Nicola Coughlan and Aimee Lou Wood are positively giddy over the prospect of their new dark (and Dark Ages) comedy Seize Them! letting them shed their good girl images.
The top Netflix stars – who have individually found massive success as the nice, sweet Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton and Aimee Gibs in Sex Education, respectively – are in top form for a day of interviews in a Soho hotel.
They may be playing ‘two absolute s**theads’, as Coughlan describes their characters, but they come across as utterly delightful and upbeat as you’d hope in real life.
Sharing a chilled and chatty relationship, it’s easy to forget they’ve not worked together before, although onscreen they play sworn adversaries, spoiled Queen Dagan and the rebel ‘Humble’ Joan.
Dagan is one of those outrageously out of touch and vicious medieval monarchs, while Joan is a peasant who leads an uprising to snatch her power.
Derry Girls star Coughlan, 37, truly embraced the fun of playing outside of type.
‘My characters generally, I don’t know about you Aimee, but it’s always like, she loves to read, and no-one really notices her… And this was like, she’s really mean and she has an axe!’ the actress laughs, calling it ‘perfect’.
And no prizes there for working out which period drama-dwelling beloved bookworm she’s referring to, set to take centre stage in Bridgerton’s upcoming season three.
Wood, 30, who’s also appeared in Living with Oscar nominee Bill Nighy, recalls her first reaction to the script.
‘I was like, Oh my God. She’s so awful – and that’s so fun! Because I do often get the angels.’
‘You’re like a tough cookie. And I get to be a brat,’ she adds to Coughlan.
Seize Them! is a riotous movie, filled with mud, poo, blood, sword-skewering, imaginative uses of gunpowder and exclamations like ‘t*tting balls’.
The Monty Python and the Holy Grail vibe is hard to ignore, as well as shades of the Horrible Histories TV adaptation, thanks to the film’s humour and imaginative use of violence (Dagan recalls her father killing her mother by pressing her through a cattle grid, for example).
Screenwriter Andy Riley (Gnomeo & Juliet) is praised by Wood for ‘drawing the characters so vividly’ but she says that the pair of them love the Python comparisons.
‘We’re very used to men in those kinds [of roles] whereas actually, it’s really cool to have that kind of comedy with women at the centre.’
They’re ably supported by a stellar cast including Jessica Hynes as Dagan’s oily advisor Leofwine, Lolly Adefope as her loyal and dry-witted attendant Shulmay and Nick Frost as simple peasant Bobick.
Both Coughlan and Wood get stuck in to the action and gore of Seize Them!, with Coughlan remaining tight-lipped on her favourite scene to film to avoid giving spoilers – ‘but it was one that involved a lot of blood!’.
They also relished wielding weapons.
‘It’s not things that we get to often do – I never thought I’d do a movie where I’d get to swordfight, not at all,’ the Bridgerton actress shares.
‘We were the worst two in our respective drama schools at stage combat and you’re like, look at us now!’
‘That was really cool,’ agrees Wood. ‘Because those were also the bits that I was most scared of. When I read the script and I saw that there were sword fights, I was like, “Oh, no…”’
However, they ended up triumphing.
‘It’s always the way that the thing that you ended up being able to do that you didn’t think you could do is always the coolest!’ she adds.
Coughlan’s Humble Joan is quite a transformation for her, from the severe dark haircut to a northern accent, and the historic nod is evident.
‘I feel like she thinks she’s Joan of Arc, but she really isn’t – she’s the antithesis of that,’ says the star of her character.
She had also planned to portray her ‘completely differently’.
‘We had the table read and I thought she should be very Trustafarian, West London – like her dad’s really rich, and then she goes on this quest to be better than everyone and save the common man,’ she explains.
‘And they were like, “Mmm… no, that doesn’t work.” And I was like, “Oh, God! I can make her Northern?!”
Having already mastered a Derry twang, Coughlan does well with this regional accent too, having already used it in a play, Chapel Street, ‘many years ago’.
‘Who knows where exactly it’s from, who’s to say, but it’s somewhere up north!’ she chuckles, embracing the non-specific Dark Ages setting of the film.
This vagueness also allows the film to have fun with everything from a professional ‘s**t-spader’ discussing the different consistency of poo in detail to a ‘high fünf’ between German-accented foreign monarchs (played by Paul Kaye and John Macmillan) and various grisly methods of torture, including the cleaving off of arms to be ‘shoved up their a**es’.
There’s even a bit around the miserable medieval diet where an indistinguishable lump of ‘lamb or cheese’ is offered to Dagan.
‘That made me feel ill,’ admits Wood, recoiling. ‘It was actually vegan cheese all mushed up and I hate to eat some of it, and it was sweaty.’
On that tasty note, we part, but Seize Them! offers plenty more gross-out moments where that came from.
Seize Them! is out in UK cinemas today.
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