On 23 September 1921, a letter arrived at the home of Edith Swan, a laundress in the seaside town of Littlehampton, addressed to “the foxy ass whore 47, Western Rd”. One of the milder letters that had been plaguing the Sussex community for three years, it continued:
“You foxy ass piss country whore you are a character.” Swan blamed a neighbour, Rose Gooding. But the post-office clerk and the local police had other suspicions, which drove them to rig up a periscope to spy on deliveries to the town’s post box and marking postage stamps with invisible ink.
The combination of filthy poison pen letters and DIY sleuthing in a quaint small-town setting is a gift for the star pairing of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. Directed by Thea Sharrock with a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, and stuffed with classy character actors, Wicked Little Letters blows a raspberry at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories.
It also undercuts the Downton Abbey image of British social history which, says Buckley, “gives everybody the idea that people are kind of lovely when actually there’s a little bit of dirt under everybody’s pretty teacup. Everyone loves a good swear, even the ones that say they don’t.”
Colman and Buckley are in high spirits when we meet, having just spent half an hour filming Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, in which they discussed the different forms of rudeness with a group of five-year-old boys. Colman, familiar to them as the conniving innkeeper Mrs Scrubbit in Wonka, bounces in first with a “fart” app, which she has installed specially for the occasion.
“It’s so good, I can’t stop,” she says, letting off a peal of whoopees, as assistants scurry around ensuring she and Buckley have everything they need. “Oh sorry, that’s too much,” she apologises, after miming along to a particularly sonorous one. “OK, I promise I’ll stop,” she says, giving vent to another as her co-star settles into the seat next to her. It’s an impromptu improvisation of delighted gaucherie reminiscent of the one that propelled her 2019 Oscar acceptance speech for The Favourite into the best-ever league.
Colman and Buckley became best friends after meeting through a Letters Live event at a festival in Oxfordshire, at which Colman’s contributions included a humorous letter from a 17th-century naval officer to a creditor, and Buckley read a declaration of love from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats.
“We stayed up late doing karaoke,” says Buckley. “Yes, we just sort of fell in love with each other,” adds Colman, who went on to recommend her new friend to play her younger self in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s award-winning adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Though the separate timelines meant they didn’t have any scenes together, they continued their after-hours bonding, “singing, playing guitar, swimming in the sea and drinking rosé,” says Colman.
“I’m sure we are kindred,” adds Buckley. “Yes,” replies Colman. “It should happen more often – outside and inside work.” When Wicked Little Letters came up, on which Colman and her husband, Ed Sinclair, are producers, she suggested Buckley again, though this time for a character who is the exact opposite of her own.
While middle-aged Edith tends to the town’s laundry and dutifully keeps house for a tyrannical father, Rose is a free spirit who roisters with the sailors in the pub when she is not waging domestic war on her sister and her seaman husband, who is known not to be the father of her young daughter.