Maxine Peake: ‘I’m sure people say: don’t hire that big red raving loony’
The actor on her new role as a woman undergoing IVF, the trouble with being outspoken and why she called her dog Castro
Maxine Peake’s roles range from a transgender Hamlet to a sharp lawyer in the BBC series Silk to, most recently, an early 19th-century matriarch from Manchester in Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo. Now she is about to star in a stage adaptation of Julia Leigh’s harrowing memoir of IVF treatment, Avalanche: A Love Story, as part of the Barbican’s Fertility Fest about “the science of making babies and modern families”.
You have made no secret of your attempts at IVF; was it personal experience that drew you to this piece?
What I like about this piece is that there is no happy ending. It is so difficult for people for whom IVF has not been positive to find stories that do not end well. I wish I could have read Avalanche when I was going through IVF. My experience was not successful. I did three rounds and that was me done. I felt I’d been through the mill. And I felt guilt. I felt: do I want a child enough? What people do not understand is that you are pumping your body with hormones. I felt I don’t want to do this again, thank you very much.