Ruth Wilson on the True Horrors of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

Ruth Wilson has ducked into a cabin in the French Alps, taking a break from an activity she enjoys when she isn’t acting. “I’ve been skiing this week,” she said last week in a video interview. “It’s been a passion for years. It’s very dangerous. I can go head-down into something.”

She said that last part with a smile. Wilson, an English actress known for playing Idris Elba’s psychopathic nemesis in “Luther,” likes going to extremes and working without a net. Last year, at the Young Vic theater in London, she tested her endurance in “The Second Woman,” a 24-hour production in which her character goes through the same breakup scene 100 times, with 100 different scene partners. (Some, like Elba and Toby Jones, were trained actors; most were not.) For her first professional Shakespeare assignment, a 2019 Broadway production of “King Lear,” she played both Cordelia and the king’s Fool (opposite Glenda Jackson’s Lear).

Wilson’s latest role, in the limited series “The Woman in the Wall,” is no less daunting. (It premieres on Friday on Paramount+ With Showtime, having debuted in Britain in August.) She plays Lorna, a woman haunted by her years at one of Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries,” at least a dozen of which operated across the country from the 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Run by Catholic nuns, the mostly for-profit laundries used unmarried, pregnant and otherwise ostracized women for hard, unpaid labor, often after mothers were forcibly separated from their children.

Lorna, who is packed off to a fictional laundry at age 15, wants desperately to find her daughter. Like many babies born to unwed Irish mothers like Lorna, she was sold into adoption against her mother’s will. Hundreds of others are buried in unmarked graves.

As the series begins, Lorna, a chronic sleepwalker and outcast, is startled to find a dead body in her home. This happens around the same time a popular priest is found murdered. The six-episode series leans into Lorna’s tortured perception and subjective experience; she is antisocial and unstable but also the target of gaslighting by those in her seaside Irish town who insist that nothing all that bad happened to her when she was young.

The actress attacks the role with her typical intensity, portraying Lorna as a sort of feral animal in human form, alternately mocked and feared, pitied and scorned. At the same time, a Dublin police detective (Daryl McCormack, of “Bad Sisters”), adopted from a “Magdalene laundry” as a young child, confronts his own past as he investigates the crimes swirling around Lorna.

On her break from the slopes, Wilson, who also executive produced the series, discussed the shameful real-life history behind the story, her hunger for risk and the dramatic power of sleep deprivation. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

A great deal of “The Woman in the Wall” seems to take place inside of Lorna’s head.

The first few episodes are about the subjective and being inside her experience. It feels like a sort of nightmare state. We’re trying to land on what it must feel like for some of these women from the laundries, for this constant trauma to be coming back. And when the world is denying it, that must be very hard to reconcile.

Was it difficult to play that nightmare state?

What was really hard was holding two things in your head at the same time. You’re holding this desire to find the child but also the fact you might have just killed someone. Those two things were very hard to play at the same time. So I didn’t. I played one thing, and then the next scene, I played another thing. Her present moment keeps switching. Is it the guilt and fear that she may have killed this woman, or the hope that she might find the truth about her daughter?

What were some of the other challenges of playing Lorna?

It was quite difficult to manage the genres. It has the crime caper at the center of it. It’s also gothic horror, and it’s got some black comedy in it. And it has these scenes that feel like social realism; the scenes with the mothers were incredibly naturalistic and honest. So she’s a character that can traverse all those different worlds and make them all feel genuine to her. It’s very dark, and very emotional. But there were some moments that were also fun to do, like the sleepwalking. And I find her funny as a character.

Between this and “The Second Woman,” sleep loss seems like a prevalent theme in your work.

There’s something really interesting about the subconscious. The idea of “The Woman in the Wall” is that it’s hard to grasp reality when you’re functioning in a sort of non-sleep state. It’s a kind of madness.

Do you find yourself gravitating toward risky roles?

I don’t ever want to repeat myself, and I do like a challenge. I didn’t have any second thoughts about “The Second Woman.” I just thought, I will learn something from this, even if it’s boring for the audience, which I don’t think it will be. I wanted to push myself to the point of what happens after 18 hours of no sleep and you’re still performing. There’s some part of me that’s interested in the personal pursuit, and observing myself in those scenarios and seeing what I do and how I manage, and what effect it has on my performance. I think I’m interested in my own relationship to performance as much as I am in character.

Did anything surprise you about the real-life events behind “The Woman in the Wall?”

I was shocked by how recent this all was. I knew about the laundries, but all the depictions of it before had somehow made it feel like they were from the 1950s. It didn’t feel like it was the 1990s, when I was a teenager, when I was the age at which girls were being put into those homes. It really brought home that this is incredibly recent history, and for that reason, it’s hard to talk about because people still are having to process it and reconcile it. Those women that survived it are still out there and are still desperate for their stories to be told and for people to acknowledge that it happened.

What kind of behavior made women vulnerable to being placed in these institutions?

Women were put into these places not just for having sex. They were put in because they were too loud, too brash, wore a skirt too short, or just sort of stood out in some way. It was a way of oppressing women of all ages. Some women were in there in their 40s. They had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. There are some horrific stories of forced labor in these laundries. It was very brutal, and still not enough has come out about the truth of these places.

What is your next challenge? And will it afford more sleep?

I just finished playing Emily Maitlis, the journalist who did the famous interview with Prince Andrew, in the series “A Very Royal Scandal” with Michael Sheen. It was fascinating to do a deep dive on that interview and how it came to be, and the consequences of it. That’s what I’ve just finished filming, but I’d love to find a love story at the moment. I’m looking for some sort of love or connection because I feel so much work at the moment is sort of nasty and represents people in such a negative way. I want to find some hope.