Looking over the past two years of Rebecca Ferguson’s resumé is almost enough to give you whiplash.
Since 2024, the versatile Swedish actor has veered between genres, playing the witchy mother of the messiah in Dune: Part Two, an army officer trying to prevent the end of the world in political thriller
A House Of Dynamite, an emotionless AI judge in sci-fi-action movie Mercy, twin sisters in the film finale of crime drama Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man and terrifying headmistress Dame Snap in the recent big-screen adaptation of the beloved children’s book The Magic Faraway Tree.
In between all those projects, she also found time to film the final two seasons of Silo, the post-apocalyptic drama set in a huge underground bunker. Ferguson stars as a plucky engineer who discovers a massive cover-up and she also serves as the show’s executive producer.
So why the flurry of activity and the wildly eclectic choices?
“I thought maybe my career was coming to an end, so I just grabbed anything that came my way,” the charmingly self-deprecating Ferguson jokes to Stellar over a Zoom call from Los Angeles, sitting alongside series creator Graham Yost. “You know, make a bit of
dosh and hope for the best, really. I bought my mum a house and paid off a couple of mortgages.”
But when pressed, Ferguson admits there are many reasons she chooses projects. Sometimes it’s because she’s desperate to work with an actor, as was the case for Peaky Blinders and its Oscar-winning star Cillian Murphy.
“We have the same agent and it was a standing joke where I was kind of ‘I’ll be a tea cup … anything … I just want to be on the receiving end’ because I think Cillian is a fantastic actor,” she explains. “And then he called and asked if I wanted to be in Peaky with him, which was great. It was an honour because it’s a big show for him.”
Other times there’s a personal connection, as with this year’s family adventure The Magic Faraway Tree, which she chose thanks to Saga, the eight-year-old daughter she shares with her businessman husband Rory St Clair Gainer. (Ferguson, 42, also has a 19-year-old son, Isac, from a previous relationship.)
“My daughter had finished reading Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. We were in LA to do Silo press and she threw it on the bed and went, ‘I’ve read it – I’m done.’
“An hour later, I got an email offering me Dame Snap. So then I was like, ‘Of course I’m doing it.’
“Sometimes you just do roles because of your kid reading a book.”
And sometimes, Ferguson admits, “we just do jobs because it’s a job” – though she declines to name names, and adds that she’s become pickier in recent years.
Indeed, she initially needed some convincing before she signed on to the critically acclaimed Silo.
Adapted from Hugh Howey’s book trilogy of the same name, the dystopian drama is set hundreds of years after an environmental catastrophe, and follows the fortunes and misfortunes of a heavily regulated community living in a giant underground silo that extends 144 levels into the earth.
Show creator and writer Yost had been impressed by Ferguson’s performance alongside Tom Cruise in the fifth Mission: Impossible film, 2015’s Rogue Nation. He knew he’d found the right person to play Juliette Nichols, the steely and driven engineer who questions the silo’s strict hierarchy and inviolable rules – and eventually becomes its reluctant leader.
Although Ferguson had already made inroads in Hollywood thanks to her Golden Globe-nominated role in the 2013 British historical drama series The White Queen and the 2014 sword-and-sandals action-adventure Hercules, it was her dramatic Mission: Impossible entrance as the ambiguous MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, resplendent in a yellow evening gown and somehow making a sniper’s rifle look sexy, that made the world sit up and take notice.
“I was like, ‘Who the f*** is that?’” Yost recalls to Stellar.
“She was so compelling. Then I read she was Swedish. That’s why I didn’t know her. And I’d never seen The White Queen. So I’d been a huge fan for years and then we got a shot and she said no. But [she] was intrigued enough [for us] to keep on asking.
“We had another Zoom and I said ‘Don’t worry about that script you’re not fond of – we’ll fix it.’ And we just hit it off.”
Season three of Silo opens with Ferguson’s character Juliette dealing with memory loss while also being manipulated by mysterious and shadowy forces at the top of the hierarchy she’s meant to be leading.
With its references to Iran, misinformation and artificial intelligence, the plot also feels strangely prescient for scripts that were written three years ago and adapted from a book that was written 15 years ago.
“You always like to find resemblances,” says Ferguson of the real-world parallels.
“But lack of information and controlling people through narrative and media has been going on, I think, for centuries and centuries and centuries. And through religion, too.”
And while Silo paints a bleak vision of the future with its blasted, irradiated landscapes, authoritarian rule and underground civilisation, Ferguson says she doesn’t lose sleep over the prospect of the world going to hell in a handbasket. She’d rather focus on the things she cares about and can control than catastrophise about the things she can’t.
“I don’t read a lot of news and I feel privileged to be in a position where I feel safe,” she adds. “It’s a bit like bubbling yourself because I can. I think it’s important to also educate yourself – but I find it tears me apart.
“I look after my community a lot and that’s about how we raise our kids, our friends’ kids. It’s kind of the micro rather than the macro,” she tells Stellar.
“I’m very controlling when it comes to my kids, who have no social media. I love communes. My home is a commune for friends and family who need homes.”
Silo is streaming on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping each Friday.