EXCLUSIVE: “I’m just thrilled, chuffed to buggery is what I say,” says Miriam Margolyes about A Friend of Dorothy scoring an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film. The film has struck a chord and Margolyes, while being self-deprecating and characteristically a little blue, is on good form when she chats to Deadline, alongside A Friend Of Dorothy co-star Stephen Fry and the film’s writer-director Lee Knight, who tells us he is also working on a feature-length version of the short.
Knight wrote the title role for Margolyes. “I immediately knew I wanted to do it,” she says. “I’ve never made as much money as I have recently, so it wasn’t about that. It was just about love, really. That’s what the film was about in some ways. I was just very taken by it and very charmed.”
The movie, which is on Disney+ in Europe, follows JJ, played by newcomer Alistair Nwachukwu who meets Dorothy after kicking his football into her garden. She recognizes his latent acting talent and his struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. He helps her with day-to-day tasks as the pair read plays, act out scenes, and become firm friends. “Perhaps you are the first ever to truly see me,” Dorothy says to JJ. “You see me,” he responds.
Margolyes says: “That was a moment and Lee’s skill is that he captured it. We don’t, in life, much get the chance to see each other; most of the time we spend hiding. I’ve always been somebody, personally, who came out rather more than people wanted me to.”
Knight’s directorial debut never tips over into mawkish but has some unashamedly tender moments. “Who wants to make something that depresses people?” Margolyes asks. “We’re living in complicated times and this is making people happy. It’s a true story, based on a true event and on a real woman who was Lee’s neighbor. So, there is happiness and truth there, let’s celebrate that.”
Deadline speaks to Margolyes, Fry and Knight on a Zoom, but Nwachukwu was busy prepping for his part in the stage version of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind so we had to squeeze in a call with the breakout star in between rehearsals. His way into a co-starring role in A Friend of Dorothy was via social media, answering an open casting call on Instagram.
In the film, JJ’s friendship with Miriam is ultimately empowering. Nwachukwu says: “He’s very guarded at first, I think because of his sexuality. He’s pushing that down, he’s pushing a lot of things down. He’s not his full self, and Miriam helps draw that out of him and bring out who he really is. She helps him to celebrate who he is. Up until that point, he’s ashamed…there’s a lot of shame there.”
Fry succinctly captures the generation-spanning relationship between Dorothy and JJ: “There is this sense that she is someone who has given her heart to theater and to actors and playwrights and the mysteries and the wonders that they can produce, and she sees this in JJ.”
He bookends the film as Dickie, the executor of Dorothy’s will. “I saw Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, and it absolutely knocked me for six,” he says. “The inspiration is E.M. Forster’s ‘Howard’s End’ and there’s a sort of spring from E.M. Forster to The Inheritance, and from The Inheritance to A Friend of Dorothy. It plays as a little silent gift inside the film.”
Margolyes and Fry have storied careers, while Nwachukwu’s acting journey is just beginning. Understandably, he admits to nerves. “I didn’t want to let Lee down, I didn’t want to let myself down, and I didn’t want to let the story down,” he says. “But then Miriam is so graceful, she just said to me: ‘What you need to do is breathe and listen and the story will take care of itself. It’s a conversation, soul to soul. We connect my soul to your soul, your soul to my soul. We just breathe together, we listen’. And that’s what we did.”
It turns out Nwachukwu wasn’t alone in feeling the pressure. “You know, good actors and nice people help each other, and we helped each other,” Margolyes says. “I wasn’t conscious at all of teaching him anything, I just know that I was terrified and I thought he was probably quite scared too. But I knew, just from being with him for five minutes, that he is an extraordinary talent.”
Writer-director Knight, meanwhile, is soaking up the buzz that accompanies an Oscar nomination. He is also hatching bigger plans for Dorothy, notably to make the short into a feature. “That’s what I’m working on at the moment,” he says. “I know how the [feature-length] story plays out. I really would also love it to be a play eventually because I just think there’s something so theatrical about these characters. There’s just so much more I want to explore. I feel like [the short] is the tip of the iceberg.”
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