Patsy Ferran will not judge a book by its cover. But covers are important to her. “See?” she said, palming a copy of a Barbara Kingsolver novel at a Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson bookstore. “Such a good cover. Aesthetics do matter.”
Ferran, a London-based actress, is currently starring in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just up the road from the store. A latecomer to reading for pleasure, Ferran picked up fiction, particularly American fiction, during the pandemic lockdowns and has yet to put it down. Currently working her way through Percival Everett’s “James,” with Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” cued up next, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t buy any more books. But the shelves were calling.
“I kind of explore cities via book shops,” she said. “That and good coffee.”
In the store, Ferran, lively, shrewd and lightly self-deprecating, (“I do my own glam,” she said wryly as she shook out her hair from a woolly hat) picked up and put down several recent paperbacks, enthusing about their feel. “British paperbacks are so stiff, you have to crowbar them open, which I hate,” she said. Ferran decided that she might buy just one. Or two. Certainly not more than three.
Ferran, 35, made her professional debut just after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in a production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” More stage roles followed, including her first lead, as Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” also by Williams, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. “This young actor is a genuine marvel, as hilarious as she is heartbreaking,” one critic wrote of the performance. Soon she was recognized as one of the most talented stage actresses of her generation.
Small and quick, with dark, curling hair, Ferran was an unusual choice for Blanche. A great American heroine, “an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty” in Williams’s words, Blanche is typically played by willowy, languorous blondes. (Recent New York Blanches include Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson). Ferran knows this. She worried that audiences would dismiss her as the wrong cover for this particular book.
“My gremlin in my brain was going, They’re going to hate you,” she said. “Because you are a very unconventional Blanche.”
Ferran leaped onto the London “Streetcar” at the last minute. Another actor, Lydia Wilson, had been cast opposite Paul Mescal’s Stanley. But when Wilson had to withdraw days before previews began, Frecknall, the revival’s director, thought of her former colleague and friend. Ferran was at the bank when she received Frecknall’s text asking her to join the production.
Briefly, she resisted. She wondered how it would look to replace another actress and the run would mean postponing her honeymoon. Besides, she didn’t see herself as Blanche. “No way, José,” Ferran, who is fond of old-timey epithets, said. “Blanche has this flighty, coquettish, airy energy.” Ferran, who was cast in boys’ parts all through school and typically favors an androgynous look, felt far away from all that.
“I’m not a naturally feminine woman,” she said.
But her husband convinced her that if she turned down the role, she would regret it. Besides, she is a people pleaser. “I was like, ‘She needs me,’” Ferran said. So she called Frecknall back and said she had one more day of shooting on “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho film, but then yes, she would do it.
That night, studying the script and realizing the number of lines she would have to memorize, Ferran panicked. She called her agent and attempted to back out. It was too late; a news release had already been sent. The next day at rehearsal she saw Frecknall, and the two women burst out laughing.
“I was like, Oh, we’re going to be OK, because we all know how mad this is,” Ferran said.
She slept very little those first weeks and acquired many more gray hairs. But everyone welcomed her, and in Mescal, her co-star, she found a real theater animal. (She hadn’t realized how famous he was until the show was up and running. “Like, oh my God, people really love him,” she said.) In the past, Ferran had always had the luxury of time to prepare. Now she had to go on instinct alone. She couldn’t worry that she wasn’t a typical Blanche or change herself to become more Blanche-like. Instead she brought Blanche to her, creating a Blanche who was nervous, nervy, achingly vulnerable, smarter than the other characters assume.
“Because I had no time, I only had myself as a filter,” Ferran said. It is, she believes, the best acting of her career. The Times critic Matt Wolf agreed, writing that he had rarely seen “the anger that coexists with Blanche’s fragility conveyed as clearly as it is here.”
She has tried to apply some of these lessons to her film and television acting — in addition to “Mickey 17,” she also has a major role in an episode of the new season of “Black Mirror” and plays Jane Austen in “Miss Austen,” the PBS Masterpiece series that premieres on May 4. “Onscreen, you have to be as unprecious and free and relaxed as possible,” she said. “So you learn to just go with the flow.”
But flow doesn’t always come easily to Ferran. After the London run ended, in February 2023, Ferran had something approaching a Blanche-adjacent nervous collapse. “My body reached breaking point and I wasn’t very well for a couple of months,” she said.
The prospect of returning to the role, first for a West End reprise in February and then for the Brooklyn performance frightened her. Certain lines in the play, like Blanche’s declaration that her nerves had broken, felt too close. She worried she wasn’t mentally strong enough to play the part in New York City. But she describes this more recent rehearsal period as being akin to exposure therapy. “The more you do it, the more your body just gets used to it,” she said. “It actually has helped me massively deal with my own [expletive],” she said. And she’s been moved by the enthusiasm of Brooklyn audiences. “Holy moly,” she said. “The joy and generous open vocal responses that we’re getting, we never got in London. I love this city so much.”
The demands of the show and her preparations for an upcoming Charlie Kaufman movie mean that Ferran only has between two and three waking hours to herself each day. She likes to spend them reading. Blanche, a former English teacher, would approve. At the bookstore she decided on a copy of Charles Portis’s “True Grit” and two recent novels by American women. She hefted the shopping bag proudly. It’s not likely to be her last purchase.
“I’m thinking, do I buy a third suitcase to take them all back to London?” she mused.
