Shirley Henderson is probably best known for weeping in bathrooms: first as Jude, the highly strung, chain-smoking bestie of Bridget Jones in the 2001 romcom, and then, the following year, as Moaning Myrtle, the piercingly shrill ghost who haunts the girls’ bathroom in the Harry Potter franchise. If her face isn’t one you immediately recognise, you’re sure to remember those tearful loo scenes and, of course, that distinctive voice.

When I meet Henderson over Zoom, her voice is a few notes lower and a few shades softer thanks to her lilting Scottish brogue. “It’s just what comes really. I thought those [voices] made sense,” she tells me of the two iconic performances. “I just did the voice that was in my head.”

Henderson is wrapped up in a navy wool peacoat at her home in Scotland, where she lives a decidedly private life. She isn’t exactly living in the spotlight, and that seems to be how she likes it.

Although she may strive to avoid the trappings of celebrity, a quick overview of her resume will offer dozens of acclaimed films: Trainspotting, Marie Antoinette, Anna Karenina, Wonderland, Topsy-Turvy and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, to name just a few. More recently, she delivered a much-discussed turn as the decidedly creepy obsessive stalker Frances in season two of Happy Valley, and in 2022, she appeared as Agatha Christie in the murder mystery film See How They Run alongside Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson. Last year, she was awarded a lifetime achievement award by Bafta Scotland.

Her latest project, The Trouble With Jessica, sees Henderson adeptly taking on yet another fierce, complicated woman. She stars as Sarah, a highly strung upper-middle-class woman whose picture-perfect life is falling apart at the seams – her husband, Tom (Alan Tudyk), has spent all their money on an ambitious architecture project. On the verge of bankruptcy, the pair are forced to sell what one can only assume to be a multi-million pound home in north London. During a dinner party to mark their final night in the house, they spill the news to their oldest friends, Richard (Rufus Sewell) and Beth (Olivia Williams), a couple, and Jessica (Indira Varma), an untamed, impulsive writer who never settled down. When Jessica dies in Sarah and Tom’s garden, Sarah makes a quick, manic decision to convince the other three to help her move Jessica’s body back to her own flat. “The buyer,” explains Sarah in the film, “… when he finds out what just happened, he won’t buy the house.” 

So begins a darkly comic dance as the threesome manically negotiates the next steps. Of course, numerous painful secrets are revealed along the way. With the feel of a modern-day Oscar Wilde satire, the wickedly sharp script by James Handel and director Matt Winn manages to simultaneously skewer the hypocrisy of the middle classes while also offering moments of undiluted truthfulness and humanity. It was this writing that first attracted Henderson to the role.

“It’s lovely writing. It’s dark, cutting, sharp humour, and not necessarily comfortable humour, but it makes you laugh,” she says. “There’s also a danger there because it’s about people’s lives imploding – there’s a badness creeping in. And the speed of it all – all of the running around and all the physical stuff that comes with that panic. It’s a complicated piece.”

As Sarah’s panic mounts, a darkness within her seems to unlock. She manipulates, blackmails and threatens in her attempts to convince the others to go along with her plan. 

“It’s her life on the line,” Henderson says. “The secrets and the financial stress [build up] and she finds this anger that comes out of her. But she also finds a vulnerability and it all crashes down at the end. That’s what makes the journey worthwhile. For an actress, it’s a nice arc.”

Perhaps most striking about Henderson’s turn in The Trouble With Jessica is its unapologetic harshness. It is a performance made up of sharp edges, revealing the human potential for immorality and selfishness. Sarah is not exactly a nice or a good woman, but Henderson certainly doesn’t shy away from channelling her ugly ferocity.

“She’s got a lot of flaws,” says Henderson. “But it’s nice to see [a woman who is] raw and ugly at times in an emotional way. She’s bad and sad and messed up – but [it all comes from her] love for her husband and love for her life. These kinds of characters are interesting to play.”

Born in Forres, Moray, in 1965 and raised in Kincardine-on-Forth in Fife, Henderson grew up far from this world of flawed characters and sharply written scripts that now fascinate her. In fact, Henderson, who once described her childhood self as a “tomboy” with an overactive imagination, had never considered pursuing a career as a performer. “I didn’t know much about the acting world. I didn’t really know what it was,” she says. “I knew what I’d done – I’d done my own stuff. I used to sing in working mens’ clubs and all kinds of things.”

At 16, during a year at Adam Smith, a local college, a teacher noticed her talent and suggested she audition for drama schools. “So, I went down to London. I was very excited, but I didn’t really know what it was,” she says, miming out wide-eyed wonderment. “I just knew that it was maybe a way into this world.”

Henderson auditioned for only one drama school and, at 17, she landed a place. She spent three years at Guildhall where she “just had to learn everything”. 

It wasn’t only reading plays and studying accents and movement that was new to her. “It was also being with lots of people and kind of growing up together,” she recalls. “I was a very, very young 17. So seeing all these girls stripping off in the changing rooms – I’d never seen anything like that… It was wonderful.”

During her time at Guildhall, she fell in love with theatre after seeing the few productions she could afford. “I saw [the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of] Cyrano De Bergerac with Derek Jakobi. I didn’t know about the Royal Shakespeare Company, you know. I thought that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.”

After spending three years soaking everything in, she was, as she says, “ready to go”. Within a few years, she had landed leading roles at London’s National Theatre and in British television staple Hamish Macbeth. Then came roles in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland. 

As Jude in the three Bridget Jones films, Henderson found a nervous energy that resonated with a generation of young women in limbo.

“She’s very much under stress,” she says of Jude. “She’s got this boyfriend that just treats her like dirt. She’s drinking a lot, she’s out at night, she’s smoking. She’s full of fun, but there’s also this nervous thing about the beginning of life. You know, ‘What’s my life gonna be?’”

Next came Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets. “I didn’t know Harry Potter before that. My sister was staying with me at the time in London and she’d read the books. She said: ‘Moaning Myrtle – she’s only 14!’” Henderson was 37 at the time.

Henderson began by searching for the voice. “I started practising the voice. When I went for my interview, I just put on a white blouse and a black skirt and tried to look as young as possible. And I just did the voice that was in my head. And they seemed to like it.” 

This focus on finding the voice is typical of Henderson’s approach. Although “each job is slightly different”, she says, her process is playful and organic and always starts with speaking: “What I often do is read out loud to myself – a novel, or anything – and try an accent or a particular sound. And then I’ll try and feed that into the dialogue. Then I’ll start speaking to myself, trying to do a little bit of improvising with myself. It’s like an amalgam of all of these things until I start to get a feeling for it – until it’s starting to sound how I feel it might be.”

She recalls playing Judy, a woman with advancing Parkinson’s living in northern Canada, in the 2017 film Never Steady, Never Still.

“I had to do a Canadian accent and I had to do Parkinson’s in my body. That took a lot of reading out loud and practising it in my body. It was about going back and forwards [between the two]. And then eventually, it’s fully about [combining it all with] the text. And then [the character is] in you.”

When it came to The Trouble With Jessica, Henderson didn’t have the luxury of time – she was sent the script just three days before shooting began – so a lengthy period of physical and vocal preparation was out of the question.

She threw herself right into the text. “For me, the rhythm was in the mouth. I felt she was pacey, she was fast. So, I just tried to get some of the dialogue in my mouth – I felt that everything else would come if I could get on top of some of [the dialogue].”

Perhaps this ability to transform so completely is why Henderson has somehow managed to avoid widespread fame: she finds her characters’ voices, lets them screech or whisper or wail or yell, and then she vanishes, quietly, back to her Scottish retreat. Despite two extremely iconic roles and numerous turns in beloved films and TV series, she remains relatively anonymous – at least to the general public. For actors, she is what Matt Winn, director of The Trouble With Jessica director, calls a “magnet”.

“She’s very serious about what she does but is also extraordinarily modest about her work,” he tells Stylist via email. “She’s also what I think of as an ‘actor magnet’ – if Shirley’s in it, other great actors want to be in it too. She has a very original approach to acting and it’s obvious that others really enjoy simply watching her.”

The result is yet another remarkable vocal and physicality transformation filled with a raw ferocity that is perhaps a little surprising coming from one so reserved and private in day-to-day life.

What’s next for Henderson? Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t seem to be looking for anything too flashy. Last year she left behind a lead role in a Dune prequel slated for release on HBO Max. (Her The Trouble With Jessica co-star, Olivia Williams, will be taking over the role).

Her interests instead lie in the quality of the work. “It’s lovely to start at the ground with something and let it creep up in your body as you gradually discover it and work out what it is.”

In 2017, she did just that, starting at the ground with a “small workshop” of a Bob Dylan-inspired musical play. What began as a rather experimental two-day workshop eventually became The Girl From The North Country, a West End smash hit that ran at The Old Vic.

“I remember being a little bit nervous because I’d not been on stage for such a long time,” she says. “But I remember walking along the Southbank past all the restaurants and cafes and thinking, ‘I want to say yes to this. I love the writing and I get a nice feeling. I’m gonna say yes, I’m gonna say yes.’”

Henderson starred as Elizabeth, a woman with early onset dementia, whose condition leaves her freed from societal convention and reeling between aggression, childishness and indifference. Her soulful performance, which included yet another vocal feat in the form of a gut-wrenchingly powerful rendition of Like A Rolling Stone, was met with rave reviews and earned her an Olivier award. But, of course, it was only the work itself she really cared about. “It was a beautiful experience,” she says. “It was just glorious. I never thought that would come my way.”

Whether her next project is another surprise hit like The Girl From The North Country, another indie film like The Trouble With Jessica or something that no one ever even sees, I get the sense that Henderson will be content as long as she is invested in the process.

“I’m always up for anything really. If I read something and I think, That’s the thing I’ve been looking for,” she says. “I never know what will come next. Just have to wait and see. Hopefully something nice.” 

The Trouble With Jessica comes to UK cinemas on 5 April 2024.

Images: Parkland Entertainment; Getty; Miramax; Warner Bros.