of Elon Musk can’t, is show that callousness, that double life (where, as McTeer puts it: “You still want the best for your children; you still enjoy whatever it is that you enjoy; you’re killing a load of people one minute and saying ‘Get your feet off the couch’ the next”) in a way that is delicious but not anaesthetising. Kaos is visually opulent, it’s verbally dextrous, you won’t be watching it out of a sense of duty. But it is deeply political in a pretty energising way. “We had fun with it,” McTeer says simply. “It’s a gross generalisation, of course. Some of the 1% are magnificent people, but there are definitely some who are not. We are the ones who couldn’t give a toss about everybody else.”
The last play McTeer did in the UK was Phaedra last year at the National (“I only play goddesses now”) and that had its own allegorical punch, situating her eponymous character in a metropolitan elite disconnected from society by its own narcissism. The ancient gods are coming in dramatically handy in these vexed times of gross inequality and global discord steered by invisible wealth.
“Of course, it’s wonderful to see old people enjoying it,” she says dutifully, “but especially to see these young people every night, discovering classical theatre, thrilled and excited and shocked to start in this domestic drama and end up in this epic, massive tragedy in such a short amount of time.” Even though Phaedra was a big, unwieldy show with a very expensive set and all that, McTeers says: “I’m going to do my damnedest to try to do it in New York somehow.”
Apart from if she stopped acting for a different career – she’d be a psychiatrist, she says – her next dream is: “If I could write myself another television series, I would be prime minister.” Kaos has either given her a taste for her own magnificent authority or for box sets with a purpose. Maybe both.