'I'm losing track of how I really sound': actress Monica Dolan Credit & Copyright: Andrew Crowley
Who is Monica Dolan really? In a wide range of performances, she carries with her a quiet aura of repression and frustration. Often the lid is torn open to reveal other emotions: grief, rage, passion, resentment, cunning, violence, or worse. Some of her characters end up in jail. There are even rumors that Rose West (A Suitable Adult) and Ann Darwin (The Thief, his wife and a canoe) crossed paths in HMP Low Newton.
What will happen to Loch Henry? The new season of Black Mirror is out on Netflix, so anyone who's seen it knows that something terribly dark and confusing lurks beneath the frost and twisted appearance of Dolan's character, a Highlands widow mother who loves bergerac and plain home cooking.
“I also play quite a few people who don't have dark secrets,” she says. It refers to, say, A Very English Scandal, or Bagnold Summer Days, or Talking Heads. But when her character disappears for twenty minutes, anyone with basic telegram literacy will suspect something is brewing.
“Maybe I'll have to do another interview,” she says, “and say that I really didn't have enough money, and I had to play a small role in Black Mirror. She is laughing. What's more, 45 minutes on the phone with Dolan—she's off to film a drama in Kent—shows she laughs a lot more in real life than she does in the role.
There is one role in her back catalog – the one that won her a Bafta Award – that may have given her clues for the part. She knows the one I'm talking about: Rose West. “It came to my mind,” she says. “I completely left him alone as a source.” Since we're talking before the release of Loch Henry, she doesn't want to discuss it further.
So what can we talk about in Black Mirror? Let's try some accents. Dolan is so nimble that you could look at her head of firefighting public relations at W1A and imagine that she really is Welsh. It's almost unexpected to hear her speak in the Home Counties RP.
“I'm also losing the idea of how I really sound,” she says. She doesn't always use a dialect coach to find her voice. “I remember playing in a play once and thought it sounded like Delboy from Only Fools and Horses, so I directed it.” For Loch Henry, she chose a light Highland accent, reinforced by strict tutoring. She stayed in it on set because “if you suddenly start talking with that accent, it's like suddenly doing a very strenuous exercise in the gym without warming up.”
This was a potential violation of the rule introduced by Netflix that “you are not allowed to imitate people as part of your work, you must show respect. A lot of the people I worked with were Scottish, so I told them, “I use this accent when I'm not doing a double – please don't be offended.” ”
She brought two completely random areas of retro lore to Black Mirror. Her character's devotion to John Nettles was shared by Dolan's mother. “Of course, when I was offered Midsomer Murders, I couldn't refuse, and on my parents' golden wedding anniversary, I received a signed photo of John Nettles. I may have unwittingly studied the backstory.”
Michala Herrold as Pia in Black Mirror: Loch Henry Credit & Copyright: Netflix
She also got to know how VHS tape recorders work and still owns one. “At one point, we were trying to do something that was tech-related, and I was like, 'Oh wait, hasn't tape been used for this before?' I was very, very, very proud when everyone said, “Oh yeah!” After that, I went up to Charlie [Brooker] and said: “If you see it in this scene, it was my idea.”
Dolan also needs to talk about cardigans. She often wears them because of the kind of women she plays – too often, according to her nieces. Did she ever ask about other options? “Well, I could, but the point is, if it's someone who's going to wear a cardigan, it's someone who's going to be wearing a cardigan, and that's it. You can't really betray a character.” She reports changes in her latest job. “I have quite a lot of wool. Maybe I'm switching to fleece because I've had quite a few fleece like Anna Darwin. And I have a lot of polo shirts.”
Now she is filming in the film “Mr. Bates vs. the Mail.” The four-part ITV drama is about a blatant miscarriage of justice when a post office went after innocent people for what turned out to be accounting glitches in their own computerized system. In Jo Hamilton, who didn't go to jail but pleaded guilty to false counting, Dolan plays a lawbreaker you can really root for.
“I'm very lucky to have her because she really lovely person and very approachable and also very excited that we are doing this. She has an incredibly positive outlook. It must be innate, because she had to be so steadfast.” She attended the reading and sent Dolan an audio recording of her life story. “I got her backstory, which was extremely helpful. It also means you have an accent.”
'You can't really betray the character': Dolan as Anna Darwin in “The Thief, His Wife and Canoe “. Photo: TV footage
Meanwhile, on Channel 4 is “Change,” Bridget Christie's bewitching battle cry about a menopausal woman who leaves her carefree family for adventure in the Woods of Dean. Dolan plays Carmel, one of two odd forest sisters (last name: Eel), whose loamy accent will require many extra hours in the dialect lab. Her first utterance – “The vegetarian town has come for the caravan of believers, Agnes” – makes every garbled vowel sound like a cipher. The character is, at least in part, Dolan's own invention.
“I have been friends with Bridget for several years,” she says. “We chatted about these characters and what they might be called, and as is often the case, if you have a comedian as a friend, it ends up being their material. Bridget always wrote it. We thought about these characters all together.”
Episode Guide
Dolan also had her own characters in mind when she wrote and first performed her solo play Beasts in 2017. Her theme was the pornification of culture and its impact on children. “I thought I had something to say and someone else would say it first if I didn’t say it. I would really like to write something else, but sometimes I think: “Oh, I'm not sure if this is really useful to anyone.”
Before she starts being useful again by opening the lid of the post office, I ask her if she knows that Loch Henry is featured in “Joan the Terrible,” another episode of Black Mirror. When a character scrolls through a Netflix-like streaming platform, her show is one of the options.
“Oh, good,” she says. Nobody told her. “Wow. This sounds like the start of a Blue Peter annual that will go on forever. Makes me feel a little endless.”
Black Mirror is now on Netflix
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