Jaime Winstone breezes into the room wearing a colorful silk dress and the easy confidence of someone who has always been undeniably cool. Cheerful and outgoing, her role as Sandra, the free spirit of the feted up-and-coming feminist blockbuster Made in Dagenham, suddenly makes much more sense. Her previous roles in films like Kidulthood and Donkey Punch would definitely qualify as ‘edgy’ but here she revels in the part of the sweet factory girl who dreams of being a model. Winstone says, ‘she’s such a sweet character, I just really relate to her. Sandra says, “We are going to make this strike happen, and I do believe in it, but it’s still a shitty factory, and I want more.”‘
She pauses. ‘Frankly,’ she adds, ‘for me it’s a real relief just not being chased by zombies.’ Made in Dagenham hopes to be a step up from Winstone’s recent project Dead Set, a horror series set in the Big Brother house. Telling the feelgood story of a women’s strike at the Dagenham Ford factory in the late sixties, it aims to blend serious equality issues with feisty, likeable characters.
Winstone is eager for the chance to bring a forgotten chapter of history back to life. ‘The locations we filmed in really gave us a sense of what it was like to be these women,’ she explains. ‘We could really feel the spirit of the characters. We all adopted the accent and joked that we were like a right bunch of Fag Ash Lils.’
Rosamund Pike, meanwhile, who played Miranda Frost in Die Another Die, looks every bit the off-duty Bond girl in black leather jeans and a lace biker-cut jacket. She is playing Lisa Hopkins – one of the film’s three central characters – a Cambridge-educated housewife inspired by the workers’ struggle. ‘She sees these women going out on a limb to fight for something they believe in,’ Pike tells me, ‘and she finds her voice, which is there all along but was lying dormant until her encounter with Rita inspired her again.’
She takes a moment to think.
‘Roles for women, you know, they don’t usually go to darker places.’ She is thoughtful, clearly untroubled by lingering silences. ‘I’m always trying to find characters that are not what they at first seem to be. Coming back to Made in Dagenham, she says of Lisa, ‘you think you’re dealing with a comfortable middle class toff who then turns out to be very ballsy and passionate.’
There is a similarly pensive moment with Winstone, when asked if the plight of the Dagenham strikers is still relevant forty years on. She nods in emphatic agreement, ‘especially with what’s going on now, with the aftermath of the recession,’she says. ‘I work in an industry where, apparently, women don’t have their say. For me this industry is based on tradition, where you’d have the starlets like Monroe and a male director.’ She stops again, only to return to her thoughts on the industry: ‘it’s 2010 now, we are catching up, but there is still inequality. I don’t know if that’s based on tradition, a British tradition, or if we’re just a little bit behind.’
Both women noticeably brighten when the conversation turns to their future roles. After playing the daffy Helen in An Education, Pike has been cast in more comedy roles, including the upcoming Johnny English sequel with Rowan Atkinson – ‘it has a really funny script,’ she says with relish. Her days reading English at Wadham have clearly been an influence – having just finished a stint playing Hedda Gabler for the Theatre Royal in Bath, she’s currently working on a BBC adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love, and stars opposite Paul Giamatti in a forthcoming adaptation of Barney’s Version.
Like Pike, Winstone is keen to avoid placing herself within any one category. She hints that a West End production may be on the cards, but when pressed for further detail, refuses to get overly specific: ‘I wouldn’t wanna say, ’cause if it flopped, that’d be shit.’
Even with the occasional sleepless night or the creeping sense that ‘we’re just a little bit behind,’ it is inspiring to see members of both the current and up-and-coming generations of British actresses practising what they preach so relentlessly.
While either could trade on their looks alone, they continue to choose edgy, intellectual, and sometimes downright unpretty roles. Tradition may still reign in the film industry, but Pike and Winstone are clearly doing their share to see that the ladies catch up.
