A Matter Of Heart

“I almost had to shed a layer of skin for this role. I really felt that Beth was trying to do something that no one had done in this way before,” Chan says of writer-director Beth de Araújo, whose extraordinary movie draws on an experience from her own childhood. “There was just something about it that struck a nerve in me.” In the hands of lesser filmmakers, such difficult subject matter too regularly becomes gratuitous. “I’m very aware of storylines where female pain, women being killed, violence against women, can easily be exploited or used as a plot device, or shown from the male gaze,” says Chan. “I never felt that with this project. Ultimately, Beth is trying to help us empathize.”

Anchored by an astonishing performance from then-eight-year-old Mason Reeves, we watch a child’s desperate attempts to make sense of something that she has neither the language to articulate nor the emotional equipment to process. It is not just a film about sexual violence, though. It is about the fraught limits of parental devotion, the inconstancy between truth and justice, and the dreadful discovery that, try as we might, we cannot always protect those we love.

Some films follow you home, or in Chan’s case, long after you’ve put the work into the world. “This script is very personal to me, too,” she says, watching the lid slide off my composure. “When I think of my own experiences – and people in my life…” she falters. “I thought a lot about my mum. As women, we hold so much all the time.” On these last words, her eyes fill and something important passes between us. A moment of silent but fluent solidarity.

Pushing through grief and into action, Josephine asks challenging questions about the systems that allow violence to persist – and the responsibilities of those who stand by. Chan is emphatic about the part men must play in changing that. She credits Tatum’s careful approach: “His daughter was a big part of him feeling connected to the film. We spent a lot of time talking about the way we were parented, past relationships and his relationship with his daughter.” But she makes a wider point: “It’s not enough for the men who don’t [cause harm] to just be silent,” she says. “If they’re silent, they’re…” She trails off. “Complicit,” I finish the sentence with her consent. “We need men to be holding each other accountable,” she picks back up again, “and talking to their sons, their brothers, their family members.” It is not a matter of condemning individual perpetrators, she argues, but of challenging pervasive attitudes: “It’s an entire culture that needs to shift.”

With the toughest topics out of the way, we pause for tea – mine a fresh mint and hers a traditional Yorkshire brew – and tuck into our sweet treat, merrily clashing spoons until there’s not a crumb left of the crumble.

At this stage in her career, Chan is widening her net. “Give me a complicated woman any day. Someone where what you see is not quite what you get.” Mercifully, not all of her knotty parts require so much fortitude. She thoroughly enjoyed playing furtive former lover Gigi in The Five-Star Weekend: “Both on a professional level and a personal level, I fell in love with my castmates. I hadn't met any of them before, but the group chat’s still going strong.” Even if they were not all enthusiastic about her introduction of British snacks. “I tried to get Jennifer Garner to try Twiglets,” she chuckles. “She was not having any of it; she wouldn’t even try them. But it was just a joy, that job. And we are doing a season two! I don't think they've seen the last of Gigi.”

Then, of course, there is the question on everyone’s lips. As Crazy Rich Asians returns to our screens, this time in episodic format, we are baying for insight about Astrid’s return. I ask her what she is most excited about for round two. Her answer is revealing, although not a confirmation: “There is so much there in Kevin Kwan’s books, so there's a wealth of things that could be explored. I know that Astrid’s story is very much not [complete]. It’s kind of just the beginning for her. So we’ll see. We’ll see.”

While what happens next for Astrid will ultimately be decided by showrunner Adele Lim, Chan is taking greater control of which stories make it in front of an audience. “I’ve started producing. I am a producer on Josephine. It is meaningful to be able to get behind a project from an early stage and see it through.” She is also executive-producing an upcoming Anna May Wong biopic, in which she will star as the Chinese-American Hollywood icon. “It’s a brutal time for the industry. There is a certain pushback against diversity, but I also feel optimistic. I think people are coming back to the cinema.”

“There are so many amazing filmmakers,” she says of who might find themselves on her production roster, “and a huge number of female filmmakers, thankfully, that I would love to work with and support,” citing Halina Reijn, Justine Triet, Céline Sciamma, Celine Song and Chloe Domont as dream collaborators.

The light is lowering outside, and we’ve returned to the gentle jesting we started with. “I have a healthy sense of the absurd. It can be a bit of a dirty sense of humor as well,” she laughs. “I take my work seriously, but I try not to take myself too seriously.” She tries to persuade me that she’s a jeans-and-a-tee kind of girl. Considering that she arrived in a deep green, pixel-print coat from Dries Van Noten’s season-defining fall/winter ’26 collection, every bit the style muse, I tell her I remain generously unconvinced.

At home with her boyfriend, actor Dominic Cooper, life certainly is about to get a little more unkempt. The couple already have a black rescue cat, Mr. Kitty, who took it upon himself to adopt Cooper while he was filming in Puglia. “The kitten started sleeping in his room. And whenever I would FaceTime him, the kitten would be there. So we had him microchipped, got a rabies vaccine, an EU passport and found this lovely lady to drive him all the way to the UK from Italy.”

Now, though, “we have adopted another rescue kitten that is arriving on Friday!” I make an incredulous face. “Look, you can’t argue with the cat-distribution system,” she insists. “My sister was on holiday in the South of France and found an abandoned kitten that was starving and dehydrated and absolutely tiny. Like, literally, the size of your palm.” They’ve called her Bamboo, Bam Bam maybe, for short, she says, swiping through pictures of the stubby-tailed kitten on her phone. “So, actually, the last few days, I’ve just been googling loads of videos on how you introduce two cats.” Let the chaos ensue.

There is, however, one corner of her home devoted to serenity and solitary pursuits. Last year, after some time spent weighing up when she might have space for a baby grand, Chan finally bought herself an upright piano. “It’s actually the best present I’ve ever got myself,” she says. Having played when she was young, she’s rediscovering the pleasure of practicing, currently working her way through a Schubert impromptu. “It’s pretty hard. I’m also a terrible sight-reader, so it takes me forever to learn both hands and stitch it all together – but it’s something that I find very relaxing.”

Taking stock of the afternoon, we’ve quite careened around conversations: Twiglets failing to make it in America, the qualities of the great British dessert and the lawlessness of our beloved cats. However, accenting the laughter and tears, the synergy and singularity, was a moment of transcendence. An acknowledgment that, even though there are countless ways to be a woman, parts of the experience are bindingly, wordlessly universal.

Josephine is in movie theaters from November 20

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