She appears for barely ten minutes of a three-hour film, yet Samantha Morton, who began her working life as a magician's assistant, has cast the spell everyone is talking about this summer. The 49-year-old actress has emerged as a surprise contender for next year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn as the sorceress Circe in Christopher Nolan's hit The Odyssey.
The Nottingham-born actress reads Circe not as the villain of Homer's poem, but as a woman punished by history for what she knew rather than what she did. "I think that women in history have often been vilified, whether you're a midwife, a wise woman," Samantha tells The Arts Hour on the BBC World Service.
"We think about kind of the burning of women at the stake, because they were herbalists, you know, and I don't think Circe is a baddie at all."
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Her interpretation, she says, came straight off the page, and she wanted Circe to be far more than just a villain. She adds: "Villains are always amazing roles, but I did want to make her a little bit more. My interpretation was what I read on the script, which was phenomenal, and it was multi-layered, because we are, as humans; we're not just two-dimensional."
