Now she’s in the Star Wars blockbusters, but at 19 she bared her … er … soul for art in 2003 in a hifalutin’ BBC mini-series, “Servants,” which was about England’s dunderheaded rural aristocracy in the 1850s and their various servants and attendants. (A real mass audience blockbuster, just like Star Wars!)
The Guardian wrote a funny (and quite positive) review: “I particularly enjoyed the overstyled, smocked-and-gaitered shepherd, accessorised by just two sheep (one black, one white), who, as he explained, was paid to stand around in sight of the Big House: ‘It’s the Master’s idea of a pastoral idyll.”
Man, those shepherds used some pretty fancy vocab back in the day – “pastoral idyll”? Lord Byron couldn’t have said it better. Those servants must have been like the field hands in Python’s Grail who dreamed of forming an agrarian collective.
Those statues you see in the topless clip provided a recurring thematic device in the show. The working class people kicked them, ridiculed them and generally disrespected them.