"Andrea Riseborough is a consummate shapeshifter. In the last few years alone she's transformed herself into former Vogue editor Audrey Withers (for last year's Lee Miller biopic), the garish Mrs Wormwood (Matilda: The Musical, 2022) and an alcoholic lottery winner (in Michael Morris's To Leslie, for which she was Oscar-nominated in 2023). This year, she emerged in a new role altogether, joining actors Fiona Shaw, Minha Kim, Fionn O'Shea and Bel Powley on the runway for Simone Rocha's Autumn/Winter 2025 show."
"In her latest picture - Dragonfly, a carefully observed two-hander from writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, and the real reason for our meeting over Zoom today - Riseborough partnered with another esteemed actor, portraying the 30-something, socially adrift Colleen to Brenda Blethyn's widowed pensioner Elsie. The two neighbours' lives start to merge when Colleen offers to do some shopping for Elsie, who has recently suffered a fall and is now at the mercy of overworked carers employed by her largely absent son."
""Simone's work is absolutely beautiful, so I was incredibly happy to be part of it, but it helped that we were all having this odd first experience," she tells me. "It's becoming less odd - we're all [actors] becoming these tools of marketing - but that was absolutely not how it felt; it felt like Simone had gathered a lot of creative people she respected.""
Andrea Riseborough has taken diverse roles including Audrey Withers in a Lee Miller biopic, Mrs Wormwood in Matilda: The Musical, and an Oscar-nominated performance in To Leslie. She joined Simone Rocha's Autumn/Winter 2025 runway, noting the collaborative creative environment despite actors' increasing role in marketing. In Dragonfly, a social-realist two-hander by Paul Andrew Williams, she plays Colleen, a socially adrift thirtysomething whose life becomes entwined with widowed pensioner Elsie, played by Brenda Blethyn. The film explores friendship and complicit loneliness amid overworked carers and absent family. Riseborough also has a forthcoming role portraying Isabella Blow in a biopic.
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