SHE has stripped to her undies in raunchy Holly-wood blockbusters, but Kate Mara had to tell her parents to skip through chunks of her new BBC drama to avoid red faces.
In the ten-part series A Teacher, which starts tonight on BBC2, the 37-year-old actress plays Claire Wilson, who has an illicit affair with an 18-year-old pupil in her English class.
Kate said: “My parents want to be supportive and watch. I just told them they’re going to have to fast-forward through some things. That eliminates a lot of the show.
“When I called them to ask them what they thought, they said things like, ‘Yeah, we only had to fast-forward four times tonight’. That leaves probably ten minutes of the episode.”
Based on a 2013 film of the same name, the US-made series follows Claire, who is stifled in her marriage to aloof musician Matt, played by 37-year-old Ashley Zukerman, and she has no friends at work.
Kate said: “Some people are definitely going to feel uncomfortable watching. It wasn’t something that we made thinking it would be a super-easy watch.
“Comfortable is not the word we were going for. I don’t think you normally see the story told from this point of view. The fact that it’s a female doing the abuse and being the groomer and all of these things is also something that is rarely discussed.”
Intimate scenes
Kate has starred in the films Random Hearts, Brokeback Mountain and The Martian, as well as the TV mini series American Horror Story: Murder House. She is best known for playing Zoe Barnes in Netflix’s House Of Cards.
For A Teacher she also had the challenge of being executive producer — and returning to work just ten weeks after giving birth to her daughter with her British husband, Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell, 34. The couple have not revealed the name of their daughter, now 18 months old.
Kate said: “I had a two-and-a-half-month-old while I was shooting. It is definitely not the kind of role you want to play when you have to breastfeed a child every two hours.
“You’re in the middle of a love scene and you have to pause because your trailer is screaming. It is amazing when you think about what you can get done in a day.”
She credits her co-star Nick Robinson, 25, of Jurassic World fame, who plays schoolboy lover Eric, for helping her shoot the sex scenes.
Kate said: “There are some very intimate scenes and I had just had a baby, so it could have felt vulnerable and scary. But it didn’t feel that way at all because I had incredible support. Nick is awesome. He’s a true professional.”
Having her daughter has changed Kate’s perspective on work.
She said: “Eventually she’s going to be able to look at the work I’ve done. And now, more than ever, I want it to mean something and for there to be a point to it.
“Sometimes you do just have to work for money. Sometimes you’re lucky enough that you can make choices based on more than that.”
And she took on this role because it was a challenge. When Claire offers to give teenager Eric private tutoring, their inappropriate attraction quickly escalates into a sexual relationship. Eric fantasises about Claire, and after one lesson he moves in for a kiss. Claire initially refuses but goes on to groom the boy.
When their fling is eventually exposed, Claire is left reeling from the scandal and Eric struggles to move on with his life.
In one interview Kate said: “I can understand how a student might fall into that trap of that relationship. It’s someone you really admire and respect, who gives you attention, makes you feel like an adult, all of those things we crave as teenagers.”
When Kate started researching the role she was shocked at how common relationships between teachers and teenagers can be.
She said: “The amount of real-life stories we would see on a weekly basis was overwhelming.
“This type of predatory relationship happens much more frequently than I think most people would expect.
“Playing someone who is an abuser, who uses her position and her power to manipulate someone, is not something I would say is easy.”
She added: “Although we know Claire’s choices are wrong, we wanted to show the human side of her as well.
“For example, everyone can relate to feeling lost at some point in their lives and wanting to be seen.
“That does not give any sort of justification to her choices at all, but it’s finding those relatable characteristics that is important.
“The fun of being an actor is exploring those types of situations.
“I do find that characters that are a little bit scary to play, people who are a little bit morally complicated and who I don’t necessarily relate to, are the ones I’m craving to explore and take on. I’m always looking for a challenge.”
School musical
New Yorker Kate — whose dad Timothy’s side of the family owns the New York Giants American football team and her mum Kathleen’s their rivals the Pittsburgh Steelers — now comes from a family of actors.
They include her younger sister Rooney, 35, who is engaged to fellow actor Joaquin Phoenix, 46. This year the couple had a son who they named River, after Joaquin’s late brother, actor River Phoenix.
When Kate and her siblings Rooney, Daniel and Conor were children they were taken to Broadway shows and Kate was nine when she began acting, in a school musical. Her first TV role was in US legal drama Law & Order in 1997.
She met husband Jamie, who is from Billingham, County Durham, while filming Fantastic Four in 2015.
Kate and Jamie — who has a seven-year-old son with his ex-wife, Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood — kept their 2017 wedding private.
Afterwards the couple, who split their time between LA and New York, simultaneously announced the marriage by tweeting a picture of their first dance. He wrote: “Me & Mrs B”, while she simply wrote: “Nuptials” alongside the picture.
While Kate loves reality TV, walking her dogs and learning ballet, she has revealed that Jamie hates trying new dances, even though he first found fame at 13 playing Billy, the schoolboy from a gritty English mining community who longed to be a ballet dancer.
Kate said: “I love ballet. It is one of my escapes during quarantine. I do it in the back yard. I will be doing my lesson and Jamie will dance by the screen in the background. You would never know he was Billy Elliot.
“The most romantic thing he has ever done for me so far was for our wedding, for our dance. I wanted to learn a swing dance with him because I love swing dancing and it took a lot of convincing. He hates dance lessons. He said yes.
“We spent about four weeks learning this whole dance and then, the week before the wedding he was pacing the room.
“I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he was like, ‘The choreography is just not good enough. We’ve got to scrap the dance’.
“We didn’t do it for the wedding. We ended up slow dancing to our favourite Mexican song.”
- A Teacher starts tonight on BBC2 at 10pm.
