Chuck Chuck Baby star Louise Brealey on why lesbian films have more ‘stigma’ than gay films

Louise Brealey shows a tender side to a working-class lesbian relationship, in new musical rom com film Chuck Chuck Baby. 

Brealey, seen as Deb in the BAFTA-winning sitcom Such Brave Girls and aspathologist Molly in BBC’s Sherlock, tells PinkNews about channelling repressed lesbian love, building chemistry with her on-screen co-star, The Sixth Commandment‘s Annabel Scholey, and why Chuck Chuck Baby is, categorically, about “gay love”.

Written and directed by Janis Pugh, the queer comedy drama charts Helen’s existence as a closeted, thirty-something woman. Blending working-class realism with musical whimsy, this big-hearted film is packed with the love between women, romantic and platonic. 

Set in present-day industrial North Wales, it follows Helen’s life, which is set to the mechanical hum of a chicken factory where the camaraderie of her boisterous co-workers gets her through the day.

When her teenage crush Joanne (Scholey) returns to the sleepy town, Helen starts to question her life, living with ex-husband Gary (Celyn Jones), his young girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn), the pair’s new-born baby and his dying mother, Helen’s former mother-in-law, Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), for whom she cares.

With years of silent queer pining reignited, Helen is hopeful that Joanne also felt the same way and maybe still does. The film is deeply tender and Brealey’s handling of her character is as playful as it is delicate, as she the begins to blossom in unexpected ways.

PinkNews: What was it about Helen that drew you to her?

Louise Brealey: We often tell stories about people who leave a small town but Helen hasn’t left. Those sorts of people, especially women, aren’t seen in our culture. I was really excited about telling her story. When we meet her, she’s in the sh*t. She’s got a dream of getting away but she’s bound and doesn’t feel she’s got a choice. Then this person comes back into her life and she realises she does have a choice: a choice to risk, to love and to dream.

How did you go about placing Helen’s delayed chemistry with Joanne, that giddy teenage infatuation, into an adult character?

There is something very innocent and joyful about their connection. In the script, it’s not directed saying they have a playful connection but Bel and I just adored each other. Everyone always tells you they love each other when they’re filming, but they really don’t. Bel and I did.

What Janis captures in their love story is the centrifugal sense of giddy joy and a sense of falling. Janis wasn’t interested in getting down and gritty. I would have very happily done endless sex scenes with Bel but the story didn’t need it.

Janis, as a gay woman, was not interested in showing women having sex. She felt there are a lot of examples in cinema of men thinking this is how lesbians have sex, and she [didn’t want] to get involved in that.

[Also] this isn’t a gay trauma film. [The characters] happen to be gay, and I find that tremendously exciting and refreshing.

It’s interesting because that shouldn’t be radical. Queer cinema seems to be reaching a point of tenderness that has been missing for so many years. Is there a feeling of radicalness?

Definitely. It feels quite radical and progressive. That was important to me and Janis. There’s this thing of “don’t talk about it as a lesbian film” but I find that problematic. I want to celebrate that but at the same time… do you think gay cinema has the same stigma from a mainstream point of view? Because I don’t think there is. I don’t think anyone’s telling Andrew Scott that he can’t talk about being in a gay film, because it bridges the mainstream.

They’re talking about it as a sort of film that celebrates female love in all its forms but I don’t want to pull any punches here: this is gay love. Crucially, it’s made for a working-class female audience because this is as much a celebration of the friendships in that group, the humour, passion and perseverance and women in that bracket, as it is for gay women.

The film celebrates romantic love between women but also platonic found family. What were your conversations surrounding this theme?

That’s another reason I think the film is very resonant right now. Talking about the families we make in our lives, not just the ones we’ve been given. It is a love song to friendship as well as inter-generational relationships. It’s in the film because that’s Janice’s world, she grew up in Flint [in North Wales], where we shot, and these women are totems in her life. There’s this beautiful moment with close-ups of the women who worked in the actual chicken factories. I saw them seeing themselves being seen. That is a huge thing in our culture, the [treatment] of older women, working-class women, where we put our value and what we celebrate.

It’s hard to say in an interview because, like “What are you on about? You’re in a BAFTA-winning comedy.” Checking my privilege, I am lucky that I’ve had opportunities in my career to tell stories. Having said that, it’s not easy. There’s a lot of talk about how it’s changing: it’s changed for 15 actresses and the rest just get lucky or don’t get lucky. I think that’s a reflection of what it’s like to be an older woman in our culture. Janis had a hard time, they wanted her to make the characters younger and they didn’t want me because I wasn’t famous enough. 

The film has such a great soundtrack, it’s so engagingly used as a tool to articulate emotion. How was it to work with these embedded musical moments?

When we shot the Neil Diamond scene, it was a living nightmare. We’d run out of light and there was a lot of panic around me. But every time I sing [“I Am, I Said”], I feel what [Helen] feels. I held on to Neil and it took me through. I’m most proud of [the scene] because I managed to pull it off.

Here’s a name drop: I was talking to [singer] Patti Smith in New York earlier this year, I did a Letters Live with her and [True Romance and Broken Arrow star] Christian Slater. We were going: “What’s the point of acting? We should have been musicians.”

She was like: “No, film is the highest art.” So, me and Christian felt a lot better about ourselves. I don’t want to say Patti’s wrong because obviously she’s an archangel, but [music] is like someone banging a tuning fork on your rib cage and you just vibrate with it.

[There’s a scene] with the “Northern Lights” song, every time whoever’s watching it gets to that bit, they just smile. You see it do the thing inside their chest and that’s magic. If you could bottle that as an actor, you’d be on to a winner.

Chuck Chuck Baby is due in cinemas on Friday (19 July).