Nathan Stewart-Jarrett loves an erotic thriller. “The Bedroom Window with Elizabeth McGovern. Body Heat with Kathleen Turner. The Last Seduction … I mean, basically, I love all of those movies,” he says.
The reason we are talking about erotic thrillers is that this is how I have just described Femme, an electrifying two-hander starring Stewart-Jarrett as Jules, a drag queen who is beaten up by a gang of homophobic young men. His life derailed by the attack, Jules withdraws into himself, until a chance encounter at a gay sauna reveals two useful pieces of information: first, that Preston, the gang’s ringleader, is himself gay, and second, that Preston hasn’t recognised his former victim out of drag. Jules realises he has been handed the opportunity to take devastating revenge on his attacker. What ensues is a tense game of cat and mouse that keeps you on your toes throughout.
To me this has all the hallmarks of a classic erotic thriller, but Stewart-Jarrett, despite his affection for the genre, sees the film as harder to pin down: “I wouldn’t say it’s an erotic thriller, per se. I’m still trying to discover what it is! But I find that I don’t always see things the way everyone else does … or the way I should.”
During the course of our conversation, that sense of the elusive, unexpected angle becomes a recurring theme. Stewart-Jarrett is intellectually playful; someone who enjoys questioning certainties – an approach that extends to his choice of roles, from his breakout in cult supernatural drama Misfits, and a part in the Ofcom complaints-magnet thriller Utopia, to tackling Broadway classic Angels in America.
With Femme, Stewart-Jarrett’s first task was to convince people that he could be terrified. “There were questions, because I was quite big at that time, quite muscly, and so there were questions of whether or not I could be convincingly scared.” Luckily, reading opposite him for the part of his attacker was another actor who resists typecasting: George MacKay, who proceeded to plausibly frighten Stewart-Jarrett in their chemistry read.
“I was petrified!” Stewart-Jarrett says. “I’d met George once before, like a few years ago, but I’ve never seen him like that, and he really scared me. It was so necessary for the film to see us go there and be able to do that. It’s all well and good if you can flirt; actors always need to be charming, so you can try to turn that on. But accessing that level of fear and also aggression on his part, it’s hard.”
With the cast locked, Stewart-Jarrett had three weeks to try to lose the muscles and learn to walk in heels, which he did by going to Italy, avoiding pasta, and walking on a treadmill in the world’s most vertiginous shoes. “It didn’t work,” he laughs. “I was not very good.”
Something must have clicked before the shoot though, because Stewart-Jarrett manages a very credible drag persona, although for most of the film Jules is shown out of drag. “There was a lot of talk about [referencing] Drag Race, but to be honest I didn’t want to just copy a drag queen.” There’s that unexpected approach again: it’s not about mimicking RuPaul’s Drag Race, instead it’s about giving a hint of Ryan Gosling on a mission of revenge in Nicolas Winding Refn’s cult hit Drive. Femme is as much an exploration of the dark side of masculinity as it is femininity.
“Yeah, and we’re obsessed with masculinity as a culture,” says Stewart-Jarrett. “When an actor who was thin suddenly has huge rippling superhero muscles, it’s like: ‘Oh my God, now we’re gonna pay attention to that person.’ We’re obsessed with that transformation, with that journey to masculinity, and it’s awful. On dating apps like Grindr, people are like: ‘No fems’. In Femme, Preston is encased within toxic masculinity, and Jules is using and getting in touch with his masculinity to enact revenge.”
Stewart-Jarrett points out that the cultural fetishisation of masculinity can be almost as damaging to the people who buy into it. In Femme, the worst nightmare for MacKay’s closeted hard man is people knowing the truth about his sexuality. It’s too easy to see the progress that has been made in society and mistake it for a full-throated revolution. Stewart-Jarrett draws a parallel with the moment Obama was elected: “And that was that! And racism was ended! No, no, no, no, no. And I think that the film has to speak to those kinds of tensions. The tragedy in Femme is that Jules is fine, Jules is loved and celebrating his birthday, and he thinks he can take that love, that adulation, on to the streets. And Preston is there to rip it all away from him. And that happens all the time. That’s what independent film, novels, essays, art or whatever has to do; we have to discuss these things.”
The film has been recognised for doing exactly that by the UK’s most prestigious LGBTQ+ movie awards, taking the Iris prize for best feature; it also played at the Berlin film festival. But on paper it can’t have looked like a sure bet – the two directors, Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, had just one short film to their name. What drew Stewart-Jarrett to the part they were offering?
“I think I’m always looking for a challenge,” he says. “The role really has to light me up. I need to do things I really want, or things that keep me up at night. I always think about Halle Berry turning up and collecting her Razzie [Golden Raspberry award for worst actress, for Catwoman], and being really game. You’ve got to take yourself with a pinch of salt – without being salty.”
Razzies are not something he will need to worry about with Femme, which has already received 11 British independent film awards nominations, including best joint lead performance for MacKay and Stewart-Jarrett. It’s a stunning showcase of the actor’s versatility, as Jules moves through multiple emotional registers in a carefully calibrated performance. So what’s next? He is tight-lipped on the specifics, but it will probably be something unexpected.
“I seem to only do everything once, which is fine. Be it West End, or Broadway, or a studio film, it’s like one time, one time, one time. And I’m like, ‘Well, if that’s what’s happening, then just lean into that.’ It’s varied. There’s a spirit or feeling of being an outsider because you’re never part of any camp, you kind of just flip between. And it’s nice, like you get to see things differently.”
Earlier in our conversation, Stewart-Jarrett made a similar reference to not seeing things the way he “should”. But where’s that “should” coming from: is there one right way to see things? He laughs. “I suppose it’s more that I might be contrarian about something I shouldn’t be. Like, what is the other angle? What is the other point of view here? I think there’s this element of stepping into someone’s shoes … But it makes me an annoying friend.”
He laughs again. You’d have to ask his friends about that, but it would be a shame if he dropped that questioning tendency. It feels like the key to him as a performer: impossible to typecast, but able to play anything he sets his mind to.
• Femme is in cinemas from 1 December. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett can also be seen in Culprits, now streaming on Disney+.
