Likewise, Hope Gap fails to oblige with the kind of closure that even films such as Marriage Story supply. At 31, Bening had just divorced her first husband and lead a low-key life by Hollywood's standards. I don’t get out much. It’s completely barmy’ … O’Connor and Nighy in Hope Gap. “Grace doesn’t have the reaction we want her to,” says Bening. I didn’t want to play the man who comes to save them.”, “I don’t like the look of hardly any versions of being male, frankly,” says Nighy. It is a film about emotional crisis, released during a global breakdown. But lucky for him, she had a thing for silver foxes. “Talk about brutal, because it’s such a repudiation of the needs of others.”, Right now, says Bening, she is just trying to ride out the “Covid-coaster”. I don’t have any answers. Hope Gap’s needy wife and repressed husband can seem to play into cliche. Therefore it always will be like that. “Oh my God. “Men have been getting away with everything for centuries. This is the stumbling block when it comes to cool, impartial discussion of Hope Gap. He has always wanted to live by “fast-moving water”; maybe now he will try. “By abandoning the weak, the strong survive,” he tells his history class, apparently about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Now, their darkest moments are back in the limelight, with Annette Bening as Grace, the mother, and Nighy as Edward, her husband. The world’s probably about to explode.’ It’s always been like that. It’s all going to end in tears. It’s not their problem. And I loved the fact that she just does not. That is the other thing about the cove of the film’s title. “Jamie [Josh O’Connor, playing the son] is not an observer. When I’m alone on a hillside, I feel weirdly comforted.”. Hope Gap is based on The Retreat to Moscow, a play Nicholson wrote in 1999, inspired by his parents’ separation. Just more bullshit.”, Nighy warms to his theme: still not an agony uncle, but certainly a pained relative. A long pause. O’Connor, who is 30 and has a serious girlfriend, reckons compromise can be the finest part of a relationship; Nighy, 70, who was with Diana Quick for 28 years, suspects it is more about “people who make an effort and those who don’t”. I haven’t done that for about 30 years, but it’s a very pleasurable thing I remember.”, O’Connor, raised in Gloucestershire, currently in Leeds, talks about “feeling rubbish” whenever he returns to the capital. “That it examines stuff. Enough truth-bombs drop to make what could have been a slightly suburban bit of prestige cinema really unsettling. Explore Annette Bening's Bio-Wiki, net worth & salary in 2020. People of character who are now saying: this has gone too far, we’ve got to get rid of him.” What if he is re-elected? “I think it’s OK,” says Nicholson. Edward’s other argument is that compatibility is an absolute; he was just mistaken when he thought he and his wife were a good fit. The loneliest I’ve ever been has been in London. Edward’s rhetoric puts her in mind, she says, of people today whose primary concern is safeguarding the economy. Grace does not buy it. “But it is dodgy. Apparently taken pretty much verbatim from real life, it is a winding insight into how having a child immediately recasts all your actions as an example. Yikes. I think there will be a revolution.” You can hear her shudder 6,000 miles away. If you have any sense of history, you know people have frequently been saying: ‘This is the worst time that’s ever been. That is its point. The two actors talk about their new film, Hope Gap, and along with co-star Josh O’Connor and director William Nicholson, share their thoughts on honesty, fidelity and the perils of talking at breakfast, Bill Nighy would like you to know that he is not a professional agony uncle. “I’ve seen incredible personal tragedy within a family where people really step up and I’ve also seen people really not do that.” It’s astonishing, she says, as well as explicable. Therefore, it isn’t like that actually. I’m taking the pain of people close to me and putting it out there for my own glory.”. All three of the men I talk to reject this. In simplistic stories, it’s different, but in real life you see people behave in ways you never would have guessed and they’re not heroic. “She was fine with it. Hope Gap does not shy from exploring options if you feel the future holds little but misery. You must be wholly honest, he insists, and he is as good as his word. And after a bust-up the presence of the child – the living embodiment of a marriage – is both a joy and a torment to the parents.”. And until we deal with sexual politics, the world will not function properly. I was always jealous in the school play that all the emotional parts were for women. She made her 48 million dollar fortune with The Siege, The Search, Untitled Warren Beatty project. I sometimes have flashes of memory and think how lonely she was and how hurt and that I didn’t do enough to support her.” Both Nicholson’s parents have since died, his mother after moving in with her son and his family for her last 15 years, for all his talk of abandonment. Now, their darkest moments are back in the limelight, with Annette Bening as Grace, the mother, and Nighy as Edward, her husband. (Reuters) “The performances that inspired me were things like seeing Pete Postlethwaite cry on stage. She has been trying to encourage people to vote; feels buoyed by the Democratic Convention, and “that dedicated Republicans are beginning to really repudiate Trump. Admitting such qualms is unusual. ‘In real life, people aren’t heroic’: Annette Bening and Bill Nighy on why marriages implode. “But it is dodgy. But none seems so fitting as a three-hander about claustrophobic domesticity. We can’t really make somebody else do anything or feel a certain way.” (Lest you dismiss this wisdom, Bening’s parents celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary next month.). ‘The myth of women being weaker is male propaganda’ … Bill Nighy and Annette Bening in Hope Gap. When it was staged, his father remained reticent, but his mother was “devastated, absolutely devastated”. The father of one my dearest friends committed suicide when she was in college. The battle lines in Hope Gap are drawn in blood. “The scientists are screaming: ‘We can’t do this, we have to test, to do everything we can to protect our healthcare workers who are dying.’ But there is a certain point of view, embodied in the movie, that says: ’There’s a cost, people die, but we have to move on.’ That sort of brutality.”. Yet Grace’s almost gleeful fragility is a red herring. Cliffs can be an invitation as well as a consolation. He even dares to suggest that children may bear some responsibility when their parents split. But that’s still the hinge which the rest of her life turned on.” She sighs down the line. Annette Bening and husband Warren Beatty arrive at the 83rd Academy Awards in Hollywood, California, February 27, 2011. I think a lot of us feel overwhelmed with this sadness and the despair. And the prevailing rawness means even the movie’s smaller moments assume a new potency. Even publicising it on the phone, talk soon returns to the pandemic. She subsequently “internalised the script”, says Nicholson; the sense you get is that this was not good. In the film’s most moving scene, Jamie tells Grace he would understand if she wanted to kill herself; but that if she does, he will know that unhappiness wins. How do you measure such things? But the minute you start to try to help, you feel better.”. If you don’t and then one day you say, ‘You never gave me what I wanted so I’m leaving,’ that’s not fair.”, Yet Bening, who has been married to Warren Beatty for 28 years, is Team Edward when it comes to compatibility. If you want to dress up in women’s clothing, just say. “I think it’s OK,” says Nicholson. Like they’re a rocket and I’m the first stage and then I drop away.”, “You can’t really feel that until you are a parent,” says Bening. And you really get to know people a lot better.”. This is a man who processed most anxiety years back. Tell as much of yourself to your partner as you can. “I’ve spent lockdown with my three grownup children and their partners,” says William Nicholson, the film’s writer and director, “everybody squashed up together.