Dame Penelope Wilton on starring in Operation Mincemeat with Colin Firth and why Ricky Gervais was desperate to work with her

Virgin Radio

12 Apr 2022, 14:24

After Life star Dame Penelope Wilton DBE joined the Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose to talk about her new Netflix movie WWII deception Operation Mincemeat, the upcoming Downton Abbey film and working with Ricky Gervais on After Life.

The 'unbelievable' Netflix story is based on two British officers who 'hatch an elaborate plan to turn the tide for the Allies by enlisting the ultimate secret agent: A dead man. Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald and Johnny Flynn star in John Madden's OPERATION MINCEMEAT, on Netflix in select territories May 11'.

She told Graham about playing Hester Leggett: “It’s based on a book written by Ben MacIntyre who was an expert of that period. But the story is that there was a special department in the Second World War called Room 13 that thought up ideas because we had to try and fool the Germans into thinking in different ways to sabotage what they thought we were going to do. 

“So the allies were going to move up through Sicily and up through Italy in 1943 but the Germans knew we were coming that way so we had to try and convince them that actually we were going to land on northern Greece but the we had to find a way of doing that. 

“So this particular department was filled with people with ideas, including people like Ian Fleming, a lot of novelists and they came up with mad ideas, a lot of which didn't work or were dismissed out of hand and this was one of the maddest which was to find a body of this vagrant and they decided to put on this vagrant all the information they needed to fool the Germans into thinking we were landing in northern Greece, and then to catapult him out of a submarine so his body would float up on the coast of northern Spain where there were a lot of spies and hopefully they would then see what he had on him and realise that actually he was a top secret service person who knew the secrets of what we were really doing.

“Anyhow, this all went in front of Churchill and a lot of people poo-pooed the idea but Churchill was really up against it and he thought it was mad enough to work and so this group of people created this character out of this poor dead vagrant and covered him with what was called 'wallet glitter', so he had tickets from his dry cleaning and a letter from his girlfriend and all sorts of things and they created this character called Captain Martin.

"And they did float him out and he was found and then the Germans fell for it, because there were a lot of spies there. The Germans started to move their big battalions out of Italy and to northern Greece so when we actually took over we met very much less resistance and most importantly tens of thousands of young men's lives were saved. So that's it in a nutshell."

On working with Gervais on After Life, she said: “The reason I did it was because Ricky was a great fan of Ever Decreasing Circles and I think he used to watch it when he was young boy or a teenager and so he said having me in After Life was his homage to Ever Decreasing Circles.

"I was called Ann in Ever Decreasing Circles and he calls me Anne in After Life and then I think a lot of people had a great desire for me to dash off with Peter Egan and then in the last two episodes of After Life, who should turn up but Peter Egan and we do actually have a sort of romance, so I think that’s what Ricky liked."

Talking about the upcoming Downton Abbey movie, she said: “It's the same crowd who were in the first film, we're all still there and hopefully we're going to lighten people's hearts because that's what we need at the moment. We're going through such difficult times."

 Operation Mincemeat is in cinemas on 15 April, 2022.

Listen to The Graham Norton Radio Show every Saturday AND Sunday from 9:30 am on Virgin Radio or catch up on-demand here.