‘God’s Creatures’ Star Emily Watson on Bonding With Paul Mescal and the Power of Difficult Conversations

You’ve done plenty of impressive accent work in your career before, including an Irish accent in Angela’s Ashes. The thick Kerry accents in God’s Creatures really give it a sense of place—were there any unique challenges when it came to preparing for it?

Well, when I first was offered the job, I Googled “Kerry accent,” and got to a video of two guys coming down off the mountain having lost their sheep, and I couldn’t understand a single word they said. That really put the shits up me. [Laughs.] I mean, I was like, this is really going to be impossible. Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly is the producer of the film, and she is from one of those villages, as is Shane Crowley, the writer, and they’ve known each other since they were 12. So because they came from that world, I spoke to various members of their family and listened to recordings of them all, and they actually all sound very different. Women speak differently to men and different generations speak very differently too, so I felt reassured by that, at least. But yes, I had a dialect coach, and I don’t just come to it easily—I have to study and work hard to get there.

Your chemistry with both Paul [Mescal] and Aisling Franciosi [who plays Sarah, a woman in the community] is electrifying. How did you go about building that rapport with them?

We were actually very, very isolated. We filmed when it was level five lockdown in Ireland, and while I’d had a jab in England, they had only given out very few in Ireland at that point, so the COVID protocols were extremely stringent. We began by isolating in our own cottages on the Donegal coast, which was amazing, to be honest. Just to be in a little house by myself, looking at the sea and spotting dolphins…although it was also a fairly intense period, not really seeing anybody and then rehearsing on Zoom. After that, we all stayed in this hotel with nobody else in it for about 10 days to rehearse, and it was like being sprung out of a cannon. Suddenly, there was this visceral energy, and it helped because the main characters here are very much not head people, they’re quite animalistic. When Aileen lies to protect her son, it’s not a thought-through thing, it’s the instinctive lashing out of a mother. We did a lot of running around and playing hide-and-seek and going a bit wild in his hotel. The directors were keen that we were very much in our bodies, and the film was very much about the physical work—the physical space between us and the body language between characters. With Paul, it was also important that we found the joy in that relationship, as you really have to invest in how much they loved each other and how close they were. And, well, to be honest, what’s not to love. [Laughs.] It’s Paul Mescal, and he’s truly a delight, so that part was easy. We all formed a very strong team and kind of looked out for each other, because it was quite a tough road ahead.