Picture: Getty Images
The actress and model Sophie Kennedy Clark bounds into Bob Bob Ricard, around the corner from the Sky studio where she has to work this afternoon. In what she terms her “work uniform” – black shorts over opaque tights, lifted with a pair of leopard-print shoes – Kennedy Clark seems much younger than her 24 years, and possesses the quintessential delicate English rose colouring that one imagines beneath a bonnet in some Jane Austen adaptation. “My mother keeps asking if I’d ever consider a period drama,” she chuckles. Sadly for her mother (who is the singer and actress Fiona Kennedy) the answer is likely to be: not in the foreseeable future. For although Kennedy Clark’s wide-set blue eyes and fall of golden hair give her an elfin beauty that has seen her fronting campaigns for both Burberry and Pringle, she prefers to subvert their message in her choice of screen roles. Her film debut was in Tim Burton’s vampire thriller Dark Shadows, she went on to give birth on screen as the young Philomena in the eponymous film about forced adoption, and followed this up with a central role in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Where did she get the courage to take on such challenging films? “I go up for all sorts of nice girl-next-door jobs and I don’t seem to get them. Maybe I've got some sort of strange quality?” she laughs, in her softly Scottish-accented tones. “The reason I fell in love with film is because it’s so mind-expanding,” she explains, more seriously, citing Tilda Swinton and Samantha Morton as her inspirations. “I’m very instinctual as an actress. I never trained, and I’ve been so lucky in the things I got so early on being so high-octane. When you’re given that platform, I think you have a responsibility to do work that affects people. So maybe I go in to those meetings with a bit more vim and vigour?”
It is therefore less surprising than it might seem that for her latest project, Kennedy Clark has teamed up with Jake Chapman, the controversial contemporary artist, who, with his brother Dinos, has made headlines for works featuring defaced Goya etchings and Nazi atrocity vitrines. “You don’t stroll past his work without a double take,” says Kennedy Clark approvingly. Now, she’s participating in one: Chapman’s television directorial debut, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor. Blackly comic and unsettling (Kennedy Clark describes it as “a cross between the Rocky Horror Picture Show and a David Lynch film”), the series is an adaptation of Chapman’s pastiche of a Mills & Boon novel of the same name. Kennedy Clark plays the heroine Chlamydia Love, torn between two men: her handsome plastic surgeon fiancé, and a hideously deformed writer, both played with considerable vim by Rhys Ifans. The story swoops nightmarishly between locations – a puddle of vomit in a nightclub lavatory morphs into a volcano, for instance – while Kennedy Clark herself veers from exquisitely pneumatic to hideously scarred by botched plastic surgery. Bunches of flowers burgeon and rot before your eyes, maggots writhe across the screen…the effect is as simultaneously surreal and witty as any of Chapman’s artworks.
“I remember reading the script and I was like, I really don’t think anyone could do this as strangely as I think it deserves to be done,” says Kennedy Clark. “I felt I could go to the places they wanted me to.”
So did she enjoy working with the famously fiery artist, I wonder? “I don’t want to ruin his enfant terrible reputation, but he was a complete joy to work with,” she says. “We got on really well. He’s a natural collaborator. He really allowed anyone, from make-up to set design, to have their input. If you had any ideas, you just had to flag them up. Then, it just all came together as a masterpiece.”
Chapman is equally complimentary. “It’s been amazing working with Sophie,” he tells me, when he arrives about half an hour late (not, it turns out, a demonstration of indifference to social niceties, but because he was stuck in traffic coming from the Cotswolds home that he shares with his wife, the model Rosemary Ferguson, and their family). “It’s unnerving to watch someone become somebody else and so easily adopt the complexity of what you’re asking. It’s quite weird.”
While Chapman has directed before, notably a short film called The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey, which also starred Ifans as a mediocre painter alongside a stop-motion cockroach with artistic aspirations (voiced by David Thewlis), this is his first major directing project. “It was very intense,” he says. “I fumbled my way through.” In some respects, the directing process is similar to creating art, he says. “You start off with an idea – in this case, the idea is the script – and it becomes something completely different. It essentially disowns you, and you have to fumble around in the dark to try and restore it to what you think it should be.”
Despite the disparity in their ages, their fame and their fortunes, Chapman and Kennedy Clark have a relationship of mutually affectionate equals; they spend most of lunch teasing one another and laughing at each other’s jokes. At one point, Kennedy Clark praises Chapman’s “clear direction.” “Clear direction? That sounds like a spot cream!” Chapman expostulates.
So would they like to work together again? “Hasn’t he told you about the sequel?” marvels Kennedy Clark. “Chlamydia in Space,” nods Chapman. “It’s exactly the same story, but in space. I’m writing the script now.” With anybody else, you’d dismiss this as an obvious joke; I’m not at all sure these two aren’t actually telling the truth…
'The Marriage of Reason and Squalor' will air on Sky Arts on 11 June. This feature originally ran in the July 2015 issue of Harper's Bazaar.
***
MORE CULTURE NEWS
Pixie Lott to star in Breakfast at Tiffany's
Michelle Dockery headed to the West End
Emily Blunt to star in The Girl on the Train
