It’s Normalised. I Was Gawping

Imogen Poots has a confession. “I drew a man’s penis too big recently,” she says, her anime eyes widening. The 35-year-old London-born actor is sitting at home in New York, wearing an olive baseball cap. The transgression occurred at a life-drawing class she attends in Brooklyn. “The art teacher said I needed to get my proportions right, so I erased what I’d done. But then the model, who looked like a young Sam Shepard, came over and saw where the original penis had been, and realised it had been downsized.” She is pondering whether to find another class. “There’s a bunch all over the city, but I’m running out of options.”

She already had to flee one through no fault of her own. “There was a man there who glommed on to the fact that I’m an actress. Another man was drawing me instead of the model. It was the model who told me, which then affected how I drew her. It all felt kind of meta. Other people had witnessed our conversation, too, which made it deeply uncomfortable. I don’t handle those things well. I’m pathologically polite, but inside, there’s a burning furnace.” She thinks this over. “That’s Englishness, I guess.”

In her new film, The Teacher, directed by the British Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, Poots emphasizes her endearingly awkward side, bringing unusual layers to a role that could have felt perfunctory. Hers isn’t the main plot: that belongs to Saleh Bakri as a schoolteacher in the West Bank, who tries to dissuade a pupil from seeking revenge against the settler who murdered his brother. Poots is an ingenuous British colleague, Lisa, who is doing her damndest to keep the students on track academically. Her nickname for herself is Miss United Nations.

“It was clear to me that there was some fun to be had with her,” she says. “Of course, she’s a huge eye-roll. Strolling in there, pale as hell, wearing factor-100, and saying: ‘You must finish school.’ Well, why must they? There’s an arrogance to that sort of superciliousness about the Middle East.”

Poots has found herself in similar situations. “My observations as Imogen were similar to what Lisa was experiencing. I learned so much while I was there. Learned and unlearned and reformed an analysis of what the Middle East is and what’s going on.”

On one of her days off, she and Bakri headed to the beach in Haifa, which was about 90 minutes away from where they were staying in Nablus. “I told the man at our hotel where we were going, and asked if he visited the beach often. He said, ‘I don’t have an ID card, so I’ve never been.’ He’s been looking at the sea for his entire life but has never been able to reach it.” Every day brought a new revelation. “There are the planes coming down low, the watchtowers, the relentless surveillance by the Israeli military. We went to Hebron and there were streets which my Palestinian friend was not permitted to walk on because the military had oppressed that right. These were all normalised things that I was gawping at.”

The Teacher premiered at the 2023 Toronto film festival, just over three weeks before the attacks of 7 October. “That obviously escalated everything but this has been going on for decades,” she says. “It’s just that our understanding in the west has been intermittent and fragmented. I think what the film shows is that empathy shouldn’t be selective.”

Finding a distributor for The Teacher has been, as she puts it, “an absolute nightmare. It’s hard for people to consider that this film might actually be a good thing and that it isn’t propaganda. It’s trying to open up the situation so that you have a perspective from both sides.” She looks glum. “It’s obviously a difficult sell.”

Her presence should make it more attractive. For nearly two decades, Poots has been a model of investigative acting, digging away at her material to unearth buried complexities. In recent years, she threw herself fully into Vivarium, in which she and Jesse Eisenberg are tricked by sinister forces into raising a monstrous child in a labyrinthine housing development. In the gripping, mosaic-like thriller Baltimore, she was bravely guarded and unknowable as the British heiress Rose Dugdale, who masterminded an art heist to barter for the release of IRA prisoners.

Poots has also found a kindred spirit in Kristen Stewart, no slouch herself at balancing high-fibre cinema with the popcorn variety. Stewart pounced on Poots to play the lead in her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, adapted from the swimmer turned writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of grief, abuse, and addiction.

“Kristen and I have been secretly worshipping each other from afar,” she says. “It’s really something to have someone believe in you that much. She’s had a mad life and yet she is one of the most authentic people I’ve ever encountered. As a director, she is relentless in the best way possible. She put her sweat into this film.”

Shooting finished three weeks ago, but Poots still looks dazed with gratitude. “You live your life and make your choices, and agents along the way try to funnel you into wearing an Orc costume so you’ll be in a hit, and you veer off to the left or to the right, and then you find yourself face-to-face with an artist like Kristen.” Her eyes go full-beam again. “And suddenly everything makes sense.”

FAQs:

• When is The Teacher in cinemas? The Teacher is in cinemas from 27 September.
• Who directed The Teacher? The Teacher is directed by the British Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi.
• What is The Teacher about? The Teacher is about a schoolteacher in the West Bank trying to dissuade a pupil from seeking revenge against the settler who murdered his brother.
• What is Imogen Poots’ next project? Poots is set to star in Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of grief, abuse, and addiction.