Daisy Ridley and her husband Tom Bateman working together on Magpie, a compelling film about motherhood, isolation and toxic marriage. Directed by Sam Yates and written by Bateman, the initial idea for the film came from Ridley after working on The Marsh King’s Daughter with young costar Joey Carson, filming in Ontario.
“Joey was unbelievable and so smart, and of course she knew that I wasn’t her mum, but I was really struck by … the fact that she was coming to work calling me mom, and she knew it’s not real. But then she was going home, and all of those dynamics at play,” Ridley explained to Yahoo Canada.
“And then because it was COVID, I was alone in Toronto, it was really lonely. But I have a solid family base. I have a solid partner, all of those things. … I have my sort of bedrock there. But the initial thing was, if you’re an actor and you go away, and it could be quite isolating, and if you don’t have something sort of stabilizing you at home, … what must that be like?”
In Magpie Ridley plays Anette, a mother of two children with her husband Ben (Shazad Latif), living in their glass mansion after Ben, a writer, wanted the family to move to the countryside.
When her daughter Matilda “Tilly” (Hiba Ahmed) gets a role in a movie, starring alongside popular actress Alicia (Matilda Lutz), who’s going through a leaked sex tape scandal, Ben takes it upon himself to join their daughter as her guardian on set. And he’s quickly attracted to Alicia.
Ben is a particularly negative husband, full of snide and rude comments to throw at his wife, and after spending time on set with their daughter he’s even more dismissive of Anette.
Having previously worked in publishing Anette now really only sees her infant child each day. The isolation, maintaining this beautiful home, that’s more like an art piece, and the impact of her husband’s toxicity, Anette’s behaviour becomes more erratic.
Discovering the attention that Ben is giving to Alicia, including looking at pictures of her when he’s not on set with Tilly, Anette spirals to initially try to keep her family together, but eventually all their secrets need to be exposed.
Buy Magpie on Apple TV for $14.99, or rent the film for $6.99
As Ridley explained, the original idea was focused on an actress trying to “infiltrate” a family after working with their young daughter, but Bateman was particularly interested in what happens to the woman who’s left at home.
“Who is the woman that isn’t able to go and be part of this romantic, exciting on-set thing? Who is this woman who, outside of her child going to work, has been isolated because of her husband’s job and his request that they go somewhere that is helpful for his creative process?” Ridley said. “And how is she handling all of those things and balancing all of those things when her child is so important to her, and she is feeling like the other woman in some ways in that relationship?”
But while Anette may have broken down, particularly after the extent of her husband’s attraction to Alicia, she’s never completely deflated.
“I remember once asking my mum, who’s not a violent person, we were talking about violence, and she said, ‘Honestly, the only time I could have ever imagined being violent is if anything happened to you three,’ me and my sisters,” Ridley said.
“I think being surrounded by amazing mothers, and everyone’s going through a lot all the time, but people that have to, even if you’ve had a terrible night’s sleep, you have to get up and you have to feed your kids. It’s sort of retaining that feeling of, as bad as it is for Anette, she still has two beautiful children who she wants to keep safe. … And a lot of that, again, is because she now no longer works, so there really isn’t a way out, bar him. So she’s going to try and make everything as easy as possible for everyone else, even if she has to bear so much.”
‘The opposite to love isn’t hate, it’s indifference’
A brilliant source of tension and claustrophobia in Magpie is seeing Anette in this house, with glass walls that reflect, as Ridley highlighted, a “gilded cage” where “the world is always looking in on her.”
“When she’s at the house by herself, aside from the baby crying, there’s really not much of anything. It’s sort of a dead space of sound,” Ridley said. “So as we were filming that we wanted to evoke that sort of claustrophobia.”
“It was interesting, even filming, we filmed the house stuff first, and then when we went to film within the film set all of us were like, ‘We can breathe!’ … I feel like everything we did with the visuals of it shows that she needs to break out. … She really has to sever those ties to even the place.”
There was also an intentional decision made for the audience to enter this relationship between Ben and Anette at a point where things are already particularly negative between them, with Anette being “used to” her husband’s terrible behaviour towards her at this point.
“We certainly wanted to come in not in a good spot, and I think we could have gone down the route of seeing them happy and then seeing how it’s changed, but the fact is, they’ve been together a long time. There’s a lot of history between them. So we wanted to establish that very quickly,” Ridley said. “And Tom, a phrase he had heard many years ago is, the opposite to love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. And I think a lot of what is so painful about how Ben is with Anette, particularly, is he’s just indifferent at the beginning. He’s certainly not trying to be cruel. He’s just indifferent, and he doesn’t choose his words amazingly well.”
“But also, Anette is so used to it by that point that it stings a little, and then on she goes. … I remember Sam saying she’s like a duck, underneath the water she’s trying to paddle, but it’s just trying to stay serene up here.”
‘We knew that the audience would bring a certain level of bias’
The story told in Magpie makes it easy to go deep on evaluating these characters, but what’s particularly exciting about the film is how this will likely land differently for everyone, based on each person’s perception of these character, and any preconceived notions any viewer may be coming into the film with.
That’s particularly true for the character Alicia, with there already being a history of judgment put on celebrities, largely women, after intimate tapes of them are released, like is the case with Alicia.
“We knew that the audience would bring a certain level of bias and there would be a certain level of projection put on her,” Ridley said. “How she is perceived changes and the perspective changes, but she is still someone that has gone through this awful thing.”
“Without knowing the history of Ben, he is acting as a knight in shining armour, … and he is really offering her sanctuary in a time that is incredibly difficult. But of course, we all know how people, women particularly, are treated who’ve had awful, awful, awful things be leaked online. So that was certainly something we knew would add to the viewing experience.”
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Buy Magpie on Apple TV for $14.99, or rent the film for $6.99
Ridley highlighted that in the screenings for the film two reactions really stand out to her.
“One is a man who said he finished watching it and called his wife and said, ‘Did I do enough for the kids?’ It actually gave me goosebumps,” she shared. “And then was talking to someone recently who had seen it, who had been in a really difficult relationship, but there were children involved, and she said she felt so furious watching the whole thing, but it was amazingly cathartic for her to watch it.”
“So even though I imagine there will be a split, in some ways, of how people feel towards them, … the conversation has been amazing. … We wanted this to be a really fun, entertaining film, but we are also talking about parenthood and marriage and reality versus fiction, and where those lines are blurred and what people can withstand before they can’t take it anymore.”