She’s an Emmy winner, a Golden Globe winner, starred as The Queen in The Crown and is now starring alongside Ryan Gosling in First Man.
But whilst she’s mastered her craft, she’s not really grasped the internet’s most powerful tools, as we found out. Watch the hilarious video below, as we introduce Claire to some classic Ryan Gosling memes for the first time. Hey girl, indeed.
Plus, as Claire takes on the role of Neil Armstrong’s wife, Janet Shearon, she discusses the hidden role models behind the story of the first moon landing…
Josh: You are such a great role model in real life, when it came to playing what could traditionally be seen as a ‘wife role’ did you want to show them to be the layered women they actually were?
Claire: The more I learned about these women, I knew that although it may seem to some people that they were, ‘just the wife,’ or ‘they were just at home’ – they were living their own lives and dealing with their own things and you could make a whole other movie about just them.
When Damien Chazelle (director of First Man and La La Land) was making the film, he didn’t just want to make it a film just about the moon landing. It is a film about those ten years of the space programme and I think that he didn’t want to make a film which everyone had already seen. I think everyone had already seen the cookie cutter 1960s perfect family and so he was always going to make a film about men AND women, and children and about how they were all affected in this. I felt like we were giving a voice to lots of women who never were given the chance at that time.
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Josh: If you were ever going to be a space tourist in real life what kind of space tourist would you be? Would you smash the trolley bar and just hope for the best? Would you just get your best chic astronaut outfit and swagger all over the moon? Or would you jump ship before you even took off?
Claire: If I was in there – definitely have some alcohol – but I would probably be clawing on the outside saying, ‘Don’t make me go, don’t make me go’.
Josh: You have previously lost it over Hollywood celebrities. When you came to meeting Ryan Gosling for the first time, did you lose it, or did you keep it together – what was the vibe?
Claire: If I had lost it, it would have been really embarrassing! I had to pretend like it was perfectly normal that this is what I was doing on a Thursday. I’ve always thought he was an incredible, amazing actor but those two people, Damien Chazelle and Ryan, are incredibly down-to-earth. So, there is no way that they could possibly be weird for more than thirty seconds because they make it all seem so normal. So that was the oddest part of it, by the end I was just like, ‘Oh have I just made a film with these two people,’ and not really realised it because they’re just so genuine and lovely.
Josh: Were you a fan of a Ryan Gosling meme?
Claire: If I’d have been in the Ryan Gosling meme world then maybe that would have seemed a bit weird. But I’ve only ever seen one meme in my whole life which my friend sent me to say, ‘you need to know what a meme is, what is wrong with you? ’ And she sent me a meme and I was like ‘oh that’s a meme,’ and that was it.
