Sexy? No, my clinch with the Night Manager was just SO embarrassing: A revealing interview with TV's most envied actress (who thinks Hugh Laurie is the REAL heartthrob) :VIDEO

Sexy? No, my clinch with the Night Manager was just SO embarrassing: A revealing interview with TV's most envied actress (who thinks Hugh Laurie is the REAL heartthrob)  

BBC방송의 6부작 드라마 '나이트 매니저' 

By SARAH RAINEY FOR THE DAILY MAIL

Pressed up against a wall on the set of BBC spy thriller The Night Manager, her chiffon dress hitched up and her legs wrapped around her co-star as she moaned in ecstasy, Elizabeth Debicki was thinking only one thing.

'Quickly!' she laughs, remembering the scene. 'We both wanted it to be over quickly. The faster we could shoot that bit, the better.

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Elizabeth Debicki speaks with a soft Australian twang and lacks the usual actor's bravado

'We did it in one take and everyone on the set was like: "OK, I think we've got it now, let's move on." Which was a relief for both of us.'

It isn't quite the reaction you might have expected from the actress dubbed 'the luckiest woman on TV' for her steamy sex scene with heart-throb Tom Hiddleston.

In the six-part BBC series, which concludes tomorrow night, the statuesque beauty has beguiled the nation as Jed Marshall, the captivating young girlfriend of arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie.

With her icy blonde crop, enviably elegant wardrobe and legs that go on forever, she's the woman that other women want to be — and the woman that men want to be with.

None more so than Hiddleston's character Jonathan Pine, a hotel manager-turned-undercover agent, whose secret tryst with Jed in episode four set pulses racing and Twitter into meltdown.

The chemistry between the pair was undeniable, and viewers began to wonder if there was something rather more going on off-camera.

But Elizabeth, 25, insists the on-screen frisson was nothing more than dramatic licence — the pair are simply good friends.

She is bemused by the fixation of fans on her co-star's bottom. 'Someone told me someone had written about "Tom Hiddleston's peachy backside". First of all, I died laughing. Second, I don't remember [it being like] that.

'They're strange things, sex scenes. They're inherently awkward to do and the best-case scenario is that you get on well with the other person, as Tom and I did.

'Afterwards, we parted ways and ten minutes later met at the tea trolley for a normal conversation. It was as if it never happened.'

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In the six-part BBC series The Night Manager, which concludes tomorrow night, the statuesque beauty has beguiled the nation as Jed Marshall, the captivating young girlfriend of arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie

While Tom, 35, may be the more obvious hunk of the cast, it was Hugh Laurie, 30 years her senior, who made more of an impression. She describes him as 'smart', 'talented' and 'handsome' — in the space of a minute. 'I loved working with him.'

It may be Hugh, also The Night Manager's executive producer and a big fan of its author John le Carre, who had spent years working to get it made, whom we have to thank for introducing Elizabeth to a British audience.

Shortly after she was cast by Danish director Susanne Bier, an invitation arrived for breakfast with him at a diner in LA.

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Elizabeth was dubbed 'the luckiest woman on TV' for her steamy sex scene with heart-throb Tom Hiddleston

'We sat for hours,' she says. 'I ordered a pancake stack, but he insisted on also ordering me his favourite thing on the menu — a milkshake with bananas and peanut butter. Even though I eat like a racehorse, I couldn't manage it, which he has never let me live down.'

Elizabeth speaks with a soft Australian twang and lacks the usual actor's bravado.

Six years ago, she was a drama student at the University of Melbourne's acting school. Two months after graduation, she was summoned to Hollywood by director Baz Lurhmann.

He was so struck by her audition tape for his 2013 film The Great Gatsby — posted from her suburban family home — that he gave her the key part of golfer Jordan Baker on the spot.

Two years later, Guy Ritchie asked her to appear in his star-studded version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E as preening villainess Victoria Vinciguerra.

'It's been quite a whirlwind,' she says. 'The only way I can describe life is feeling as if you're pitched forward all the time, not always able to stop. I'm slowly getting used to watching things I've been in, trying to understand it all.'

Many see Elizabeth's turn as the willowy-limbed, ethereal star of The Night Manager as her career-defining moment. Her unique look — alabaster skin, piercing eyes and an elfin blonde crop — is aloof, mysterious and impossibly sexy.

Costume designer Signe Sejlund explains why her character never wears a bra.

'It's nice to see skin. She's so tall and her skin is as white as a canvas. I wanted her to be a see-through goddess. Floating and pure, and at the same time she should wear an evening gown the way you wear pyjamas, as if you just stepped out of bed and don't care.'

Elizabeth is comfortable with her body — all 6ft 2in of it. Indeed, her semi-nude scenes in The Night Manager have left viewers in no doubt of that.

One of her first scenes saw her climbing naked into a bath in full view of the male cast, while in a later scene she stripped off on a beach in front of Hiddleston for an impromptu swim.

Her confidence in her body comes from her parents, Amanda and Stanislaw, who trained as ballet dancers at Le Lido cabaret in Paris. Elizabeth was born there in 1990. 

When she was five, her family relocated to Melbourne. Her mother, half-Australian and half-Irish, runs a dance school in the city, while her Polish father works in a theatre.

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However she insists the on-screen frisson was nothing more than dramatic licence — the pair are simply good friends

Her younger brother, still at school, and sister, a model, live in Australia, and the three are very close. Growing up, her long legs made it hard to fit in at Huntingtower, her £2,100-a-term private school.

'At that age, you just want to be like everyone else,' she says. 'I was academic — a bit of a nerd. Looking back, it wasn't a very comfortable experience.'

She did ballet every day and grew up assuming that she would follow in her parents' footsteps. In the end, she took up drama.

'Being on stage felt like the most natural place,' she says. 'I always got a thrill from it.' These days, she lives out of a suitcase, splitting her time between the family home, her agent in LA and visiting family and friends in Britain.

As for dating, it's 'difficult' as she's on the move so much. She admits to falling for intelligent men — but none of them as dark and conniving as The Night Manager's Richard Roper.

Unlike many actresses, she doesn't have a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account, and 'never reads things on the internet'. She hasn't even followed The Night Manager on TV. Perhaps she can tune in when it's launched in Australia this week. 

If she does, she'll be watching from the sofa of her parents' home in Melbourne. There, she's not a star, just another one of the locals. 'I could count on the fingers of one hand the times anyone has ever recognised me,' she says.

One gets the feeling all that is about to change.

 

 

SO WHAT COLOUR IS TOM'S HAIR? 

Mousy brown: As Pine in The Night Manager 

Rusty copper: At a film premiere last October 

Jet black: In Toronto for the 2011 film festival

A touch of blond: Tom's recent publicity photo 

DID YOU SPOT LE CARRE'S SECRET CAMEO - AND THE PREGNANCY THAT LASTED FIVE YEARS? 

HOW HUGH GOT INTO CHARACTER

The former Blackadder star, who wrote a Nineties novel called The Gun Seller, had to be dissuaded from doing too much research into his role as Richard Roper. He wanted to interview real-life arms dealers, until the producers stopped him. ‘These are deeply frightening people and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them,’ says Hugh.

He unsettled his co-stars by staying in character, never dropping Roper’s velvety growl. ‘He was so into it, he had a presence,’ says David Harewood, who plays a CIA agent. ‘On set he was a bit of a terror.’

THE ETON CONNECTION

Hiddleston and Laurie went there: Tom (born 1981) attended with Princes William and Harry; Hugh (born 1959) was a contemporary of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. John le Carre taught French and German at Eton in the Fifties.

THE BOYS’ TOYS

The King of Jordan owns a vintage wooden Riva speedboat similar to the pair Roper used to take his family to a beachfront restaurant in Majorca. The cost? About a quarter of a million quid each. But that’s nothing compared to Roper’s private aircraft, a Learjet, which would set you back £15 million.

His other mode of air travel isn’t much cheaper: an eight-seater executive helicopter — like the one he used to clatter up to a Swiss mountain hotel — costs nearly £10 million. 

The arms dealer put on a ferocious display of firepower for a potential arms-buying client, laying waste to an Arab village which had not been evacuated. 

Calling on his own private mercenary army, he staged a piece of colossally destructive theatre, deploying a FGM-148 Javelin light anti-tank missile, used to destroy a remote-controlled car, at £175,000, and FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, at £25,000 a pop, which blew up a drone in mid-air. For the grand finale, he unloaded enough illegal napalm to light up an entire valley. As Roper remarked, napalm is ‘hard to get hold of these days’.

JOHN LE CARRE’S ROLE

Like so many writers and directors before him — Alfred Hitchock, Woody Allen and Morse creator Colin Dexter — thriller writer le Carre had a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo role. The Night Manager author played an elderly diner in a restaurant as Roper’s drunken right-hand man Corky (Tom Hollander) ran amok, snatching away a lobster salad intended for another diner. Le Carre said: ‘My dear man. What the hell’s going on?’

WHERE WAS THE CCTV?

One startling oversight is the absence of security cameras at Roper’s Spanish fortress home. Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) and Roper’s lover, Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), are free to sneak about the place, even breaking into ‘The Chief’s’ private study to find documents showing his dodgy deals, without being caught. Of course, the absence of cameras might be a security measure in itself. Perhaps Roper didn’t want any incriminating evidence about himself on film.

Strange, too, that British spy boss Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), while heavily pregnant and apparently about to pop, feels no qualms about rushing around Europe for secret assignations with the arms dealer’s lawyer.

In the first episode, when she first speaks to Pine on the phone, she already looks pregnant. Five years later, when the action moves to Switzerland, she has filled out a great deal. So has she been pregnant for five years?

In the book, her character was a man named Leonard, so the problem didn’t arise. Colman didn’t find out she was pregnant until after she was cast, so Angela’s condition was a late addition to the script.

WHO HAS THE BEST LINES?

‘Nothing quite as pretty as napalm at night’ — Richard Roper (though the remark echoes Colonel Kilgore’s famous line in Apocalypse Now: ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’

‘If you lay one hand on that precious fruit, we’ll chop it off. And I don’t mean the hand’ — Roper’s venomous second-in-command Corky warning Pine to stay away from Roper’s lover, Jed.

‘We are the emperors of Rome . . . blood and steel, the only elements that ever meant anything’ — Roper surveys the smoking landscape after blowing up a huge amount of ordnance to impress an arms buyer.

‘It is so pleasing to wake up the f*****g Germans’ — Roper, again, after he and his party land in ski resort Zermatt by helicopter at night.

‘You saved my boy and I’m grateful. But if you ever step out of line, I will make you howl for your mother’ — Roper’s welcome speech to new employee, Pine.

‘Alternatively, fill your pockets with stones, walk into the sea and keep going’ — the suspicious Corky’s welcome speech.

‘I don't care who sees me naked. I do care who sees me cry’ — Jed explains why she’s so rarely fully dressed.

WILL THERE BE A SEQUEL?

The one-off novel is not part of a series of books. But that’s unlikely to stop the Beeb, which co-produced this series with U.S. cable network AMC and production company The Ink Factory.

If there is a Night Manager 2, the budget is likely to surpass the first series, which cost a rumoured £20 million. But would John le Carre give the green light to such a project?

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3510081/Elizabeth-Debicki-talks-steamy-sex-scene-heart-throb-Tom-Hiddleston-Night-Manager.html#ixzz441UssqDZ 
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