![]() Morton: I suppose I have been incredibly lucky as Samantha Morton to have personally, very rarely felt-you know, I’ve read things and I wouldn’t know it was written by a man or a woman. We are all very complicated, and that should be able to exist within a character. And you’re like, “Dammit.” But in life, I don’t think there are those differences. So often I read something and love it, and then it’s a male name above that description. This is incredible.” It was a combination of wanting to go back to my roots, playing these working girls-except now, as opposed to playing the young girl, I’m playing the older woman.ĭo you feel in the scripts you’ve seen or participated in that, historically, male characters are allowed to be more flawed or dimensional? Does having a team of female creatives make a difference?īrown Findlay: In the past, it felt like that. But when this came along, I read the first script and I thought, “Oh, my gosh. Television doesn’t seem to be as crazy as it was when I was a kid.” The dream for me was always to be in the movies, you know. I then went and did The Last Panthers, and I had literally the time of my life, and thought, “Wow. I don’t mind movies, but I was nervous of television. Coming back into television, I was very, very wary about committing to anything that could potentially take a long time. I was very lucky to get into some independent cinema, and Woody Allen saw me in a movie, and then my movie history is history. Samantha Morton: At the age of 16, I got the part of a young prostitute-or, rather, a girl who was trafficked for sex-in a show called Band of Gold, which was at the time very, very groundbreaking. ![]() The younger, Lucy ( Eloise Smyth), is an innocent who, as the series opens, is just about to have her virginity sold by her mother to the highest bidder. ![]() The older is Charlotte, a very experienced and coveted harlot-and a role that asks Findlay to play against her Downton Abbey sweetheart type. The show focuses primarily on Morton’s madam, Margaret Well, and her two daughters. The list itself gets a fun showcase in the first episode, but it’s the bevy of women who populate it that prompted Alison Newman and Moira Buffini to create Harlots as a co-production between ITV and Hulu. The series was inspired by British historian Hallie Rubenhold’s 2005 book The Covent Garden Ladies-a dive into the annual guide called “Harris’s List,” published from 1757 to 1795, that served as a Zagat of sorts for 18th-century London prostitutes. Morton and her TV daughter, Downton Abbey alum Jessica Brown Findlay, spoke to VF.com about the Hulu show that is proudly boasting “a whore’s eye view.” Harlots is the rare show entirely written and directed by women. But unlike the fictional liars and feuders currently flooding the Peak TV market, these sex workers aren’t manipulated by men-onscreen or off. With all the power, lust, and flashes of humanity that we usually associate with male antiheroes, Margaret Wells (Oscar nominee Samantha Morton) and Lydia Quigley (stage and screen legend Lesley Manville) pit their considerable intelligence and stable of girls against each other for control of Georgian-era Soho. Harlots is a lavish 18th-century period drama about dueling houses of ill repute and the ruthless women who run them. But over on Hulu, there’s a female-led project that has something all the rest do not. The ladies of old school Hollywood are feuding on FX, while the women of Monterey, California, are covering up lies both big and small on HBO. When it comes to meaty roles for women on television, it feels as though we’ve entered a golden age.
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