Charlotte Riley was born in County Durham in 1981 and studied at Lamda. She won the Sunday Times Playwriting award in 2004 for Shaking Cecilia, co-written with Tiffany Wood. On screen, she appeared in Edge of Tomorrow, London Has Fallen and Peaky Blinders. She met her now husband Tom Hardy on a 2009 ITV adaptation of Wuthering Heights; they have two children. On 30 March, Riley stars alongside Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen in the BBC series Babies, about a young couple suffering a pregnancy loss, and will appear in Masters of the Universe in June.
Play
Guess How Much I Love You? at the Royal Court
This is hands down one of the best plays I’ve ever seen. It starts at a couple’s 20-week scan, then you watch them navigate the news they’re given. It’s an incredible tale of how love can get you through the most painful moments of life. I went with three friends and we were speechless afterwards. The emotion expressed by the two actors, Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, was visceral. It’s finished now, but I would recommend reading the play, because the writing by Luke Norris is really powerful.
Tea
Ringtons
Tea is a really important part of my life, and it all stems from spending a lot of time at my granny’s house. I have a vivid memory of this gold and green van turning up at the house, and it’d be the Ringtons man. They still sell tea house to house, and you can order it online – it’s really good. My granny would scoop it out of the tin and stick it in your cup, no tea bag. That’s how I still drink my tea today. So Ringtons is really nostalgic for me. I just need to find a milkman to deliver milk and that’ll be my fantasy complete.
Podcast
The Telepathy Tapes
I hate driving, but now I can’t wait to get into the car so I can listen to this podcast by the film-maker Ky Dickens. She goes on a journey with families of children who have non-verbal autism. These families have, over the years, started to connect to each other because they were all experiencing the same phenomenon: their children could communicate through thoughts in the way you and I do through words. The story and the beauty of what happens to these families is incredible, and on a larger scale it questions our understanding of consciousness.
Art
Bone Tooth and Claw skulls
My family and I love rambling around the woods and picking up animal skulls and bones; we have a big collection. I’m fascinated by skulls: their symbolic meaning, the way they look, their tactile nature. There’s this incredible guy called Joe Vettese who works as a prop-maker in the film industry but he also makes these incredible metal skulls, using real animal skulls that he first casts in wax. I think they’re really fucking cool.
Nonfiction
Foraging with Kids by Adele Nozedar
When we moved out of London to the countryside, I reconnected with a lot of things from my childhood: weekends spent in the garden and going out picking blackberries or sloes. I bought this book because I wanted to give my children what I’d experienced. It started when a neighbour came round with a jar of bright green wild garlic pesto. I’d never tasted anything like it. Now we go and collect sticky weed to make tea, or daisies and dandelions to make fritters. It takes you through the seasons and connects to something deep inside.
Exhibition
Frameless London
This is a really beautiful immersive art experience in Marble Arch. You walk into these huge rooms and the art is projected on to the walls and the ceiling, and there’s music curated around the artwork. I went with my children and they were able to interact with the pieces. It’s quite trippy. In the Degas room, petals would fall when you touched them. What’s brilliant is that it makes art really inclusive for all ages. Children can run around, jump, do whatever they want. My kids absolutely loved it. And I loved it too.
Photographs by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images, Richard Goldschmidt