It is a sunny afternoon in Hammersmith, where he has lived for many years, and we meet in a cafe next to the Thames. He brought with him Velma, her four-month-old husky puppy, to the delight of everyone here. About half of our conversation is based on work, the rest is all cynical. Velma is Dolan’s first dog as an adult. He chose a husky because growing up in Woking, he lived with a family that raised them. “I was there all the time. I fell in love with them completely. ” Dolan, who is also a playwright, is very good at telling a story. One day, when he was four, he says, the dogs escaped. The owners were on vacation. “My mom got most of them in the car, but my dad, Boris, was quite aggressive.” Boris had arrived at a local cricket ground where he was surrounded by local police. “Obviously, I went to the dog and he growled,” I said [she puts on a stern voice]: ‘Can you!’ and he just followed me. “I do not seem to have the same result in Velma at the moment”, he adds, smiling. Velma is sitting under Dolan’s chair, the model puppy. We’re here to talk about My Name is Leon, the BBC adaptation of Kit de Waal, a wonderful, moving film in which Dolan plays Maureen, a 1980s Birmingham contractor (wearing a cardigan). But there are sharp edges in history: racism, mental illness, deep injustice, a system of care that does not work. “I thought the script was one of the best I had ever read,” he says. “It was very ready. Even the hours of the day were written in the headings of the scenes, so it was very clear. This is so important, because then everyone knows his tone and knows what they are doing. “ “I thought the script was one of the best I’ve ever read”: in the upcoming My Name is Leon. Photo: Ben Gregory-Ring / BBC / Douglas Road Productions It required a Birmingham accent, which Dolan easily wraps around the words “Curly Charm”. It has an incredible origin. “I heard White Dee,” he explains. White Dee, also known as Deirdre Kelly, was a clear character from the Channel 4 Benefits Street documentary series. “He did an interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. It’s a good interview, actually. I listened to it again and again and saw it every day before we started. ” Dolan loves to make tones and studies them in depth. He did Welsh in the BBC W1A comedy and Rose West’s Gloucester accent in Appropriate Adult. He made a speech in the Bronx for a recent theatrical work, Doubt, at the Chichester Festival Theater. He found Anne Darwin’s Hartlepool accent harder to understand, but worked with a dialect coach until he acquired it. She and her co-star, Eddie Marshan, who played John Darwin, retained the voices of their characters during filming, but, as she says, this is just practical. “They are the muscles of your face,” she adds, touching her jaw. It makes sense to keep practicing the same things. She is practical in her work and seems practically allergic to anything very offensive-acting. Dolan also has a personal relationship with the Northeast. She was born in Middlesbrough to Irish parents – her mother is from Enniscorthy and studied botany and biochemistry, and her father was a chemical engineer from Dublin. She was one of four siblings and moved a lot, following in her father’s footsteps – Essex, Durham, Beckleicht and Stockton, before eventually settling in Woking, where her mother still lives. “Well, even though I did not speak that accent when I was young, I listened to a lot of it and there is a very warm relationship with it. He definitely came in. “ The canoe, as he calls it, became a success. As we talk, Dara Ó Briain comes in, apologizing, telling Dolan how much he loved her in this – of course, we joke that he paid him to do it. He says he did not know much about the case before taking office, although he recalls hearing about John Darwin’s return to the news before the full extent of what had happened became clear. “The first thing I remember was that this guy came into a police station, saying he had amnesia and that they thought he was the missing canoeist, and everyone was saying, ‘Oh, oh my God, this is amazing.’ He never met Anne Darwin. Halfway through filming, during a pause caused by Covid, Dolan went to a barbecue, where she ended up talking to someone she knew, David Leigh, the journalist who broke the story of the Darwins scam. He contacted Leigh, who showed her some of Anne Darwin’s letters from prison. “After she spoke to me, he asked her. He said, how would it feel to meet Monica? And he said, “No, I would rather not.” And I understand that. “ Resident evil: as Rosemary West with Dominic West as Fred West in 2011’s “Appropriate Adult”. Photo: ITV / Shutterstock Until I watched the drama, I did not know that Anne Darwin was sentenced to a larger sentence than her then husband. “Yes. He took six years and three months and she six years and six months. I think maybe there was an element of moral judgment for her and, in a sense, maybe that should have been left to her family.” When Dolan first read the scripts for Canoe, she told the show’s creators that she was worried that Anne would leave her too much. “I wanted to see her lie more, because, well, she did, and I could see that the author wanted us to like her. But I also felt it was more fun to come to a scene where he just lied or someone says he lied. “We have all lied at some point,” he said. “It’s what makes it so effective, I think. It has been done well, because it has to do with forgiveness, without denying that it has been done. “What this family has achieved in terms of forgiveness is very unusual.” The cast plans to meet for drinks tonight, to celebrate the show’s success and catch up. Marsan can not do it, as he is shooting elsewhere, but I called to ask him about working with Dolan. “Personally, I think she is one of the greatest actresses of our generation and I always wanted to work with her,” he said. She told me that she auditioned to play Fred West in Appropriate Adult (the role went to Dominic West) and was disappointed he did not have the opportunity to work with her then. What is it for her? “She is disappearing, because she is not vain, in no sense. “She is losing herself, but not in a forgiving way.” He compared her to Olivia Colman, with whom he has also worked, in the sense that it took a few years in the industry to find what to do with her. “Oh,” Dolan laughs when I mention it. “I will wait to see what he does to me, then.” I say it’s like your moment. “This is my moment…” she sings, entering Martine McCutcheon’s classic. “I think I was really lucky. I have worked a lot, but I also get bored very easily, which I guess is good and bad. This means that if I have done a role, then I will want to do something very different. ” She explains the anxious feeling of her career on screen (her career on stage is just as varied). From comedy (Alan Partridge, W1A) to period dramas (Wolf Hall, Vanity Fair), through films such as Days of the Bagnold Summer, The Dig, Pride, Black Mirror, Strike, Inside No 9, the Revied Talking Heads… is over mall. “I think your characters also stretch you. Learn more about people and what people are capable of. “And when you play people who do quite extreme things, you see what is possible and what can be imagined.” She and Marsan are attracted to what she calls “extreme characters.” They had a joke about it, shooting the canoe, where they turned to the camera and pretended to be in a version of the genealogical show Who Do You Think You Are? They named it Who The Fuck Am I? “I can not believe that I lost so many years without having a dog”: with Velma the puppy. Is Monica Dolan wearing an Edeline Lee blouse (fenwick.co.uk)? meandem.com pants and russellandbromley.co.uk sandals. Photo: Zoe McConnell / The Observer Dolan’s work ethic sounds amazing. Early in her career, a theater director advised her to look at the work ahead of her, instead of allowing herself to be guided by broader ambitions. For example, if she was offered a project, then she should consider the benefits of that project, instead of thinking about whether she would prefer to make a TV or a movie. This principle has guided her since she started. “It means you go a lot with your instinct and that’s a great way to try to stay true to yourself,” he says. If she was offered a major American series that required her to sign the same role for seven years, say, would she do it? “If it was in front of me and I was reading it, I could. But I was never very good at commitment. I wanted to be a Brownie and, after a week, I wanted to leave. My mom said no, if you were in the army, you could not leave after a week. So I had to stay. “ Dolan’s family is full of scientists. If he had to do something in public …
