Post your questions for Martin Clunes

His credits range from Men Behaving Badly to Wuthering Heights, and now he’s playing Huw Edwards. What would you dearly love to know about the actor and documentary presenter? It’s delightful that Martin Clunes has won so many plaudits for his performance in this year’s Wuthering Heights, alongside Margot Robbie’s Cathy and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff. He plays Cathy’s drunk but generous, cruel yet humorous father in a part that could easily have drifted into the background. But he makes such an impression that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw reckons he “ pretty much pinches the whole film ”. It’s not as if Clunes hasn’t brushed shoulders with the Hollywood A-list before. You might remember him as Richard Burbage, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes and Judi Dench, in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love – a role with added resonance given that his father, Alec Clunes, who died when Clunes was eight, was a distinguished Shakespearean actor. Other roles include 1992’s Carry On Columbus (the la...

Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley: ‘Never repress a woman – because it will come out’

The actors star in a true-life 1920s tale of a snobbish small town upset by poison-pen letters. They discuss falling in love with one another, the f-word and the parallels with today’s internet trolling

On 23 September 1921, a letter arrived at the home of Edith Swan, a laundress in the seaside town of Littlehampton, addressed to “the foxy ass whore 47, Western Rd”. One of the milder letters that had been plaguing the Sussex community for three years, it continued: “You foxy ass piss country whore you are a character.” Swan blamed a neighbour, Rose Gooding. But the post-office clerk and the local police had other suspicions, which drove them to rig up a periscope to spy on deliveries to the town’s post box and marking postage stamps with invisible ink.

The combination of filthy poison pen letters and DIY sleuthing in a quaint small-town setting is a gift for the star pairing of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. Directed by Thea Sharrock with a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, and stuffed with classy character actors, Wicked Little Letters blows a raspberry at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories. It also undercuts the Downton Abbey image of British social history which, says Buckley, “gives everybody the idea that people are kind of lovely when actually there’s a little bit of dirt under everybody’s pretty teacup. Everyone loves a good swear, even the ones that say they don’t.”

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