Rose Leslie: ‘It was hard to say goodbye to Ygritte’

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/11/rose-leslie-ygritte-honeymoon-game-thrones

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Curled up on a blanket-strewn couch in a Battersea cafe a short stroll from her home – “My agent said to pick a spot where I feel comfortable, and this is where I have my coffee” – Rose Leslie admits that she isn’t rushing into the new year. “I’m luxuriating in a bit of quiet time right now,” she says, explaining that she’s recently returned from a five-month shoot in Pittsburgh.

When I suggest that five months in Pittsburgh is enough to earn anyone an extended recuperation, she leaps to the steel city’s defence. “It’s really lovely, actually,” she says. It’s an adjective the 27-year-old uses several times in our conversation, her RP vowels barely betraying her Scottish roots.

“The accent was beaten out of me long ago, I’m afraid,” she laughs. One of five children, born and raised in Aberdeen – in her family’s ancestral castle, no less – Leslie discovered an aptitude for self-disguise when she left as a teenager for boarding school in Somerset. “But my siblings and I can still slip into it when we’re together.”

Leslie does a lot of slipping into accents these days: most viewers will associate her primarily with the northern brogue she brought to her three-year stint as Ygritte, the headstrong wildling lover of Jon Snow, in HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Meanwhile, a film career is unfolding. Honeymoon, a nippily effective indie horror from debut director Leigh Janiak, is a striking calling card – having built solid buzz on the festival circuit, the film is out this month on DVD. It owes much of its nervy power to the gutsy, mutually attuned performances of Leslie and fellow Brit Harry Treadaway, as American newlyweds whose lakeside honeymoon goes awry following a night-time encounter.

“It felt like theatre in its intimacy and intensity,” says Leslie, whose stage work includes Bedlam at the Globe, “because you had to believe this couple had a relationship outside the confines of the film.” Both graduates of Lamda – “He was a couple of years above me, and I was the gimpy first-year in complete awe” – Leslie and Treadaway drew on their drama-school experience with exhaustive rehearsals prior to shooting. “Leigh was very open to us playing with things, especially by the point in the script where you don’t quite know who’s losing their marbles.”

It was certainly a world away from the expanse and expense of Game of Thrones, though Leslie found different comforts in the longer-term character arc of Ygritte, one that came to an end last year with – spoiler alert – her bloody death at the Battle of the Wall. “I enjoyed revisiting Ygritte every year, as opposed to being one character for four months and never seeing them again,” she says. “It was as hard to say goodbye to her as it was to the show itself.” (One thing that didn’t die with Ygritte was speculation about the nature of Leslie’s off-screen relationship with co-star Kit Harington.)

Leslie isn’t one to dwell on past roles, however. “I’m not yet fortunate enough to take only the scripts that capture my fancy,” she says, “but each one has to be a new experience, to put me in a light that audiences haven’t necessarily seen me before.” The next new experience: playing a witch (“no pointy hat, alas”) in the Pittsburgh project, the Vin Diesel-led The Last Witch Hunter. Beyond that? “I’d love to try comedy, which I’ve never actually done,” she says. “I could fail miserably at it, but I’d have fun working it out.”

Honeymoon is out on digital download on 12 January and on DVD later in the month