She played a child in Atonement, a rebel in St Trinian’s – and has now finally come of age in Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl. She talks about famous friends, on-screen nudity and being a ‘quirky weirdo’

 

Studio Photoshoots > 2016 > Session 008 for The Guardian

 

 

Juno Temple sits down in a Los Angeles coffee shop, a bundle of energy in a comfy tracksuit, headphones around her neck and waves of blond hair piled on her head like a pineapple. She orders an almond milk latte, and apologises in advance for any strange scratching that may occur, because she was bitten by mosquitoes during the night. “And there’s one bite on my back that is so bad, I had to scratch it with a fork to reach it. I was really getting my Baloo the bear on.” A fork? “Well, a plastic one – I wasn’t aiming for actual bloodshed. I once used a fork to comb my hair,” Temple says, “because there was a time when I didn’t own a hairbrush. I can’t remember what film I was shooting, but I was staying in a hotel in London – and the fork worked! I felt like Ariel,” she adds, wistfully, meaning the Disney mermaid. “God,” she says, seeing my fascination at these cutlery improv situations, “you’re never going to let me live forks down, are you?”

It is hard not to warm to the girl. I say girl, but Juno Temple is 26 and has been earning her own money since she was a teenager living in Somerset: playing Cate Blanchett’s daughter in Notes On A Scandal, and Lola, the child who is raped by Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in Atonement (and later marries him). Since then, she has lived in LA for seven years and acted in more films than seems possible, usually playing someone far younger than her real age. A boarding school girl (the St Trinian’s comedies), or a wild child with crazy hair (Linda Lovelace’s best friend), or an English rose with dewy pink cheeks and bags of sexuality waiting to come out.

Bafta gave Temple its Rising Star award in 2013, “which was so nice to get, because it was from England. I was like,” she does a lucky gasp, “oh, you still remember me! But I also think my little brother rigged it, by telling everyone at his school to vote for his sister. He’s a computer whiz-kid – he probably hacked in.”

Even so, Temple isn’t a household name, which might be about to change now that, as she puts it, “I’ve finally hit puberty on camera! I’m playing 22 nowadays. Woo-hoo! I’ve left boarding school. Baby steps. Before, I’d go for these auditions with an older guy and they’d go, nope, this looks like actual paedophilia.”

Her new 22-year-old character is a woman called Jamie Vine, in the American drama series Vinyl, set in the 1970s music industry in an edgy and exciting New York. Temple plays the lone woman working in A&R at a record label, trying to get her talent recognised by the men, who prefer to use her to buy drugs and make coffee. You could call her the Peggy Olson figure, except that she’s shagging, dealing cocaine and trying to invent punk in the first episode, so maybe not.

The show was dreamed up by Mick Jagger and produced by Martin Scorsese, with Jagger’s 30-year-old son James as the lead – a punk singer who gets tangled up with Jamie – so perhaps it’s no surprise that HBO committed to a second series mere days after the first one had begun, even if the critics were not totally convinced. Temple’s performance has been widely praised, though, and she seems absolutely in love with the whole thing.

Punk played a formative role in her own childhood. Her father is Julien Temple, the British film director who became friends with the Sex Pistols and made The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle, Absolute Beginners, The Filth And The Fury and Earth Girls Are Easy. He also had a long career making music videos for, among others, David Bowie (Jazzin’ For Blue Jean) and the Rolling Stones (Undercover Of The Night), which leads me to ask Juno if she knew Jagger as a child. She is a bit vague on this, wary of being accused of nepotism. “I don’t remember having hung out with Mick before. Maybe when I was like…” She gestures the height of a small child. “But my dad speaks so highly of him. Me and Jimmy Jagger had a lot of mutual friends back in London, but our paths had never crossed. We’ve become very good friends now, though. He’s like family.”

She stresses that she had to audition. “I did a tape and then, yeah, I had to go and read for Marty [Scorsese]. It was at the Beverly Hills hotel and it was very quick. His direction is so specific. Down to your body language while you’re saying one word. It’s very rare that he’ll just say, ‘OK, let’s go again’, like someone else would. It was one of those moments when you’re just, like, whatever happens, wow – to be 24 years old and in a room reading for Scorsese. I’m all right with that, you know?”

Temple then got to work with him for six weeks on the two-hour pilot episode, before he handed over to a series of other directors. “That was a shift for me, coming from film. I wasn’t used to working with a different director every time. In TV, it’s so much more about the writers, because they’re the ones creating the universe. The writers are the ones who know what’s up.”

When it came to research, she started with her father. “I picked my dad’s brains apart for this time period. Punk was truly a revolution – this thing that affected people’s cores, and these kids who were really pissed off with what was going on with the world. It gave them a chance to scream about it.” (Whether James Jagger took inspiration from his father is less clear; he has said he “took a little bit of Jack Ruby, a little bit of Richard Hell. Maybe a little bit of Iggy Pop – and then a lot of asshole.”)

Temple grew up listening to punk, still does – and, yes, she plays everything on vinyl. (As for new music, she loves Tame Impala.) “The fact that my character is discovering the beginning of punk, it feels like,” she squeezes herself a bit, “Dad would be proud!”

Has he seen it? “I took him as my date to the premiere. I was nervous, because I was, like, if he doesn’t dig it… And he loved it. He was the perfect date.”

Her childhood sounds so dreamy that I don’t know whether to seethe with envy or frantically try to give my own children the same experience. She grew up in a 650-year-old house near Taunton, Somerset, with her two younger brothers; her mother, Amanda, is a film producer. Rolling fields all around, ancient oak trees, a hedge that her father cut into a long upward slope so that Juno, who was obsessed with Alice In Wonderland, could run along it and pretend she was getting smaller and smaller. She spent her childhood in fancy dress, was always very independent, and from the age of nine would go on holiday with her best friend in the summer: “We’d fly on our own and meet people there.” She went to King’s College, a nearby private school, as a weekly boarder, “but my parents were down the road”. Then she went to the notoriously bohemian Bedales in Hampshire for sixth form (Cara Delevingne, Lily Allen and Sophie Dahl are all alumni), “and I loved it. Loved it.” To be fair, she does seem to love absolutely everything.

How did her parents feel about her working as an actor, at an early age? “Aw, man, they were bummed when I first told them. They were like, ‘Ugh. Ohhhh. You’re gonna be told that you’re too short, that your tits aren’t big enough. You’re gonna constantly be told the things that are wrong with you.’ As a woman in today’s society, you’re already getting that from all quarters. I think they were also, like, ‘You can’t just step into this and be good. You will have to work and you will have to fight for it.’ My mum sent me to an open audition for Notes On A Scandal, so I could see quite how many other girls wanted to do this. And I queued up and I got the job. That was my first ever audition, and my second was Atonement. My mum thought, ‘Fucking hell, well, surely it goes downhill after this?’”

It didn’t, even though, despite being blond and slim and pretty and white, Temple’s is not the cookie-cutter beauty Hollywood most likes. “Sometimes they might need that beautiful Malibu Barbie look, and that’s great, but sometimes they might need the quirky weirdo. And I feel, like, sometimes you get frustrated and you’re like… I would like to look more normal. If I audition for things, like playing a mousy secretary at the back of the room, I will straighten my hair, tie it up, no makeup and put glasses on. I think as an actor you have to embrace the fact that it’s not about looking good; it’s about zipping yourself into somebody else’s skin.”
As for her big hair, “New York is much more embracing of it. They’ll be like, ‘Woooaaah, that’s a great mane, man. Wow, lucky you!’ Whereas here in LA people are, like,” she puts on a deeply concerned voice, “‘Oh my God, what is that?’”

Directors do seem to like taking her clothes off, though. One year she went to the Sundance film festival and afterwards someone complained that he had seen her in three films and she’d been naked in all of them. “I was like, actually, no: in one of them it’s only side boob.” She adds that, “when you sign up to a film, you sign up to everything that’s in the script. I really believe in that. So don’t pansy out on the day. Don’t be half-arsed about it. Nudity to me isn’t that big a deal. I think if it’s necessary, it’s necessary. There are moments where it’s distracting and not needed, and I’ve fought my corner and said no, you don’t need to see my tits right then.”

Really? “Absolutely. Well, OK, in the Vinyl pilot, there you go, that’s my butt and there’s my boobs. The fact that we were naked in that scene to me made it more palpable, more raw. But I also think I’ve been penalised for taking my clothes off too much, for sure.”

Meanwhile, she is excited about what she sees as a female revolution in Hollywood. “You’ve got the Amy Schumers, she’s so brilliant. Also, how cool that most of the Oscars nominees this year were women under 28: women who are intelligent, really beautiful, really brilliant, and really real. I cannot wait for this thing that Amy Schumer is writing with Jennifer Lawrence. She did The Hunger Games in such a way that, to me, she felt like a heroine. Not a Hollywood version of a heroine.”

Then there are writer-directors such as Jill Soloway, who cast Temple in Afternoon Delight and went on to make the award-winning TV show Transparent. “Jill truly has set a bar for what it is to be a woman and, I’m just going to say this, discover your vagina. Own your ovaries. And, like, be a fucking woman. The fact that her writers’ room is full of transgender people, it’s like, Jesus Christ, she’s the real deal. When we were doing Afternoon Delight, she’d get so involved with some of the scenes we were shooting, she’d be in tears.”

I ask about a poker room scene in that film, in which Temple tries to seduce a room full of fathers, whose children she also plays with, whose wives she knows. It is both very erotic and very uncomfortable. “Jill does great things where she comes and whispers little secrets to you, so then you have a new motivation. But you don’t know what everybody else’s is.”

She has lived in Los Angeles for seven years now, all without a driving licence, walking everywhere, “which makes people think I’m crazy,” she says. Her house is a cute bungalow in Los Feliz, which her friends call the Doll House because “it’s very sweet, very girly inside, overflowing with vintage clothes and records, and on the outside it looks like I’m in deep Louisiana. I’ve got a great little jungle going on and all my friends come and have a drink on my porch, on the corner of the street.”

She recently separated from her long-term boyfriend, actor Michael Angarano, hence having to scratch her own back. It sounds quite nice being single, though. She loves Agent Provocateur underwear so much that she wears it “mostly on my own at home. It’s my heaven.” Years ago, she lived in a tiny flat next to their shop in London. “Living in Soho was bonkers. It was nuts. The apartment was probably the size of these two booths,” she says, gesturing around the coffee shop. “I lived with my best girlfriend and we shared a bed. She had a boyfriend, so when he stayed, I was on the couch, with a net curtain between us. It was my first little home. My friends came and stopped by. I was the go-to, and I had a constant bowl of Haribo on the table.”

For some reason I thought she was going to say cocaine. “No! I was dealing sour cherries and milk bottles. Soho has changed so much now. Oh, man. London is a grey city: grey sky, grey buildings, grey coats. The idea of living in the countryside in England is so much more of a turn-on to me, with that mad, blood-red soil when it rains.”

But she isn’t planning on moving back, unless Donald Trump wins. She might swap LA for New York, though, where Vinyl is made: she fell in love with the Lower East Side while researching her role. “I’ve been in LA for seven years, and everyone says that’s a good time to finish a cycle.” At the grand old age of 26, Temple says it might be “time for a fresh start”.

But now she has to leave, because someone is coming to collect the diamond ring she borrowed for the Vanity Fair Oscars party. “I asked if I could keep it and they said, sure, it will cost you $7,000. I’m so glad I did not know that when I was dancing around with it on. I danced so hard, I got blisters. You know those big, juicy blisters where you have to…” Get the fork out? “Exactly. You have to go in.”

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