When Anna Maxwell Martin was told her new series, Star City, had a no make-up policy, she was thrilled. It’s set in 1970s Soviet Russia, when lipstick and mascara were considered bourgeois and vulgar and were hard to come by, and the director wanted it to look authentic. Surely most actors would be terrified at the prospect of showing their face without any warpaint? “I absolutely loved it,” she tells me. “It’s less time in the make-up chair — that’s my dream role, to just get on with it.”
The actress, 49, is not the sort of person who enjoys putting her feet up while someone powders her nose: “That side of my job is a snooze.” She is too busy for that; she’s fast-talking and uses the word “practical” eight times during our interview. She made her name with a Bafta-winning performance in the BBC’s Bleak House in 2005 and as 12-year-old Lyra in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre (she was 26, but people believed she was a child and “I got some creepy letters”). Now she has become one of our most versatile, nuanced and downright hilarious actresses, withering in Line of Duty as the nightmare boss Detective Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael, Tiggerish in Ludwig and the star of Motherland, as the frazzled mum Julia.
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When she’s not acting she is campaigning for changes to the way schools treat children with special educational needs, but, she says, above all “I am a mum to my two girls, that comes first. I really like being busy and doing lots of things at the same time, though.” She pauses and grins. “I then burn out and cry and my boyfriend says I should do less.”
Maxwell Martin: “I never take the lift, I always take the stairs”Pip
We have met after a photoshoot and Maxwell Martin is in high spirits, wearing long denim shorts and a sleeveless black top that shows off her impressively toned arms and a small blue tattoo of a bird (“It’s very bad, I was on drugs,” she says, clarifying that’s a joke). “Please objectify me,” she says when I admire her biceps. “There was some talk about my abs in Cannes — I was over the moon.” They are there thanks to dynamic Pilates. “Any other exercise is too slow for me… Something like 80 per cent of Brits have lazy glutes,” she says. “What I say to them is, look, I also have lazy glutes, but I am trying. I never take the lift, I always take the stairs.”
Maxwell Martin’s default mode is jaunty repartee and laughter, but in Star City she is terrifying. It’s a spin-off of the Apple TV space thriller For All Mankind, and is about the Soviet Union’s mission to become the first nation to put a man on the moon, showing the tangled lives of the cosmonauts, engineers and intelligence officers embedded in space race HQ. She plays Lyudmilla Raskova, the “badass” head of KGB surveillance, whose sole purpose is to protect the space mission at any cost. She also has a strong fur hat game, including one that “made me look like Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em”.
Maxwell Martin, who grew up in Beverley, East Yorkshire, the daughter of two scientists, read history at Liverpool University, but didn’t know about the era in Star City. “I was drinking Bacardi Breezers, not studying,” she says, smiling. “I didn’t know about that period of Russian history, I didn’t know how Lyudmilla could have been a tank commander in the Second World War — they call it the Great Patriotic War in Russia — so I phoned a friend, the historian Ben Macintyre, because he knows everything, and said, talk to me about tank commanders during the Second World War! Thanks, love!”
As Lyudmilla Raskova in Star Cityapple tv
There are parallels between Lyudmilla and Carmichael from Line of Duty. “They are both women who have to maintain their high status at all costs. It’s really fun to play a part like that. Lyudmilla wants to do her job really well and if that means shooting someone, that’s what she is going to do.”
During filming she commuted from the set in Lithuania to see her teenage children whenever there was a gap in filming. “It’s not good for the environment,” she says. “Being a mum is my priority and so a lot of choosing parts comes down to how it balances with that side of my life. I’ve just had four months off with them, shopping, cooking, walking the dog.”
She and her daughters live in north London and are “a really good, optimistic little unit. I love having two daughters and I love how funny and tenacious they are.”
The girls’ father, the Notting Hill director Roger Michell, died of a heart attack in 2021, aged 65. He and Maxwell Martin met when he directed her in the 2004 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. They separated in 2020 but were on good terms and went on holiday together a fortnight before he died. She has spoken about suddenly being a single mother to two girls who had just lost their father, and how while her daughters talk about their dad, many acquaintances avoided mentioning him. It wasn’t her first experience of grief: her father, Ivan, died when she was 24, before any of her friends had experienced anything like that.
“Grief is grief, isn’t it?” she says now. Hard and horrible? “Exactly. I’ve just got to navigate it, parenting, earning a living, doing life, helping the girls thrive as best I can. That’s the focus.”
After Michell died she was in a play, The Constituent, at the Old Vic in London and felt adrift not being able to talk to him about it. “I’d always had Roger there, so that was quite a lot.” Does she still wonder what he would say? “No, because what’s the point? I don’t talk to anyone in my head, I’ve never understood that. Some people talk to the dog, don’t they? Why would I talk to my dog? He’s clearly not going to talk back.”
Refreshingly she says her industry is often good if you are a mother. “I can’t describe how kind some people are. On Star City I never had to creep in and say, I’m sorry, this has happened. They understood my priority is my life and my family.”
With Roger Michell in 2010Alamy
Just before we started talking she called one of her daughters (her phone case has a cute 3D cartoon cupid on it) to say she wouldn’t be picking her up. I tell her it’s pick-up time at my toddler’s nursery too and she says: “It’s bittersweet sending your children to nursery — you want to work, but you want to be with them.” Her daughters were “I think retrospectively too young” when she went back to work after having them. “But you are self-employed, so you are aware you shouldn’t take too long off. You are on the hamster wheel. You’ve got to stay on it.”
She adds: “I bet people are telling you it gets easier being a parent. Nah, it definitely gets harder. Where are they? What are they drinking? Supporting their mental health is really important. Most of my friends left home at 15. Now we are still spoon-feeding them, putting a bib on them.”
Of course she is joking: she always wanted children and clearly adores her daughters. “They are ace. Who was I before I had kids? I was a pile of shit.”
As a family she, her daughters and her boyfriend, who is a camera operator, watch a lot of comedies. “We have our comfort comedies that we have watched over and over again. For the girls it’s Derry Girls, Gavin and Stacey, the American Office.”
Motherland ticks that comfort comedy box for a lot of people and she thinks that’s why it’s the role she is most recognised for. “Comedy often makes you more approachable. If you’re Julia flinging yourself about people aren’t scared to approach you.”
Her daughters, however, say Motherland is “embarrassing”. “Julia is a full-cringe character and I’d do anything to make her even more spine-churningly cringe. The stress of parenting is huge. You could write a drama about that or you could write a comedy and they’d probably be exactly the same.”
With Diane Morgan and Paul Ready in MotherlandColin Hutton
The show came to a “natural end” after three series. “We weren’t sad because we felt we’d done really good work and were proud. I’m so pleased [the spin-off] Amandaland has been a success.” Would she like a cameo in it? “No, it’s their show.”
And then there is her campaigning. She wants an end to “the cruel and idiotic” fines for the families of children who don’t attend school. Difficulties accessing support for her daughters after Michell’s death and their experience of having dyslexia made her realise how much needs to change in how children with special educational needs are treated and the way school absence is punished. Exclusions have gone up and fines have gone up from £60 to £80.
“We’ve got to stop criminalising non-attendance at school, it doesn’t get us anywhere,” Maxwell Martin says. “Never mind that it’s cruel, unfeeling, unempathetic — if you are fining families, how are they going to cope with that pressure, especially when one in three children is affected by poverty?”
She has executive-produced a short film called Unauthorised Absence about the strain on the relationship between a mother and a daughter who has undiagnosed autism and is trying to get her needs met in the school system. “Teachers and teaching assistants and the education system are all under a lot of pressure,” she says. “But amid this we are missing out on the needs of lots of children.”
She is also campaigning against cuts to the adoption and special guardianship support fund, which gives money to adopted children for therapy and support. “Taking money away from them doesn’t make sense because you are going to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a very vulnerable adult if you don’t support them as a vulnerable child.”
Maxwell Martin seems to be on a roll. She has finished filming a second series of Ludwig and is off to France for a film. “My confidence is better now,” she says. Part of it is because of having children — “They mean you are not myopically obsessed with the industry” — but it’s also getting older and knowing more people. “I have never been down on ageing, it’s great. It means you can walk into a room and know more people. I’m really ambitious.”
Admitting to having ambition is rare, but Maxwell Martin has a winning honesty to her, whether talking about the space race or lazy glutes — it makes her fun to spend time with, and one of the most exciting actresses around.
Star City starts on Apple TV with two episodes on May 29
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