Pressure: “The Very Nature of Pressure Is Containment”: Edith Bowman Meets Andrew Scott
Interview with Edith Bowman
In an exclusive conversation for Be In The Scene, Edith Bowman sits down with Andrew Scott to talk about playing James Stagg, the reluctant hero of Pressure: the man who read the weather for D-Day, and the quiet art of holding it all in.
There is a particular kind of hero that Andrew Scott seems drawn to, and it is not the kind who saves the day with a speech. When we meet to talk about Pressure, Anthony Maras’s WWII thriller about the forecast that decided D-Day, the first thing he wants to talk about is restraint.
“The very nature of pressure is about containment,” he tells me, “not releasing something.” It is a line that could describe the whole film, and it certainly describes his James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who told General Eisenhower that the invasion could not go ahead when everyone around him wanted to hear the opposite. “He wasn’t relying on charm,” Scott says. “He wanted people to listen to what he was saying rather than how he said it.”
A hero who does not need to be liked
That distinction, what a man says versus how he says it, sits right at the centre of Scott’s performance, and it is clearly what attracted him in the first place. Stagg struck him as “a singular character, different to any I’ve played before.” He is one of the heroes of the piece, “but he’s not particularly charming or likeable, and that doesn’t mean he isn’t extraordinarily gifted.”
Scott is quietly delighted by the risk of that. He is full of praise for Maras for letting him lean into Stagg’s difficulty rather than smoothing it away. “Anthony was generous in allowing me to put my own stamp on Stagg, to defend him the way I see him,” he says. The pair reworked lines together so that Stagg “never says anything that feels like a movie moment.” The goal was authenticity over likeability. “I’m grateful to Anthony for letting me make Stagg quite difficult,” Scott says, “and trusting that by the end people go, he was a very singular person, but we don’t require him to be likeable or charming, we require him to do his job.”
There is a gentle provocation in the way he frames it, one that reaches well beyond 1944. “It’s something we could do a bit more of in the world,” he says. “Understanding what people do rather than focusing too much on what they say they do.”
Finding the voice
For a character defined by how little he performs, the details matter enormously, and Scott went a long way to find them. To capture Stagg’s specific Midlothian, Lowlands Scottish sound, he worked with dialect coach William Conacher and listened to recordings of the late actor Ian Charleson, whose voice carried exactly the register he was after. It is a piece of research that has since taken on a life of its own: Scott has gone on to play Charleson himself in a film. “More to come,” he says, with a smile that suggests he means it.
The physical transformation was there too, growing in over the course of the story as the composure comes apart. But what strikes me talking to him is how much of the work was internal, the pushing down of everything Stagg cannot afford to feel. Stagg arrives at headquarters having left a heavily pregnant wife behind while England is being bombed, and Scott describes the effort of parking that. He has to “push, push, push down until he can’t really do it anymore.” The film’s tension is built as much on what is held in as on what is said aloud.
The pressure chamber
If you want to understand why Pressure feels so airless in the best possible way, Scott points to the place they shot it. The Allied headquarters was created at Mentmore Towers, and the sense of confinement was not only in the script. “It was a pressure chamber,” he says. “They weren’t able to leave this place, weren’t able to make a phone call out of there.” The cast had green rooms on site but did not stay overnight; the house, he notes, “didn’t even have electricity there hardly.” The result on screen is a group of people sealed in together with a decision none of them can escape.
That is why, he says, the film’s rare moments outside carry such weight. There is a beat by a church, a scene under a tree, where the characters step into the open air, and Scott describes the effect on an audience who have barely been allowed outside either. “You exhale,” he says. “You get fresh air.” It is a small release valve in a story engineered to withhold one.
The weather as a character
Ask Scott about the true antagonist of Pressure and he does not name a person. “I liked to imagine the weather as a character in the movie,” he says, “a ferocious character that we are at the mercy of all the time, which we are in our lives, but treat in a particular way.” To Edith he goes further still, calling it “an all-powerful, godlike character.” Against that force, Stagg is not a conqueror but something humbler. He is, Scott says, “maybe not likeable but incredibly reliable,” a man who is “humble in the face of nature.”
That humility is the whole moral of the thing. In a story where everyone is desperate for certainty because they have so much at stake, Stagg refuses to give it. “One of the big things Stagg says almost continually,” Scott explains, is that people ask, can you be certain, “and he says, no. You can’t be certain about the weather. You can look to the evidence, but you can’t be certain.” To offer more than that would be, in Stagg’s eyes, irresponsible, and Scott plays the strain of a man forced, eventually, to make a call he cannot scientifically guarantee.
There is a nice irony he cannot resist sharing. The production, shooting just outside London, kept getting lucky with the sky. “When we needed it to be sunny,” he laughs, “we were so meteorologists.” Art imitating life, imitating art, right down to the clouds.
Allies, and a spark of divine fire
For all its tension, Scott sees Pressure as a hopeful film, and specifically a film about people who are nothing alike managing to work together. He returns again and again to the idea of allies. “It’s about allies, literally,” he says, “an allied unit, and how people who are extraordinarily different can come together to do something completely wonderful.” He is talking about Stagg and Eisenhower, but he is also, clearly, talking about now. “So much of what we talk about now is the difference between people,” he says. “Actually what we have to do is work together to do good things.”
He is generous about the company he kept. Brendan Fraser’s Eisenhower has “this extraordinary lightness and a huge likability,” while also being physically imposing. Kerry Condon’s Kay Summersby is “assertive and capable, but with this enormous heart,” and one of the only people in the film who sees Stagg’s vulnerability. Chris Messina, his forecasting rival, is “the most brilliant actor and a delightful person.” Damian Lewis plays Monty “with such humour and flair.” What unites the whole ensemble, Scott says, is a theme of integrity, “not just Stagg’s, but Eisenhower’s, Summersby’s, Krick’s, and how we need that to make huge decisions that affect the course of history.”
At heart, he believes, it is a film about holding on to what he calls “one’s own spark of divine fire,” about knowing what you are good at and standing by it. “Some of the great people in the world don’t have all the bells and whistles of a charming, vivacious personality,” he says, “but have a real integrity.”
