The year is 2000 and Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is living in contented retirement in suburbia at the turn of the millennium. Her tranquil life is suddenly disrupted when she’s arrested by MI5 and accused of providing intelligence to Communist Russia.
Ben Miles and Judi Dench in Red Joan.Back in 1938 Joan (Sophie Cookson) is a Cambridge physics student who falls for young communist Leo Galich and through him, begins to see the world in a new light.
Working at a top-secret nuclear research facility during WWII, Joan comes to the realisation that the world is on the brink of mutually assured destruction. Confronted with an impossible question – what price would you pay for peace? – Joan must choose between betraying her country and loved ones or saving them.
Red Joan offered acclaimed theatre director Trevor Nunn and stage and screen legend Dench the chance to collaborate yet again after working together extensively during their respective careers. It also offered Nunn the opportunity to bring to screen a fascinating tale of espionage laced with romance, danger, drama and moral dilemmas. The novel’s potential as a movie was evident from the first moment Nunn glanced at its jacket while browsing in a bookstore. It was a real page-turner, he recalls.
“These days, when you get to the end of a book, there’s not only a biographical note about the author but there’s an e-mail address for your feedback,” recalls Nunn. “I used it to say: ‘I’m absolutely sure that the film rights have gone a long time ago but definitely this should be a movie’. Almost by return I got an e-mail back from the writer Jennie Rooney saying: ‘No the film rights have not gone and I cannot think of anything more exciting’.”
I said I’d love to do it, long before I read it
Bringing such a complex, multifaceted story to the big screen – and setting it over three different timelines – would require the skills and input of the finest acting talent, and Nunn knew instantly who he wanted to play his present-day Joan. “We are immensely privileged to have Judi Dench playing the older Joan,” he says. “Nobody could possibly be more substantial and believable as a woman faced with a vast moral problem, a human, political, personal and intellectual problem.”
For her part Dench had so much trust in the iconic director that she agreed in principle to the project before she’d even seen the script. “Strangely enough I didn’t know the story, so I knew nothing about her. Why I did it was because of Trevor. Trevor Nunn and I go back a very long time, to Stratford, and Macbeth, and A Comedy of Errors, A Winter’s Tale, lots of productions. I’d never worked with him on film, and he asked me and I said I’d love to do it, long before I read it or knew anything about it.”
On reading the script, Dench became fascinated by this seemingly innocuous woman and her extraordinary lifelong secret. “She’s just a very ordinary person, living in an unremarkable house who, in her 70s was uncovered as one of the Cambridge Spy Ring,” explains the actress. “She was very, very good at just keeping it to herself. She had great belief in what she was doing, knew why she was doing it, and kept it to herself.
“She says in the film that it was Hiroshima that gave her the conviction of wanting to do such a thing,” adds Dench. “I remember that time, the shock of it, and I can understand the idea of somebody wanting to even things out, as she says.”
Joining Dench is Cookson playing the younger Joan between being a college freshman at 18 years old and a fully-fledged scientist, approaching her 30th birthday. Tom Hughes stars as Leo Galich and Stephen Campbell Moore as Max, another man vying for Joan’s affections, while Tereza Srbova luxuriantly and extravagantly is Joan’s friend Sonya.
Shot on locations in Cambridge and in and around London, Red Joan attempts to tell a fundamentally true story in a fundamentally true way. “Was Joan right to do what she did? The film asks that question and hopes that everybody seeing it will want to discuss, ponder and feel free to debate this issue,” says Nunn.