Typecasting is a perennial issue for actors. Some, like Vanity Fair and Ready Player One star Olivia Cooke, are wary of it; others, like Nathan Lee Graham, just embrace it.
It is something Kate Beckinsale has been grappling with this week as audiences in the UK and US gear up for her turn in ITV and Amazon’s The Widow. Beckinsale plays Georgia Wells, a widow who starts to suspect that her husband, killed in a plane crash in Africa, may still be alive.
Created by the Williams Brothers (Liar, The Missing, Baptiste), it’s an intense, demanding role, captured on a gruelling location shoot in South Africa. Roger Ebert.com lavishes praise on her performance, saying: “Beckinsale is the kind of actor who can make listening or standing in silence a vital, compelling act.”
Yet Beckinsale has described how hard she has had to work to avoid being pigeonholed and excluded from this kind of role. In particular, the Underworld series of action horror films have cast her in a very specific (and rubber-suited) light. Speaking to the LA Times this week, she voiced her frustration: “The thing that’s odd to me is you can do 50 or 55 movies. Four of them are in a rubber suit, and because people dress up like that for Halloween, that slightly skews what people think your skill set is.”
READ: Ways to Break Free From Typecasting
Ironically, it was the fear of being typecast that first attracted her to the role of vampire death-dealer Selene in the Underworld series. Back in the ’90s, Beckinsale was associated with Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, having made her film debut in Much Ado About Nothing.
She told the LA Times: “I had a bit of trouble initially when I came to Los Angeles with folks saying, ‘Well, she’s very delicate and English, and she can’t play a cop, and she’s a bit too refined.’ ”
Any reservations, however, would have been washed away by her performance opposite Chloë Sevigny in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, with Entertainment Weekly praising her US accent as “spotless” and her performance earning her a London Critics’ Circle Film Award.
READ: Avoid Failing at Accents
A willingness to challenge her comfort zone has enabled Beckinsale to avoid the dangers of typecasting at key stages of her career. As she said: “All of my career I’ve thought: ‘I need to do things where I learn more and that I find difficult.’ Whether it’s me learning French, or doing an American accent for the first time in ‘The Last Days of Disco,’ or doing an action movie, I’ve always considered this a prolonged apprenticeship to where you’re learning how to do stuff.”
For more from Backstage UK, check out the magazine.