You're listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair. Ask Gray Findes about Carrie Mulligan and he will tell you she is a brilliant actor and was a uniquely brilliant partner in their movie The Dick. Ask Lord Michaels about her hosting Saturday Night Live, and he will say she was one of the best in almost fifty years.
Ask David Hare, the writer and Robert Fox, the producer of their place, Starlight, and they will talk about her killer ambition for authenticity and excellence and her kindness to everyone involved. To day, twenty four hours after being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in the movie Maestro, she is here in the River Cafe kitchen cooking scallops
and sage with River Cafe executive chef Shawn Owen. And I know that when this morning is over and all of you ask me about Carrie Mulligan, absolutely and for sure the answer will be I love her so nice. So kay you just we're cooking the recipe which I would love you to read for scallops, and then we'll talk about everything.
Eight medium scallops olive oil, sea salt.
And freshly ground pepper.
One tablespoon salted capers prepared, half a bunch of sage leave stalks removed, one lemon. Brush a frying pan with a little oil and place over high heat. When smoking, add the scallops. Season with a little salt and pepper and cook for two minutes on one side. Turn the scallops over and immediately add the capers and sage leaves, plus a little extra olive oil so the sage leaves fry. Cook for a further two minutes, shaking the pan constantly, Squeeze the juice of the lemon and serve.
Get the pan really hot.
Yeah, put the scollops around the and see.
Them, and then let's check in a turning minute more. I'm trying to think about a scolet and thinking about what's delicious about a scolp?
Is it a texture as it because it's.
A very delicate sweetness.
I think it's a sweetness because I'm funny with texture some things. And yeah, I think it's the sweetness of something. Yeah, and usually a pretty good thought, right, yes, exactly exactly.
How long is this? Then? I reckon two or three minutes?
And then that's it.
Yeah.
Yeah, then sweeze a bit of lemon in now good old generous amounts of olive oil, isn't there?
Yeah? I love that. Well, we're on pips of it here. Yeah, but it's very good.
Yeah yeah, yeah, easy, easy.
It's about getting the right amount of color on and letting them sit. And then you know you can put instead of lemon juice, you can put vinegar. Yeah, instead of capers, you can put actuvies. Instead of saved you can put that as all.
That's delicious, cool, Thank you.
So much so having cooked it? What was that like? Oh, it's so well.
It's one of those things that I would have. I'd love to do at home, but I feel like you need to do it when people are already there because you want to give it, you know, to people straight away. I wouldn't have the confidence with that, but I think I would have a good at now good. I think it's about having really good scollops. And I always love when you actually are in a kitchen you see how much olive oil goes and everything A little bit of olive.
Oil, a lot of oil. Yeah, And so when you say that you would like to do it for dinner, for people coming to dinner. But then there is that separation, isn't there where you're cooking and they're there. Do you like to cook around people or do you like our house we have.
It's like a farmhouse kitchen. So we have a big we don't have like a cooking isle or separate. It's sort of a one big room, sort of a big table. It was an old chemistry lab table and that's in the middle of the room. And then so everything kind of you cook around My husband is more. He does it more than like he does all the big event cooking like Christmases and you know, Sunday races and things like that. I'll do if we've got you know, ten people, I'll do like a big stew or a big.
Castrole or something like that.
But he's he's good at knocking stuff up, like we have barely anything in the fridge, and he can make something out of that, whereas I need a very clear.
And yeah, you have cooked on stage? Was it? That's just it? No, it was west End? What was it a first room west End?
It was first in the west End.
Yeah, David was telling me this morning about cooking spaghetti bollonnaise on stage. And he was saying that Stephen Dawdry being Stephen Daldry, insisted on having a chef come from somewhere who was one of the great chefs to tell me about cooking. Answer. Was it the first time you'd ever had to cook on stage? Yeah? Eating onstage? Really?
Yeah, because I would I would cook it in the first half and I would eat it in the second half.
What was it like?
It was very basic, but there was a musicality to the way. So much of it was cooking. It was one thing, but also fitting it in because she's cooking in what turns into an enormous row, and so much of the physicality of the cooking was in the sort of smashing of garlic and chopping, and you know, so I had to be cooking but also furious, but also controlled that I didn't cut my finger off whilest I
was furious. So and there was a lot of kind of comedy to you know, the way that Bill would come over and sort of aunts and judge the way that it was being cooked. And you know, putting the oil in first or not putting the oil in. That
was one of the little gags. But yeah, and the theater would fill with the smell of cooking, And so I used to say to anyone who was coming to see it, particularly my dad, you have to eat before you come, because if you come and you watch a play that I mean, it's like for two and a half three hours long, you know, and you're hungry, you're going to hate it, And that's so unfair of us.
Was it for real or was it mostly theater? Was it it was totally edible.
I mean, it probably wasn't great, but it was you know, I ate it and it was tasted fine to me.
Yeah, I about eating on stage.
When I did it in New York, I was pregnant, and I did go through a phase of feeling incredibly unwell and nothing was good to eat.
So for a while it wasn't.
I was taking very small nibbles in the second half, but no, generally I kind of loved it.
And in film there are also scenes of you eating, yes, and drive in the diner and not eating, and so most recently in Maestrow, which I saw at the opening
night in your phenomenal great movie and very compelling. You know, I grew up with the Bernstein's, you know, I didn't know them, but I mean as as major figures in our lives from not just West Side Story and his concerts, but their their involvement in social politics, for which they were hugely maligned, which was unfair by Tom Wolfe for the radical chic because and especially your character Felicia was really involved in the civil rights struggle in the Vietnam War.
And as a character, I thought that it wasn't so what, it wasn't really that much in the film. But she was formidable.
She was, and it was at one point a whole radical chic scene. Yeah. Yeah, but I think you know the thing, the script evolved David five years. But yeah, and she wasn't actually when I went to I went to Chile and I met her family there and they talked about you know, she was active from a young age, from when she was a teenager in Santiago. She waschet.
I wonder whether he was then and Chile had that been before I think before.
Yeah, But she was very but she was a real homemaker, you know, she she didn't cook. I don't think I think she had Julia Vega. She had people in her life that were but she everything was. They called her the living the dining room, at the apartment of the Dakota, the French restaurant, because every time anyone came, it was beautifully kind of table every tablescape was unbelievable, the flowers that were brought in, and I think every kind of environment where she was a host was very kind of
beautifully put on. And she talks about being responsible for the kitchen of life, and that everything was you know, it was ordering the best produced and ordering the best flowers and ordering you know, that was a big part of her life, particularly in New York, also upstate, I think, but in New York that was a big part of her kind of she loved fostering this kind of beautiful environment.
What was the filming like, what was the experience of doing that movie?
It was amazing, I mean it was. It was the closest I think to a part that I had played. I always sort of felt like I had played you know, Nina and the Seagull and you know, Kira and Skylight and doing this monologue of girls and boys. I had these kind of kind of epic roles on stage, and I felt when I read Felicia that she had that breadth. So she had that kind of you know it felt
like a kind of Chekhov all. It felt like she's got this huge journey and she starts and she actually not dissimilar to Nina in some ways, because she does start as this actress with this burning ambition and as disillusioned and you know, driven to you know too well in my opinion, not madness, but driven to sort of to a completely different place by the end of the story and having.
Become a completely different person.
And I feel like Felicia really has that huge you know, she came to New York, you know, bright as a button and full of hope and ambition, and you really do get a sense of her being worn down by her experience. So just the character on its own was amazing. The way that Bradley works is so unique and so and I loved completely different experience, nothing like I'd ever done before, completely, you know, and I think because he's
in it as well. But you know, the most amazing set where you don't feel like you're in a film set, feel like you're walking on stage.
And that was right. Where where did we shot.
We shot in Tanglewood for the first week, which was amazing. Then we shot in New York and then We were on a sound stage in Brooklyn for a minute, and then we had a break and then we shot Ely Cathedral and we shot in a sound stage in London as well.
Yeah, and I in terms of again about eating, in food and nourishment, this is a character who wastes away, who starts disappearing, and the way you conveyed her fragility and his emotions, dealing with you know, her husband's the effect, well, dealing with the effect and the family. And so to see this strong woman in the beginning that you played and then how was that for you when when having to show someone dying a terrible disease is Yeah, it was I think, you know.
We we shot her younger stuff right at the beginning of the shoot, and then we jumped straight to a scene after she's diagnosed with cancer. And it was the first time I think I played anyone over a span of so many years. So she was the first week it was sort of a younger wig in black and white, and then the following Monday I had prosthetics on and I think.
I was surprised.
Actually, I thought that there would be a lot more. I'd have to like map it a lot more but it was interesting once I was in the prosthetics and the costume of that point in her life. It's funny what it does looking at yourself in the mirror when you know, we did the makeup for when she's right at the end of her life. Took about four and a half hours and was prosthetics and lots of painting in and these incredible contact lenses that took out the
sort of white around my eyes. And when I had the head scarf on, and.
You know, you look in the mirror and you do feel different.
It is an odd thing to look at Also, because we weren't trying to make her look I wasn't trying to look like Felicia, because Felicia isn't a well known face in the way that Bradley needed to look like Lenny.
We I just looked like myself.
And so, you know, I remember saying to Duncan, who was doing my prosthetics and Sean Gregg makeup artist, I said, is this basically a time machine, like you know, without the illness before the illness? Is this essentially you know? And I do look.
Exactly like my mom.
Yeah, in the palm court, you know, I look exactly how my mom does, and so it was it kind of interesting. Yeah, the whole thing was very interesting, But when it came to the six stuff, it was a lot of it was based on Bradley's experience of his father who had cancer and pastway accounts, so and I knew that, you know, some of the detail that had been written in folding up the napkins was something that Bradley's dad did, and lots of it was so lots
of I've felt constantly aware of him. And then also when people would see me in the makeup, and I think, you know, if you've had anyone in your life who's been through an illness that has affected them like that physically and visibly, you know. I remember an ad sort of like bursting into tears because she just sort of it reminded her too much of someone that she loved, and so I felt just really determined to not to get it right, but also that if there was something
about the sort of general sense of everybody. By that point, we just had the most incredible crew. There was so amazing. It really felt like that it didn't when you walked on set. It wasn't like this actor has this hard thing to do. It was like, oh, this person's not well. And that was an incredible kind of feeling. And that's how the set felt that whole week when we showed you No, who didn't it?
What was that like?
I mean I ate at home and I ate, but when I was at work now, I just yeah, because there was you know, and I remember the physical the way that she remember Mot Bridges, our costume designer, brought this little shawl that goes over her shoulders when she's receiving visitors, and it's so it was my grandmother. My my
grandmother had dementia. She didn't but she did lose lots of weight and she did get you know, as she was unable to feed herself, you know, she it was you know, it was constantly trying to get her to intake nutrition. But I remember the way her shoulders kind of came forward and it was so highlighted by this this shawl that was over her. And so when he brought that shawl, that sense of fragility and it was just so it just I felt it, you know, just
it was so kind of eerie. How you know that physicality is just so familiar.
Did you know the river cafe has a sharp It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks and then in napkins kitchen ware, toad bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shop the River Cafe dot co UK. Growing up, you grew up in a hotel, is that right? For the first we grew up in Yeah, we lived in hotels.
I was almost eight. My father was a hotel manager for Intercontinental for my whole childhood until I was sort of eighteen, so I was born. I think we were at the.
Brittannia when I was born.
My dad was running the Brittannia hotel, and then in London, Yeah, and then the Yeah yeah, yeah so there and then the Mayfair. And then we moved to Germany to Hanover and Dusseldorf and he ran hotels there, and then we moved back to London. He ran I can't remember in the hotel he then he was at the Churchill in Portman Square, so he moved around those and he also ran hotels in Vienna and Frankfurt.
Yeah did you but you actually lived in the hotel.
We lived in the hotel till I was eight.
When you were a bit like Elowise. Do you remember that book Allowas? Did you even know that growing up in the plaza? Would you run around the hotels?
Yeah?
Fine, what was that like living in a hotel?
It was amazing. I mean it was you know, it's kind of all we knew. But I look back and I think, oh wow, that was kind of an extraordinary
way to grow up. And my brother and I were certainly you know, we would sort of roll around with the the maids, you know, going into people's rooms after they checked out, and sort of you know, I remember sort of sitting in the basket with all the sheets, you know, with my hands holding on, rolling around the corridor and you know, sitting on with my whole body wrapped around a hoover, you know, going up and down the hallways.
We were ordering room service.
Did we had It was like that, you know, they'll have a they'll have a little I mean in the place at the hotels that we lived in the sort of an apartment in the top floor for the manager. So we lived in a Yeah, Mum talks about I mean, we had our own little mini kitchen and stuff, but it was more. Yeah, we didn't do room service, but we did have our linen changed. I'm pretty sure someone always says that was a massive bonus and.
Has been living at the arm the job and being the manager and living there. Yeah, I mean great for the hotel to have the manager there. Yeah. Are you one of many? Are you?
No? Just me and my brother?
Yeah. Yeah.
But we were bilingual because we moved to Germany when I was three, and we went to you know, we learned German. We went to I went to a German kindergarten, Rudolph Stein in kindergarten.
And then I went to school in Hanover.
We were with a lot of X you know, with military kids, and and then we were in distledor for in international school, and then we moved home. So we were there. We was the only thing I remember about the kitchen because we were, you know, nowhere near the kitchen. That was not And I was saying earlier, my dad, you know, I think briefly worked in kitchens on his way. He worked his way up from kind of collecting glasses in a restaurant to being the manager. Yeah, and he
so whenever he cooks. Generally I exit the building because it's just not what is it like, he just likes things ordered and the way that they and you know, for us to sort of come in and sort of casually start munching on something, his heart was not not part of it.
So that, yeah, it's but my.
Memory of one of my birthday parties when I was little was at the hotel in Disseldorf, and you know, the pastry chef made a bunch of dough. We were all making little dollies out of dough, and then they took them off and cooked them in the kitchen and brought them back. And the birthday cakes, you know, when we lived in hotels were always you know, those very elaborate kind of I feel like they always had liquor in them.
They always had like.
A bit of booze. It like properly kiddie birthday cakes, and they had like very beautiful writing in icing and all that kind of stuff. There was always such a sense of occasion in hotels. It's always like there's a big display for Christmas or there's a big you know, it was like there was always this sort of sense of there's a sort of event happening. But I always felt, really I like being nomadic. I don't mind, you know, I like being in hotel tells I'm not someone who
I don't need to bring. You know, some people sort of need to bring stuff with them to make wherever they are feel like home.
Carries with her.
Do you know the only time I ate lunch here was with Tracy.
Tracy she described, you know that she I think she's ever ordered room service. She would always, you know, I'd go out and find something and take her food on the plane or take an object. And as you say, I love hotels so much that I actually don't like when I'm upgraded to a suite because it reminds me too much of home. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like the confines of a hotel whom you can find everything. You know,
where your book is, you know where everything is. I always thought that maybe I'd be one of those women who age, you know, Richard be in a state at Clarages for the rest of, you know, of our days. I had said to him, if we saw our house, how many nights do you think we'd get in claritges. He's like probably six. And do you think there was a performance that you had to behave in a certain way with strangers.
I think so, yeah, yeah, we had you know, we met people who were staying at the hotel sometimes and there was a real kind of day. It felt like being a bit of a like a diplomat's stater or something. You know, someone would come and stay at the hotel and you would greet them.
You know, did that prepare you, do you think for acting in a certain way? I think yeah, perhaps.
I think also moving around constantly, kind of being the new kid and meetings. The time I was eight, we had moved. You know, I'd been at a I think three places in Germany, three four schools, no three so nursery and then two schools and then home to a convent school in Buckinghamshire. And then when I was eleven I moved again, and then when I was thirteen I
moved again. So we were so I think I was always kind of used to being new and having to introduce myself adapt to people, and you know that sort of thing.
What was Cherman food like, do you have a memory of it or did you?
Yeah, lots of quite meat meat based food. I mean we you know, we were amongst kind of lots of Brits as well, so but we spent we were amazingly lucky. We got to go skiing in Austria in our holidays and things, we you know, spent lots of We had lots of casia, keaza, spetzel and you know venus nitzel and delicious like warm, brothy things to be able to warm up. But yeah, I think we you know, because
it was also an international hotel. It was you know, it wasn't we were if I was eating stuff from it wasn't necessarily German cuisine or anything.
I usually asked people about their families and growing up, and restaurants were restaurants, But in your case, I often asked if restaurants were a special occasion, which was the tooth. In my family, we went out to restaurants for somebody's birthday and somebody's anniversary or something great had happened and you'd celebrate a restaurant. Here we see people just coming out for dinner with their kids all the time, and maybe it was just more for you, that was that something that.
Was just.
I suppose that I don't really remember going to restaurants at all. I don't remember going to nice you know, white tablecloth restaurants. Ever, with my we would go to there was a pizza place in Duszledorf that we would go to, but like really a hole on the wall kind of pizza place, and that was sort of a
treat that we would go there. I don't think we went to I remember what for the Millennium my dad was running the Intercontinental in Vienna and there was a big Millennium meal there and I was fourteen and fourteen fifteen I think, yeah, fourteen, and my best friend came with me and we bought dresses, you know, for millennium and we sat and it was a proper white tablecloth, seven course meal thing, and that was very That was a big, big deal. So I don't think we did necessarily.
Although when I was when we moved home and we were living in you know, Buckinghamshire, we used to go if there was anything to celebrate, we'd go to Mister Poone's the Chinese restaurant and go and have big Chinese and we did that kind of for years.
Your parents cook for you, yeah.
I mean Mum's always you know, she couldn't turn her hand to anything. She was never a sort of passionate cook, I think because Dad was the cook. So if there was meals that were cooked, it would be Dad, you know. And Mum, my grandmother was a was a wonderful Yeah. I loved baking. Yeah.
So where did she live?
So she was my mother's Welsh So she was in Carmarthenshire. So and every time I went to her for any kind of length of time, we were just bake and bacon, bake.
Oh well everything.
Welsh cakes, famously delicious Welsh cakes.
Welsh cakes, that's don't tell Sean, I asked you this because I've lived in this country for.
Well if you weren't it. But they're like their little mini sort of flat cake with raisins in and like a scone. Yeah, like a sort of flatter scone. But she'd make amazing Welsh cakes. A cherry almond cake, a delicious cherry almond cake that just got better the longer you left it in the tin. You know.
It was that kind of thing. I know that you're you're from going from school. You knew that acting was going to be an essential part of your life. Yeah, can you tell me how that happened? It was all I wanted to do. From a young age, but I didn't think of it really as a career until I was probably twelve. You know, maybe I wanted to do musical theater. That was the big you know. That's my mum and I went to go and see every musical. Every time we could go into London, we'd go and
see musical. We went to New York together, just the two of us, and went saw did you Cabaret? Was the original? There's some Mendes Studio fifty four. We saw that.
I told this to him the other day, but I saw Kevin Bacon in a one man show at the Walterkerr Theater. I forget the name of it. But I then later years later went and did The Seagull at the Walter curR and it was a really crazy kind of full circle thing. So I was I was sort of wanted to do musical theater. Then was slowly sort of realizing that that was quite a big job in terms of dance and song. And I wasn't a dancer, and I kind of was a choir singer, but not
a singer singer. Was not enormously interested in film so much. I mean I loved movies. I loved you know, my favorite all of my favorite films like Indiana Jones, Last Crusade, and you know, I liked sort of Spielberg like proper movies. And then I slowly realized that it was more kind of theater that I was probably just straight theater just in place. So it was when I was at I auditioned for a bunch of drama schools basically and didn't
get into any of them. But that was my first sort of big, sort of attempt to do to kind of make it a job, which didn't get very well. But then I found another kind of way in luckily actually right around the cord from me here, to go to Riverside Studios to do Young Blood Theater Workshop, which was an amazing I don't know if it still happens, but it was an incredible experience. It was once a week, I did it for months, where you would come together with a bunch of other actors of a similar age.
But I'd ever acted really with boys before, you know, because I've been in an all girls school and for
people from all different walks of life. And it was a lot of improvisation, a lot of just you would just be sitting all in the circle on the floor and then you would suddenly have to be in the middle of the room doing a scene about something and it was just a real I loved it and made really good friends and we did I think one or two little productions there, and then an audition for a new version of Pride and Prejudice and that was my first job.
So that so I knew we were working in pubs. Did you did you have to have a job that wasn't.
Yeah, I left school and that was you know, I had not gone to rom school, so I was taking a gap year and it was in that year that I worked in the pubs.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember the food and it was like proper just pubs.
Yeah.
I mean I worked on a barge, like a restaurant sort of barge in Marlowe, but I was serving, I was never making. And then I worked in two pubs at the same time, just picking up shifts in the in whichever one. But I'd liked I liked the sort of kind of energy of it. I think I also
quite like being in charge of giving people drinks. That I was behind this bar and I was eighteen, I probably looked about fifteen, and yet I was sort of pulling pints for you know, big burly men, and it felt kind of like quite a powerful position to be And yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's a performance, isn't it an acting and cooking? You know? I think the reason I always say that a lot of actors like to work, of course it suits them, you know, to work part time in a restaurant if they're trying to pursue their career, is that there is a lot of drama in a restaurant. Yeah, and the energy. Do you remember what you ate in those years? When I talked to Emily Blunt, it was, you know, hamburger after hamburger after hamburger, and eating and
eating and eating. She ate, so she would describe, even when she had small parts, that she would have two hamburgers before going on stage. Ye wouldn't be in school. But do you remember when you were away from or did you live with your parents when.
You were I didn't. I'm pride and prejudice. I moved out for that job, and I do remember that we were all in corsets, and I remember for the first and it was a very lovely production. It actually set me up for disappointment future productions because it was so we stayed in such nice hotels and the catering were so lovely, and I remember for the first month or so we had like really delicious like snacks, but you know, yummy cakes and biscuits and like delicious granolla y things
that we could nibble on. And after a while they had to take out our costumes because we'd all and our courses had to get sort of loosen to because we'd all've.
Been having a lovely time.
And then I moved into a flat with two boys in Highgate and I think I ate you know, literally pot noodles. Whilst I did theater. I also got into a habit of having to have a double espresso before I did a show. I didn't eat really before the play I did. I did a play at the Royal Court straight after which it was called forty Winks. It
was a Kevin Elliott play. It was a real shock for me because it went, you know, it was briden Bridges, was a summer of you know, real kind of sort of basically massive party and the best time and I and I and I was delighted. It was Royal Court is my favorite theater in the world, hands down. Ten million times. But I was playing a narcolepts, a girl with narcolepsy who also might have been a victim of rape.
I mean it was.
It was really kind of harrowing and and in a very kind of surrounded by real heavy weight, incredible actors, and I suddenly thought, oh my gosh, this is not what I don't know how to do this at all, but it was. I was in real kind of just yeah, just theater.
Have an espresso. The espresso started then before yeah, before the place.
Yeah.
And I did that for years through theater until probably until I did Girls and Boys, and I stopped.
Well to talk about because that the Royal Court is actually our local theater hand car as we live further down the keys. What makes you love a theater?
I mean, I think that was my first theater, so that was special. Then I went back there and did The Seagull when I was twenty one Christopher Hampton Ian Rickson, and and that was just completely I just that that role, everything about it, I just and I feel like I kind of I don't know, there was something about the pre show thing. I would go underneath the I'd go down all the way down to the bottom of the
stairs all the way back up again. I'd run around like a mad woman before so because when Nina comes on, she's really out of breath, and I wanted to be genuinely out of breath. So I would run around, and then I would sort of burst onto stage at the last minute. And the smell of it, I don't know, there was just so much about that theater. Every time I step in there, I just feel, oh, I just love it it.
Yeah, And so you would have your espresso before the play, and then and then afterwards, would you do that thing of going out to dinner with a bunch of friends, people who had seen the play.
And sometimes I mean, Mason, what I also love about the Royal Court is the downstairs. I'd always just go down there afterwards and we all would you know. I don't remember eating. I remember I remember eating corner sans a little corners and a glass of red wine and corn, you know, just loads of little corner shechans back then. But I don't remember going out for food much. I just sort of think I'd probably just go home and eat whata bits or something at the end of the night.
You know, there's money an issue, Yeah, at that time.
Yeah, it was, you know, it's it was the minimum wage theater, so it was. And I was spending money on living in a highgate living and you know, paying rent up there, so it wasn't Yeah it was.
I was.
I ate quite a lot of cereal.
Do you remember when food became a kind of measure of your success that you could say, I can afford to eat well now because I'm I'm earning more money. Yeah.
I think I got really into sushi when I lived in New York.
I was living in New York.
Probably what was I doing. I was doing theater there, but I was also doing a bit of film. I did the film Steph McQueen called Shame and and I remember I remember.
Sitting down with.
You know, my with a financial advisor sort of figuring out working in America and working. And he looked at my bank's name as he said, oh, you seem to have spent lots of money on rent and sushi.
I was like, that was pretty good. That's what we did. We lived in Paris. It was the same thing those days. You had check books, and we used to look at our checkbook at the end of the mother stubs and basically it was all restaurants. When we weren't working, we were just eating out, exploring, because you do learn about a culture through the food.
Don't you.
Yeah. Yeah. If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for a moment. I'd like to talk about war child, and I think that we see the effects of war, and we're seeing it
right now, aren't we We're seeing it every day. And I was wondering what you feel about how that, how warchild affected your your views of children in poverty, children in danger, and food insecurity.
So I was doing Skylight and I was I would I had this sort of you know, I have a little routine that I largely stick to, is I go into a theater at sort of five, eat, then have a nap for twenty minutes twenty five minutes poundnap, and then I wake up and I have my coffee and I get.
Ready for the show.
But I would listen to the six o'clock news every night, and that summer of two thousand and fourteen was was terrible for children in conflict, and that a lot of the news was about what's happened.
In twenty fourteen, it.
Was when the U D's were escaping Isis, and there were there was a lot of coverage and lots of images on the news. I remember seeing on the news as well, all the u ZD refugees were on Sinjo Mountain and they were being evacuated, and I remember seeing images of you know, mums and dads with their babies flinging them into the helicopter to try and get, you know,
someone to take the baby. And I didn't have kids then, but I but I remember thinking, I cannot imagine what it takes for you to think in this moment, I'm just going to hurl my baby into someone as strange as.
You know, and hope that they are even caught.
And what must that take to be in that And I was just thinking about a lot, as everyone was. And my brother had been in Afghanistan and he had encountered this girl's school that had been shut down by the Taliban and he'd raised on his own lots of money to help this school reopen so the girls could
get back to school. And he had written to a bunch of different endos asking for help kind of facilitating this, and War Child were the only ones that had written back and made it very easy and so we'll take and we don't need a commission, and we'll just we'd love to do this and help. And so he had come back from Afghanistan saying, like, this charity is really
interesting and really cool. So I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo that October and we went around and saw the projects that they were doing, met the children they worked with, and at the end of that week, I said, I'd really love to kind of focus on this, and so they asked me to be an ambassador. I went to the Ukraine with them in two thousand and twenty two at the end of that year.
Did you feel that children were Yeah, we're hungry.
Yeah, I mean, it's so different in country to countries. So in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the thing that I noticed was how I mean one of the camps that we went to was an IDP camp internally displaced people, and they were I mean, it was one of the worst places I've ever It was a really, really awful, awful camp and two children there the week that we visited had died of malnutrition of you know, had starved
to death. Basically, it's definitely a huge issue in some countries and some you know, I remember we were in when we were in Budapest, we met some Roma refugee toi ildren who were living in a in a homeless shelter. They had fled the Ukraine. Their homes had been destroyed and they were now living in this sort of homeless shelter in Budapest. And there it was you know, they were having food provided, but it was food that they had no connection to. They had no so the children
wouldn't eat. You know that you can't make a child eat something they've grown up their entire life having the And these women who were in the shelter, they said, all we want is a kitchen. We just want to
be able to make food. And their little three year olds are just rejecting because they're just first of all traumatized, but secondly they've got no So there was there was food available, but it was packaged bought in kind of you know, for them to be able to make food that was familiar and comfortable and inexpensive, but something that just for them to be able to provide their own and also for these women who are also suffering for their own trauma, for the ritual of cooking together as
a family, for that to be something that they could do community wise, I think, you know, would have been such a powerful kind of healer for them.
Times and a communicator.
When we were in Ukraine, we cooked with these women in the in the shelter, and you know, I couldn't speak any you know, we were completely you know, we had an interpreter, but really it was just peeling potatoes together, and you know, it's a wonderful way to communicate with them.
That story you told of the woman throwing her child into the helicopter, I remember, Richard and I were living in Paris in the seventies. So you met someone whose grandmother had knew that the you know, the Nazis coming to take them away from the Jewish ghetto in Paris. And she said that she her grandmother and her mother were on one side of the barricade caving on a train to towards Auschwitz. And they then nanny came rushing for them to see because she'd come home and so
and they threw her. They just threw her physical I mean, throwing a child is quite a big thing. And then nanny and she never saw our parents again. So we think about, you know, the lack of food being denial for children and the lack of food being hunger, food being a sign of illness or when your illness that you're cutting yourself off from food and whatever you know, and a sign of frailty. It's also it can work the other way, which your food is joyous when we
cook for our children. It's fun when you cook with a hope, a chef. It's fun when your family and your husband are there in their farm wanting to eat. Maybe you've grown or maybe you've shopped for It also is in times it's comfort. It's comfort from an it's emotional eating that we don't always eat when we're hungry. We eat when we feel something. So my last question to you on this beautiful day and being here with you and thank you for coming, is to say, Carrie Mulligan,
if you need comfort, which I hope you don't. I hope life is just one joyous experience. But if you need comfort, is there a food that you would reach for? Yeah?
My husband makes well. So when I had my first child. We have a friend who lives near us who's sort of a baby guru called Rachel Wadelove. She's amazing and she basically taught us how to look after babies. Well me at least, was work good at already. And she said, when your breastfeeding, must have, you know, a slice of cake, you know all the time. But also this, she had this recipe for this chicken casserole and it was just
really simple. But the crust on the top was wheatabix and cheddar cheese.
Yeah, and so Marcus makes this delicious Marcus, and it's so yummy and it's just chicken and bention whatever. But the crust is whetavix mushed up with a bit of salt and cheddar cheese and it melts and it's heaven.
And whenever I'm feeling like.
A little bit depleted or done in, he'll make that and will He'll make a big old thing of it, and we'll start with like fairly conservative portions.
And I think that's perfect. Okay, Well, thank you very much. It's a great, great time I'm with you. And now you're going to go have scalps or whatever there is in the River cop I do more together. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair. Ruthie's Table four is produced by Atamei Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Ruthie Rodgers and it's produced by William Lensky. This episode was edited by
Julia Johnson and mixed by Nigel Appleton. Our executive producers are Faye Stewart and Zad Rogers. Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore, and our production coordinator is Bellas. This episode had additional contributions by Sean Wynn Owen. Thank you to everyone at The River Cafe for your help in making this episode