“I love to see people lying… they're trying to get away with it and you just think, you're a liar! You're a total liar.” Celia Imrie is talking about her obsession with true crime documentaries and human reactions and it’s this love of solving mysteries that makes her a perfect fit for her two latest projects, The Thursday Murder Club and Celebrity Traitors. Whether she’s a Faithful or a Traitor in the latter, in fact about anything to do with the hit BBC series which will air in the autumn, her lips are absolutely sealed. “I’m not going to tell you anything about it,” she says, resolute but playful and charming. “You can ask me if you like but I’m not going to say anything. Absolutely not. All I can say is I enjoyed it very much. But I’m not allowed to say anything else.” After another attempt to dig for information on Celebrity Traitors, also starring Mark Bonnar and Paloma Faith - did she enjoy filming in Scotland again? is smilingly rebuffed with “I found a new beach, which I loved, but I won't go on about it. A new Scottish beach. Fabulous,” we leave Traitors with its secrets intact and move on to talk about The Thursday Murder Club, a playful whodunnit which appears this week on Netflix. About this, while wary of spoilers, she has much more to say. “It was a piece of magic. The whole shoot was exciting every day.” The 73-year-old Olivier award-winning and Screen Actors Guild-nominated actor is best known for film roles including the Bridget Jones series, Calendar Girls, Nanny McPhee, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, Mamma Mia! and Malevolent while on TV she’s been most recently seen in The Diplomat and Pamela Adlon's semi-autobiographical comedy Better Things, after revelling being Mrs Begg in Still Game and a string of other TV shows, and with a long list of theatre credits to her name. “My heaven is when people come up to me and say, ‘Mrs Begg! Mrs Begg!’ That happened to me when I was on Queen Mary for my very first trip - because I don't fly - on my way back from America. This very handsome young man in his white uniform came up to me and said, ‘ Mrs Begg!’ and I was so delighted. My dad was from Glasgow you see and I’m proud of my Scottish blood.” Read More - Still Game - Jane McCarry and Mark Cox Read More - Sanjeev Kohli The Thursday Murder Club, based on Richard Osman’s international bestselling novel of the same name, stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Imrie as four retirees whose days are spent solving cold case murders. Directed by Chris Columbus, it sees the amateur sleuths unravelling a historic murder when another occurs on their doorstep. The mystery comedy also stars David Tennant, Richard E Grant, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Tom Ellis, Jonathan Pryce and Ingrid Oliver. Imrie plays Joyce, a former trauma nurse who fellow Thursday Murder Club member Elizabeth [Helen Mirren] describes on first meeting as ‘nice enough, a bit simple really, but knows all about knife wounds’, making her useful to the group. “I would call her innocent, but in the book Richard calls her simple, so I had to try and make that evident too. I think she's quite intimidated by them all, understandably, when she first arrives so it's nice to watch the way she warms up and it is accepted,” says Imrie. Joyce’s modus operandi is to disarm with kindness and cake. Is that something Imrie sympathises with? “I do that all the time. I'll let you into a secret.
This is really trying to score marks with the director, but on the first day of rehearsals for The Thursday Murder Club, I decided I was going to make a cake at five o'clock in the morning, which is always the best time to do it, and present it to the director. How see through is that? Funnily enough, I do enjoy making a cake so I did it for the first day of rehearsal just to get in the mood, and also to do the things that Joyce might do.” But why five o’clock in the morning? “Because then it's fresh as a daisy. It makes all the difference. My son is going to be 31 and will probably get a chocolate cake - very, very, very chocolaty, lots of cocoa, and the icing should have a little bit of espresso in it.” Like the book from which it’s adapted, The Thursday Murder Club has a mixture of crime and comedy, a combination that appeals to Imrie. “You sort of can't have one without the other. I mean, Shakespeare knew, didn’t he? I like serious and light. If you can have both in conjunction then that's marvelous because the one magnifies the other. It surprises people a bit.” Did she have a shorthand with Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan because she had worked with them before on Calendar Girls and Love Punch, respectively? “Yes, I suppose so. I mean, I was very much in awe of Helen when we did Calendar Girls, because she led us all brilliantly into our disrobing, etc. But that was many years ago, and I don't really think I've met her since. This is the weird thing about our life.
So it's a good 20 years ago and we'd never come across each other, certainly not for work. Anyway she was wonderfully welcoming and utterly charming throughout. So I was pleased to be in cahoots with her.” And has she worked with Ben Kingsley before? “No, I haven't. But I was rather thrilled to be in the same bracket as him.
Well, we had next door caravans put it like that, which I rather enjoyed. And because he is much more of a classical actor, I suppose, although, what was that marvelous film? Sexy Beast. That was astonishing, and I watched that with my son before I met him and it gave me a completely different outlook on him. I'm glad I did because I've never met him before and I was delighted to be in the same cast as him.” “Actually Calendar Girls, when it came up, I did think to myself for the first time, thank God I'm the age that I am because had I not been, I wouldn't have been able to be cast, because we had to be of a certain age. So for the first time ever, around my 50th birthday, I was grateful to be the age I was in order to be cast.” What’s her experience of roles for older women, is it harder or are things improving? “Well, I have to touch wood, but I seem to be getting a good variety and that's marvellous, and I hope that continues. I suppose it's because we're all living longer and therefore people are being quite adventurous in their old age and there is more to write about. I've just got to avoid a few wheelchairs and Alzheimer's roles, but they're bound to be round the corner. But I'm just trying to hop, skip and jump out of the way of them at the moment.” Away from the screen Imrie has a flourishing career as a bestselling author, having written six novels and an autobiography, The Happy Hoofer. Her Nice series, set in the fictional town of Bellevue-sur-Mer between Monte Carlo and Cannes, is lighthearted and follow the exploits and adventures of several retired expats. More recently she has been exploring historical fiction with Orphans of the Storm and Meet Me at Rainbow Corner, writing at the apartment she owns on the French Riviera where she stays when she’s not at home in London or on location. “It overlooks the sea and it’s my paradise. I went out for a baguette and came back with the flat, that's the truth. I've never done anything like that in my life. And it is the most glorious place, inspirational.” How would she describe her books? “Well nearly all of them have got a link with Nice, where my paradise is. And they do have, hopefully, injected in them, a lust for life.” What is it she gets from writing that she doesn’t get from acting? “It's quite a solitary thing, which is why I'm so extremely grateful to my collaborator Fidelis Morgan who writes with me and she's extremely good at all the research. I've moved on, first of all, with a book called Orphans of the Storm about two little boys on the Titanic, which is a true story, and Fidelis's research twisted it on its head. So now, anything that I want to do, including Meet Me at Rainbow Corner, must have a historic backbone so that we can go to the real facts. Meet Me at Rainbow Corner is inspired by Fidelis's mother’s letters during the Second World War.
A huge amount has come from them. It's wonderful to have a truth or historical background in order to lay the story on top of. Because we don't know as a generation what it was like to be in the war. We have absolutely no idea. And I hope very much that Meet Me at Rainbow Corner will give some sort of insight about the extremes with which people had to meet. “My dad was in both wars, actually.
He was a doctor and a dentist in the Navy but didn't really talk about it, you see. And that's where these letters from Fidelis’s mother and her GI boyfriends in the war are fascinating. They give a real insight. You know, she got engaged about four times and they all died.
God. We don't have a clue. So it was live for today. They all had to. The character of Lily in the Rainbow Corner is sort of based on my mother, who I joke and say was a bit like The Queen and used to drive ambulances and got a certificate from the War Office for entertaining the troops with her violin. And Dot, the other heroine in the story, is based on Fidelis’s mum who was a very young nurse and had extraordinarily ghastly things to deal with, the like of which we know nothing.” What kind of books does Imrie like to read when she’s not penning her own? Read More - Celia Imrie, 2016 interview “I do like some sort of a mystery going on. On TV too. I’m addicted to true crime documentaries. And I find the way people behave in real life utterly fascinating. In fact, the first night class I signed up for was the Psychology of Criminology, which sounds very grand, but actually it was the most interesting. Very often people react in real life much more extremely than actors are allowed to. “It's fascinating when something really terrible has happened, you watch somebody and they very rarely cry because it's too shocking. So I'm fascinated by that. That interests me enormously. The real reaction, the hugeness of shock. And if somebody can get that into a book, I love it, but in documentaries and stuff like that, that's what I love. That sort of true unexpected reactions of people.” Last time I spoke to Imrie she was in America, to ‘hustle’ as she put it and hustle she did, winning parts in FX’s Better Things, which ran for five seasons between 2016 and 2022, and then Netflix’s The Diplomat, in which she plays Conservative Party fixer Margaret Roylin, with season three to be released in October and a fourth season confirmed. “Yes, I hustled and got one of my most favorite parts ever in a series called Better Things. That was a big slice of luck really.” What unfulfilled ambitions has she yet to realise? “Oh, so many. I'm quite superstitious, so I don't want to spook anything, but honestly, throw me something I think I can't do. That's what I want. “I have also bought the rights for a French play that I really want to do, a two-hander and that's quite difficult. You have all these marvellous ideas but from buying the rights to getting it on is quite a mountain to climb. But I'll do it. “As an actor, you don't really have much control so you have to wait for the part to come along. You'll notice on cast lists now that many leading actors are also associate producers or producers and more and more actors are directing and taking charge and writing because otherwise you spend your whole life waiting for the phone to ring, waiting to be asked to dance.” Coming up, with four novels by Osman so far in the The Thursday Murder Club series, there’s potential for a follow up film but Imrie has no idea if that will happen. There’s also another project she can’t talk about, besides Traitors, and something she can - a part in the fifth series of Apple TV+ show Trying, with Rafe Spall and Esther Smith. “It’s a tiny part but I'm quite delighted about that. And there’s Traitors.” Oh yes, Traitors. One last try. Does she think there are any parallels between Traitors and the Thursday Murder Club in that they’re both set in a big house and full of mystery, murder and deviousness? “Not really. I have to say I think it's a very, very clever game. That's all I can tell you. You'll see,” she says and smiles her impish grin. “And if you really want to know what I'm doing next, I'm going to make some cucumber sandwiches because I'm going to take my son and my grandson to the park for an afternoon picnic.” Celia Imrie appears in The Thursday Murder Club, Netflix, on 28 August.