Magpie stars Daisy Ridley (Star Wars) and Shazad Latif (Profile) as a couple whose seemingly idyllic life is thrown astray when their daughter is cast in a film alongside an attractive young actress. The film’s story was created by Ridley, and the screenplay was written by her husband, Tom Bateman (Murder on the Orient Express), making this a very… unique husband-and-wife collaboration.
We at FandomWire got to speak with Tom Bateman about Magpie and making the jump from acting to screenwriting. Check out the interview below!
Magpie Tom Bateman Interview
FandomWire: One of my favorite things about Magpie is that it subverts the classic trope of the femme fatale. How do you think the film challenges the audience’s expectations in this way?
Tom Bateman: I’m so glad you picked up on that because it was one of the initial driving forces behind me really loving this idea that Daisy had. She had experienced this sort of blur in perspective and reality and boundaries while making a film and said, “Do you not think that’s a really interesting space to tell a story?” And I said, “Oh yeah, that’s really good, because it’s fascinating what we do, this idea of perspective and who is what.”
And these archetypes perhaps, like you say a femme fatale, or the adulterous husband, or the other woman, all these characters — I really wanted to play with and shift the audience’s perspective on it. And in the metaness, in writing it, I myself shifted my perspective and decided to write it actually about the woman left at home, because I found her far more fascinating.
I thought, “Who is this woman who’s been left at home and has a front row seat to her husband, perhaps destroying their family and everything that she’s building and holding together? Who is this woman? What resilience she must have.” But then also shifting that to like, “Well, who is Ben? Is he a good man, a bad man? Is he a good father, a bad father? He can be both. Two things can be true at the same time.”
And equally with Matilda Lutz’s character, Alicia, the other woman, who is she? I didn’t want her to just be this 2D temptress, siren-type character. I wanted her to have her own insecurities and pain and trauma as well, and she’s been through something too.
So that shift in who people are, I very much wanted to have, and also who’s good and bad. Because one of my favorite reactions — and I have to be very careful talking to everyone, because I don’t want to ruin the film for anyone reading or watching — is people not knowing, and Daisy herself going, “Is Annette a bad person for what she does in the film? Is that Machiavellian?”
And I really love that because, sure, she’s our lead character, she’s our protagonist, and she is put through so much and is abused in so many ways emotionally. But what she does… is that the actions of a good person? I really wanted to play with that, and I had to fight a lot of creative people on how far we can push this. And I really wanted to push it there, and Daisy did too, and Sam, our director. So yes, challenging perspectives was on the menu.
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FW: Magpie does feature characters doing some things that many would consider morally objectionable, but you don’t really cast judgement on your characters. Why did you think this approach was important?
Bateman: Yeah, I think it was important straight away from the off. It’s interesting, predominantly I’m an actor who’s begun writing in the last few years. And just as with acting a role, one must be very careful not to judge the character one is playing. It’s the same, I think, with writing. With writing, I never write and think “This is a bad person, I’m going to write them as bad.” Every human being is capable of and does have a point of view that is good.
It doesn’t really matter who you are. It tends to be a good person that is, through their experience of life, morphed and molded and battered and bruised into someone who is capable of doing something that’s perceived as bad. So I wanted to try and at least with all of these characters, no matter who they were, to write a sympathetic nugget. Even Shazad’s character, Ben, has a point of view where he is not a bad person.
FW: Magpie is your debut as a screenwriter. Did you find that your background as an actor helped prepare you for writing the film?
Bateman: Very much so. And I’ve been lucky in that my acting career has been very eclectic and different in terms of genres and the types of roles that I’ve been given the opportunity to play. They’ve been very different, both in genre and tone and who they are, good people, bad people.
And that I think helps me immediately when writing scripts because I’ve put myself into many different shoes before, and continue to look for those opportunities. But equally, when I’m writing, I have quite a lot of screenplays and films that I’ve finished, and what’s fun is they’re all very different.
Daisy is my first person I sent them to, and she said quite early on, “You don’t really have a genre.” Like, I’ve written a rom-com. I’ve done a big Western, I’ve done a sort of heist type movie. I really love all forms of movies, and I love acting in those. So equally, it is reflected in my writing that I love many different things.
Also being an actor, I’ve had to struggle with dialogue that perhaps hasn’t been quite thought through as much. Stories that have been very structure-based, and you sometimes feel, “God, I don’t know what it is about this dialogue, but it’s not quite sitting right.” And I’ve wrestled with that.
So, what I wanted to try and do as a writer was make it as authentic and as real as possible from my perspective, and also be open to actors. I said to Daisy, Shahzad, Matilda, all of the actors in Magpie, “If you have any concerns or thoughts about the dialogue, I’m not precious. I’ve been there as an actor. I know what it is to struggle with dialogue. If there’s anything that doesn’t feel right to you, please do come to me and we can discuss it, and we can talk about it.” And to their credit, they did, and I think that’s to do with being an actor too.
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FW: Obviously, Magpie presents a very… dark story about marriage. Did you ever find it awkward working on this film with your wife?
Bateman: I will say Daisy and I have dreams and ambitions that we are putting into practice of making many films together. And we did both laugh at the fact that first he put out into the world sets on about as dysfunctional and toxic a relationship as you can get.
But this was Daisy’s idea, and the further I went down it, I tended to get up early in the morning right as much as I could, I’d show her 5-10 pages that I worked on that morning. And I remember her going, “People are gonna think we’re in trouble.”
But that’s the joy of what we do! We get to pretend and tell other people’s stories and we put ourselves into other people’s shoes. What’s been wonderful is that Daisy knows my head so well, I think, probably better than I know myself. I will write the tiniest line, and she’ll go, “I know where you got that conversation. Oh my god, he just said that to her. I can’t believe that.”
We talked about it in the car on the way home, and it filtered its way into my writing, which is wonderful, because she just knows exactly what I’m trying to do at all points. Even if it’s a horrible, toxic relationship, she gets where it’s coming from. I don’t think at any point she went. “Is this how you feel about me?”
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FW: There has been a resurgence of sorts in the psychosexual thriller genre as of late. Why do you think stories like this are resonating with audiences again?
Bateman: That’s a super interesting question, and you’re right. We talked about it. There’s that brilliant Phoebe Dynevor film she did–
FW: Fair Play?
Bateman: Yes! We watched that, and it’s very different, but it’s in that world, following a couple of the paper cuts that can lead to their destruction.
I wonder whether it’s to do with lockdown. It had a big impact on people. Being locked in a space with your loved one meant that it changed gears for everyone. Most relationships, if you’re with someone, you may wake up and have breakfast or do something, then you’re off to work, and then you come back. How much time you really spend in each other’s pockets drastically changed overnight. And I wonder whether there’s a sort of collective consciousness we all as people, just went, “Whoa,” and that could be brilliant.
For Daisy and I, we’d never spent that long together. We’re always in different countries and trying to fly all over the place to spend as much time with each other as possible. We just have this time together, which we loved. But I am also aware of a lot of people whose relationship couldn’t take that shift and ultimately led to that. So perhaps that, maybe.
But also, things like thrillers and genre pieces, I think are timeless. And it’s one of the reasons we really are excited about bringing this to an audience, because I know that audiences love a ride. Of course, we love going to see a film that’s slower or poignant or beautiful.
But I think ultimately, the the movies that will be that will do well again and again and again is if you can take an audience on a ride and surprise them and scare them and entertain them, which is what we wanted to do with Magpie, as well as commenting on human behavior and relationships between each other. It will resonate with people, and they will like it. And it’s the movies I love watching. I love watching going, “Oh, what’s gonna happen with this? Let’s get the popcorn out and watch this happen.”
