JACK LOWDEN IS NEVER SATISFIED

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The rivalry between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth I was a tale for the ages. Cousins with competing claims to the English throne, both monarchs stood out as strong women in an age not known for its gender equality. With its regal pomp, warring armies, and endless palace intrigue, their story is a natural fit for the big screen, where it has been recounted numerous times, attracting stars from Katharine Hepburn and Helen Mirren to Cate Blanchett and Clémence Poésy. The latest version, starring Saoirse Ronan as Mary and her fellow Oscar nominee Margot Robbie as Elizabeth, offers a new twist. Whereas previous versions often pitted the women against each other, Josie Rourke’s new film positions them as adversaries who nonetheless recognize their kinship as women in a world that is stacked against them, revealing new layers to their relationship that resonate in our time. “It has a very large message about women in power,” says Jack Lowden, the Scottish actor who plays Lord Darnley, Mary’s king consort, “and the expectation that comes with that in what is, and was even more so back then, a man’s world.”

For Lowden, who grew up in the Scottish Borders, the film was an opportunity for the self-avowed “massive Scottish history buff” to discover a singular historical figure who was previously a minor character to him. Born in England to a Scottish family in exile, Darnley was in line for both the Scottish and English thrones, and his marriage to Mary was one of both passion and political expediency. Selfish and arrogant, his alcoholism, his rumored habit of sleeping with other men (including, in this film, David Rizzio, Mary’s private secretary who was also alleged to be the father of her child), and above all his refusal to submit himself to the authority of the queen endangered the stability of the court to the point where he was soon assassinated at the age of twenty-one. “I actually knew way more about Elizabeth I than I did about any of the other players in the story, particularly the men,” Lowden admits. “I knew nothing about Darnley and when I learned about him I realized he’s a remarkable figure. He was basically her undoing. It was a grave mistake on her part marrying a man with such obscene insecurities and for him to then be thrown right into being the queen’s consort multiplied those insecurities and really highlighted them. A part like Darnley was a complete gift because of the very short journey that he has in the film which is so up and down.”

Rourke, here making her feature début, is the rare female director to take on this history. “It only seems fair that it should be directed and told by women,” Lowden says, but he argues that it is her theater background as the artistic director of London’s esteemed Donmar Warehouse rather than her gender that had a larger effect on shaping the film. “There’s just an instant shorthand,” he says, as a frequent stage presence himself. “We have a habit in theater to talk things to death, so Josie and I found a mutual appreciation for doing that and she gave us this wonderful rehearsal period, which is an amazing privilege and luxury in film. She was adamant that we had that because then you get to make loads of fuckups and mistakes and it’s great.”

Now twenty-eight, Lowden had his start on stage early, joining his younger brother Calum, now a soloist at the Royal Ballet in Stockholm, in ballet class. “He wanted to do that from a very young age and I went along with him and it became evident very quickly that I was rubbish,” he laughs, “and I was pushed quite quickly towards narrating the ballets and that’s where I got a love for being on stage.” He spent his childhood years performing in amateur theater and school plays before attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, thanks to parents who were willing to let him forge his own path, no matter where it led him. “We were lucky to have parents who never really said, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Lowden says. “When we were younger, my brother and I were obsessed with the Mighty Ducks films and wanted to be ice hockey players. They took us once to an ice hockey trail in Edinburgh and all we knew how to do was skate and we didn’t know how the hell to play hockey but they let us do that and get that out of our system.”

In 2010, Lowden, who admits he realized acting was “what I could do before I realized it’s what I wanted to do,” took a leave from drama school for his first role in a revival of the searing play Black Watch, a masterpiece about Scottish soldiers during the Iraq War that he says inspired him to become an actor when he saw its original run in London. “It was just amazing,” he recalls about touring the United Kingdom and America with the production. “I was nineteen and that play was already monumentally successful. You were a rock star for nine months all of a sudden because of the reaction people had to play. Every single night, people were on their feet screaming. In the play the character says that when he’s asked why does he go to war, he says, ‘The buzz of thinking that you might die any minute,’ and it was the buzz of that play that gave it a special place in my heart that it will always have.”

Since then, he has continued to gain notice in London’s theater scene, starring in an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire tied to the 2012 London Olympics and earning an Olivier in 2014 for his performance as Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts. Earlier this year, he collaborated with Rourke again for a provocative production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that also investigated issues of gender and power. “I always felt more comfortable on stage than in life,” he explains. “It’s an amazing thing, the license that you have to be a prick or to be a lover. I love that, probably because I was too scared to do all that stuff in life. I love that you get given the license on stage to do all those things that you stop yourself doing in life.”

At the same time, his onscreen career has taken off in the last few years, despite the clear distinction he likes to draw between the two kinds of acting. “I think they’re two different jobs,” he says. “They’re not related to me, film and stage.” He was part of the standout cast of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk—which also included Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Harry Styles, and young breakouts Fionn Whitehead and Barry Keoghan—starring as the Royal Air Force pilot Collins, whose plane is shot down over the English Channel. “It was an incredible experience. That film was just a juggernaut, the size of it, but that one man’s control and grace and clarity was just extraordinary,” he recalls of Nolan. “His ability to see the whole thing at once all the time was amazing. The man is in every sense a filmmaker. If you get splashed with water in the shot, it was Chris. The movement of the cockpit, that’s Chris. Watching him work was amazing. He’s a master.”

Despite his continued success, Lowden insists that he still finds filmmaking “endlessly complicated in many ways.” “Someone once brilliantly put it to me that acting on camera is like acting on a building site and it still feels like that to me,” he continues. “I miss the performance of stage, where suddenly there can be hundreds of people in the dark out there and you know that they’re watching you. I haven’t found that sort of romantic performance of it yet on camera. I haven’t found that pure excitement that you can get on stage.”

But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to push himself in unexpected new ways. He’ll next star in the comedy Fighting with My Family, as one half of a real-life brother-sister pair of British professional wrestlers who audition for WWE. “That’s all I ever wanted to do and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long,” he laughs about his lighter turn. His constant drive for renewal seems to have been inspired by playing Morrissey in the biopic England Is Mine last year, an opportunity to explore a kindred spirit who was also never satisfied with staying in place. “It was then when I fell in love with playing people who try,” Lowden says, “playing people who want to be something else—people that don’t like themselves and want to improve. It’s way more interesting.”

Mary Queen of Scots is out now.