Interview

YOU HAVE to hand it to Anna Friel. Though she’s seven months pregnant and suffering from something truly vile, the 28-year-old has trooped to Kentish Town, North London, from her home in Windsor to be photographed in a Tommy’s T-shirt. Tommy’s is a charity that funds research into premature birth, stillbirth and miscarriage, and it is bringing out a black sleeveless T-shirt to raise money.

So Friel has come, small, verdant, fertile, in a blue Alberta Ferretti dress and flat round-toed gold sandals, to be photographed wearing it. When she shows me her teeth I can’t believe she left the house. “I’ve had such a good pregnancy, but I’ve got really bad sores on my gums. Can you see?” she asks, flaring her lips to reveal numerous bleeding, warty lumps nudging like moss between her teeth. I blanch in horror.  “Oh, these are nothing!” she cries in a rapid, flat northern voice. “I just underwent four hours of surgery to have the first lot cut out so the infection didn’t get to the baby. All these doctors kept saying: ‘It’s fine, they’re just these things called pregnancy tumours.’ But they were just getting bigger and bigger. I found a gum specialist and she said: ‘You must get them cut out.’

“But you’re not allowed anything when you’re pregnant, so she did 12 injections in the roof of my mouth. She said ‘Are you OK?’ and I said ‘No! I can feel you cutting my gums with a scalpel.’ “It was awful. David (Thewlis, her boyfriend of five years), bless him, was holding my feet. But the tumours have just started to come back. It’s incredibly embarrassing — you’re eating a meal in company and your mouth fills with blood.”

By now she has straightforwardly greeted all the people waiting for her — the T-shirt designer, the photographer, the girl from Tommy’s — and is sitting in the office beside the photographic studio, having tried to give me the only comfortable chair. “Do you have any biscuits or hot chocolate, because I’ve not had lunch?” she asks, and then starts talking, in the same calm, rapid tone, about absolutely everything in her life — her new film, her last film, her baby, how she got pregnant (“a happy mistake”), and David Thewlis.

He is a much respected actor, having starred in Naked, The Big Lebowski and now Kingdom of Heaven with Orlando Bloom; she has done 16 films that few people have seen. Yet she is by far the more famous, thanks to a stint in the 1990s as Beth Jordache in Brookside (she had the lesbian kiss), a notorious ditching by Darren Day (he ran off with Tracy Shaw, who played a hairdresser in Coronation Street) and a track record of going out with Robbie Williams and hanging out with Kate Moss.

I have to admit, I wasn’t excited about meeting her. Brookside babe, I thought glumly. Pretty girl about town, made lots of duff movies, not very interesting. But she is uplifting. Maybe it’s because she’s so happy, or maybe it’s her northern-ness, but I’ve not seen a celebrity so comfortable in their skin. There is no attempt to hide anything. She is warm and down-to-earth, with a nice streak of saltiness, like the rim on a glass of tequila. “I’m a bit stubborn. I don’t like being told what to do,” she says of the criticism of her friendship with Kate Moss and Robbie, “and I’m not going to not hang with people because it makes me look bad. They’ve got great, successful careers, and if they want to have that kind of lifestyle the only people they hurt are themselves.”

At 42, Thewlis is 14 years older than her. They met on a flight to Cannes. “It was the best of British: Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Rachel Weisz. All on the same plane. Can you imagine? ‘Britain’s film industry goes down!’ We were laughing about it on the plane. And we got on really well, I think because we were the only two northerners. He’s Blackpool and I’m Rochdale. But nothing happened.

“Then we met again two years later, but he had a girlfriend and had just split up with his ex-wife. It was two years after that we were taken to dinner by Bradley and Damon who own (the film production company) Natural Nylon. David had just finished his novel — just typed, literally, ‘The End’ — and they said: ‘We think you two would get on really well.’

“And we did. He came to my house that night and he never left!” Friel grins through shiny, swollen lips. “I’d stopped hanging out with Kate Moss by then and calmed down. I’d bought my place in Windsor. He came and said, ‘It’s really not what I expected’. I’m very grown-up with my house. I collect lots of antiques and Pre-Raphaelite paintings.”

I ask what she liked about him, and she says, promptly, his calmness. Then she says: “He had this thing when I first met him, that he kept rocking. I just thought he needed a great big hug!” The day we meet he has given an interview saying he used to be angsty, but she had made him a lot happier. Friel lights with pleasure when I tell her this. “That’s nice! Everyone keeps saying: ‘When are you going to get married?’ It’s like, ‘Give us a chance! Let’s have the baby first!’

“I think because he’s been married before and had all the romance and air go out of it . . .” she breaks off. “But I’ve never seen a man so happy at having a child. And we didn’t plan or try. Because my ovarian cyst burst four years ago and I had something called endometriosis, the doctors had said it would be very difficult for me to have children. And it literally happened after one time of being naughty!’

She has said openly that they spent so much time apart last year that they hit the rocks. “David hates me going into details about relationships,” she says easily, when I ask about this, “but obviously if you have only a week together in six months there are bound to be problems. But he’s had a great year, doing Kingdom of Heaven and the Terrence Malick movie, and working with all the best directors. Then I went to Canada and we spent some time together, and managed to create!”

She plans to go back to work in September. But she thinks it will be fine — Thewlis will come with her on set and she’ll have an au pair. She’s wary, however, of a Posh and Becks-style nanny stitch-up. “I think it’s horrendous,” she exclaims, widening her blue eyes and staring through a tousle of brown curls. “I really do. What precedent does that set?”

I ask if she has been following the birth of Darren Day’s baby. He left Suzanne Shaw, his then girlfriend, three months after she gave birth.  Friel hesitates tactfully. “I — I . . . don’t know the ins and outs, I haven’t talked to him about it, I only see what I read in the press.” But she admits that the worst time in her life, apart from her granddad’s death, was their break-up. “Reading it on the covers of papers — that wasn’t very nice, being completely on my own in London, going: ‘Brookside’s finished, what the hell am I going to do?’ I say it is probably the best thing that could have happened. “It is,” she agrees. “If people make mistakes, they tend to keep making them. I’ve learnt to trust my first instincts, because if you have an odd feeling, or there are certain traits that you don’t quite trust or like, even if people can hide them for two or three years, they come back. It’s the truest saying, that a leopard doesn’t change his spots.”

I ask about Robbie. “I find him . . . intriguing,” she says through a mouthful of biscuit. “He’s managed, from what I hear, to stay off the drink and drugs, so I wish him every success. We were together six months, split up when he went into rehab, then we went out again for a while. But there were too many issues and stuff. I’ve never bumped into him. It’s really extraordinary. I ’ve never bumped into Kate. None of them. I really think life’s like a tree: you take one branch and go a completely different way and never see them again.”  Her talk of drugs and rehab has made me wonder how druggy she was. She admits: “I did experiment and go out and try drugs. But not to the extent that I was a ‘party girl’. I just lived a bit more in the public eye, and was a bit more guilty by association. I was single, going out to clubs and being seen drunk a few times.”

In Thewlis she went for someone totally different. Serious, thoughtful, literary, he would not be seen dead at the Met Bar. “I thought they weren’t good for me,” she observes of her more dodgy exes. “The media hated me going out with Darren. It was like: ‘Anna’s cool. Why is she going out with some prat who’s in musicals?’ But he and I had a really good relationship. We didn’t do drugs and we didn’t drink — it was just a lovely, proper first love. Then I think he just went off the rails and got a bit confused.”

By getting pregnant she has morphed from party girl to sensible mother. It is a remarkable transformation. “But I come from a very, very solid background,” she points out, “with two parents who are desperately in love, still, and come and visit me on every set.” Her father, Des, was a teacher until four years ago. He now designs websites. Her mother, a deputy head, teaches special- needs children at a Rochdale comp.

The one bit of the jigsaw that hasn’t come into place is her career. She made the mistake of turning down a part in The Mummy and then landed a role in Gangs of New York, only to have the part snatched by Cameron Diaz.  Her highest-profile role since Brookside has been in the play Closer on Broadway. But she wasn’t even asked to read for the movie. “Aaah, that was such a great part!” she laments, clearly still gutted. “But it’s a Catch-22. If you’re not in a film that does really well, you’ve not got the name to support the audience.”

That Broadway period was rather starry, with Madonna and Al Pacino dropping into her dressing room, and Jack Nicholson saying he wouldn’t rest until he’d met her. “It was nice, and Madonna was very lovely and very professional and kind,” is all she will observe, in the slightly flat voice of someone who can’t say too much.

In her passion to get on, she made four movies last year — Goal!, a football drama; Niagara Motel, a Canadian arthouse number in which she played a heroin-addicted mother; The Jury, a courtroom thriller; and Irish Jam, a black comedy in which she plays an Irish singer with a child. They are all low-key, though Goal! is from Disney — it is the sequel that she has to make in September. After the birth, that is.  A look of genuine fear darkens her face at the prospect: she outlines in graphic detail what it can do to the lower half of the body. “Please don’t put that in the interview!” she exclaims afterwards. “It’ll make me seem so vulgar!” I leave her in gales of laughter talking to the Tommy’s people and the designers. Sorry to be enchanted, but Friel is like an Ecstasy pill. Just a piece of her puts you in an excellent mood.