Andrea Riseborough On Why The Work Speaks For Itself

25 March, 2026

Words Emily Zemler
Photos Rachell Smith
Styling Ignacio De Tiedra

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Andrea Riseborough loves acting. But she doesn’t always enjoy talking about it, a reality that she admits multiple times during our interview. She’s not reluctant to answer questions, exactly, but performing is an all-encompassing feat, not something that can–or should–be broken down academically.

“I try not to talk about it very much, firstly because I just bore myself and secondly because it's very personal,” she says, speaking from the car on the way to the airport to film her next movie. “If you do it to any level of depth, the way that we try to as actors, those bits can be really painful or those bits can be very personal. There are always parts of it you want to keep for yourself.”

In every role, the British actress, 44, is always knock-out impressive, often taking on emotionally difficult projects that linger with the viewer. She memorably appeared in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals and earned an Oscar nomination for her role as an alcoholic in To Leslie, and she held her own opposite Kate Winslet in Lee Miller biopic Lee. She has embodied multiple real people, from Wallis Simpson in W.E. to Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley to Marilyn Barnett in Battle of the Sexes, starring opposite Emma Stone.

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It’s clear that Riseborough, who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, is an undeniable chameleon onscreen. It’s off-screen where she finds herself less at ease, perhaps because it means digging too deep into her intuitive process. She says she doesn’t necessarily mind promoting something after she’s done—the red carpets, the press junkets, the interviews—but the glory is in doing it rather than analyzing it.

“The process of making it or the process of rehearsing the play and then playing in the theater, that’s the holy grail,” she says. “But I've always felt, over the last 20 years of doing this, that it’s a chance to process what you've done. Because you wouldn't necessarily always give yourself that chance, as we all don't as humans, to process that job. It is kind of incredible to be able to talk about something that you've been part of.”

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Our interview today is an opportunity for Riseborough to reflect on The Good Boy, her most recent film, as well as how her career has unfolded over the past few years. In 2024 and 2025, she shot comedic thriller The Good Boy, Yorkshire-set drama Dragonfly, her friend Kate Winslet’s directorial debut Goodbye June, and The Queen of Fashion in succession and then played the lead role in Mary Page Marlowe at London’s Old Vic Theatre. From the outside, it seems like Riseborough is compelled by challenging roles, but she says that’s just the gig.

“I’ve had very few experiences where a performance or a film is not intense, to be honest,” she says. “It's a very all-encompassing way of approaching life. Shooting a film is a very odd thing to do. It's many, many hours a week. There's very little respite. It always feels, no matter what the subject matter, extraordinarily intense. It also [can be] a great deal of fun. And sometimes it's not, and that's appropriate, depending on what the subject matter is.”

Riseborough met Jan Komasa, the director of The Good Boy (known as Heel in the U.S.), after seeing his 2019 film Corpus Christi. “I thought it was one of the best films that year that it came out and I was talking to everyone about it,” she recalls. “Then he reached out to me to offer me a film. When those things happen you always feel that kismet. It’s always such a satisfying thing because you think, ‘Oh goodness, two tastes are intersecting in a way that is very natural.’”

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While Kosama and Riseborough were waiting to get that project off the ground (it has yet to film), he began production on The Good Boy, which also stars Stephen Graham. It was Graham who suggested they enlist Riseborough to play his character’s wife. She and Graham had previously played “an extraordinarily poorly behaved set of parents” before in the 2022 film adaptation of Matilda the Musical.

“Stephen's taste is so impeccable and he's a dear friend,” she says. “So before I'd even looked at the script, I knew that if these two people gravitated toward it was going to be really special.” She adds, “There are so very few beautifully written pieces and there are very few really extraordinary directors and there are very few actors that work from a place of complete authenticity.”

In The Good Boy, Riseborough plays Catherine, a woman who has become emotionally locked down by the trauma of losing a child. She and her husband Chris (Graham) live in a stately manor with their remaining son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). The couple takes it upon themselves to kidnap and attempt to rehabilitate a wayward teenage boy named Tommy (Anson Boon) using unconventional methods, including keeping him chained in the basement like a dog. As their efforts begin to reach Tommy, Catherine herself opens up—an emotional evolution that Riseborough is loath to explain.

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“As a performer what you attempt to be taken by is that she's in these vast waves of grief,” she says. “And that's really all that you connect with. Connecting with anything else would be too consciously performative. If you're trying to tell a story, especially as an actor in a piece that is being orchestrated by somebody else, it's essential that I do my job only. And that's the connection to that horrendous grief. And then in each moment, everything else becomes very clear. The awakening is clear.”

The film was shot in the fall of 2024 on location in Yorkshire and on sets built in a studio in Warsaw. Riseborough can’t remember if production lasted for six or eight weeks, but it was enough to become fully immersed in the experience of playing Catherine.

“We had to be quick, but it felt like we had space and time to do what we needed to do,” she says. “We were very united as a team of actors and committed and ready to go immediately at all times because of the kind of actors that all of us are. That was wonderful and it made everything very smooth and left lots of room for creativity.”

Not long after wrapping The Good Boy, Riseborough filmed Dragonfly, an intimate, heart-wrenching drama from filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams. It’s essentially a two-hander between Riseborough, who plays a lonely woman who befriends her elderly neighbour (Brenda Blethyn). There was something deeply familiar about the characters for Riseborough, who is from the north of England herself.

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“Paul brought the script to me and immediately I knew that I wanted to do it,” she recalls. “It was the same with The Good Boy. I read an awful lot of things, most of which I don't connect with or they don't hold the same kind of authenticity that these two projects held. With Dragonfly what was precious about it was that it was a story about three people who were incredibly real. We see so little of that really in cinema. Our language can be quite narrow in terms of representing people.”

Riseborough was similarly compelled by Goodbye June, her third time collaborating with Winslet. “We've become dear friends,” she says of Winslet, who directed and co-starred in Goodbye June, a film about children grieving their dying mother. “She's just extraordinary. She's so supportive, she's so secure, she's so gifted, and she has the real rare ability where she performs really excellently within structure. She’s just endlessly capable.”

She adds, “When you work with people and you form connections with them, it is wonderful to then work with them again and call them a friend that next time around. And to do it over and over again. It feels very much like being in the theater. It feels like you've built a company. We certainly felt that way with the Goodbye June family. Brenda and I felt that way on Dragonfly. And Stephen and Anson and Kit and Monica and I felt that way about The Good Boy.”

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Riseborough recently wrapped filming on Ti West’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, in which she plays the Ghost of Christmas Past. That one is set for release later this year and she’s already on her way to the next project, a film with an ever-changing title she can’t speak about yet. Her schedule seems as intense as the roles she plays. But, again, that’s the gig.

“There are so many professions where people are stretched to their limit,” she says. “And this is perhaps not what people might imagine. It is not as glamorous. That’s got nothing to do with it. That's the thing afterwards where everyone has a shower and washes their armpits and gets out there and shows up in a different way to try to honor the thing that everyone's created. But that's nothing to do with the actual process of it. Nor should it be if you're trying to tell important stories or if you're trying to tell funny stories or if you're trying to uplift people.”

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Immersing herself so deeply in her work has had added benefits, too. “One of the things that is most beneficial is that you feel endlessly equipped to do more than you feel that you might be able to in every area,” she says. Emotionally, psychologically, intellectually. Those moments where you feel like you can't really take on any more, that's when the work gives you a bit extra… There’s no escaping the extraordinarily fast pace and intensity of life. So perhaps the key is to attempt to take each moment with lightness.”

A Good Boy is in UK cinemas now.