Olivia Colman on playing her latest mother monster: “My little girl wouldn’t cuddle me.”

Olivia Colman’s mother characters have often concealed a spike beneath their smiley, feminine exteriors. There was the stepmother from hell in Fleabag —the kind of monster who mounts a sexhibition with a wall of plaster penises showcasing those of both your father and ex-boyfriend. Then there was Elena Ferrante’s Leda in the big-screen adaptation of The Lost Daughter; a mother who commits the ultimate crime of leaving her children, but also of stealing a child’s doll (symbolism!). And Colman’s Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown was bad in that she was the brusque kind of mother who placed her country, and her legacy, above her own children’s happiness, memorably telling Prince Charles that “no one wants to hear” his voice. Now, Colman is giving Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham the special treatment in the Hulu/FX adaptation of Great Expectations. The very Gothic Miss Havisham is described in the novel as a waxwork of spite, withering in the bridal dress she has worn since the day she was jilted. Nothing about her is maternal, but as mothers go, she looms large. After being jilted, Havisham adopts a toddler, Estella (Shalom Brune-Franklin), and raises her as a weapon to use against men. That seems to be the day’s work: walking around dusty old Satis House looking like a decorative soap and dictating Victorian customs to her mean, young charge, Estella, on whom she neatly imprints. Really, she’s the ultimate homeschooler, creating Estella’s education from scratch and dosing it with […]

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