The 2010 role that brought Helena Bonham Carter full circle: “A gift of a part”
“There is no normalcy in life,” Helena Bonham Carter once told a reporter stoutly and succinctly. The usage of topsy-turvy lunacy as the standard way to process the world around us fits in with what the general public might think of the doddering, flamboyant actor, whose media personality is both bizarre and beloved.
“There is no normalcy in life,” Carter might’ve told the press, but children’s writer and celebrated mathematician Lewis Carroll all but created that idea several decades before the Harry Potter actor was even born. Despite the temporal distance between the two thinkers, their creative philosophy was the same.
Some say that Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is the world’s most-read book after the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays. The titular character is immediately recognisable all over the world: That blonde pop of hair, the sky-like blue of her dress, always rushing and never reaching an intended destination. Beyond being a coveted piece of logic-pushing nonsense literature, the book provides the perfect act of escapism.
Writing for Harper’s Bazaar, the coveted actor extrapolated exactly what the book’s cultural omnipresence meant for her: “As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a wannabe Alice,” she said. “[The book] has always been there, like a constant internal backdrop in the imagination.”
Carter took much inspiration from Carroll’s intermingling of the sublime and the mundane. “We need nonsense,” the star insisted, in support of his tale, before adding, “A cup of it daily to keep our head above getting drowned in our own seriousness. And a reminder to play and have fun.”
So in 2008, when her then-partner and ghoulishly divine director, Tim Burton, called her in for an official meeting in his office, Carter never thought that she’d walk out having landed a part in a world which represented, in many ways, the entire creative landscape of her mind. The antagonistic, gruelling Queen of Hearts fell on her lap: “Frankly, this was better than a marriage proposal. […] This was a gift of a part.”
We might find echoes of Alice’s loose, blustery naivety in Carter’s performance of Lucy Honeychurch in the 1985 adaptation of A Room with A View, or in the cheerful absentminded nature of Mrs Lovett in the 2007 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but this was the first time Carter was allowed to wear her influences directly on her sleeve.
“Off with their heads!” she yells villainously in the Burton adaptation, a full-circle moment for the coveted star. The shrill shriek of her voice shocks and delights, even when we are encouraged to hate her malicious wickedness: “I hate this image of me as a prim Edwardian. I want to shock everyone,” Carter once said, and the huge-headed crown-bearing lunatic gave her the perfect opportunity to do so.
Carter would have a second full-circle moment in 2016, when Burton passed over to James Bobin to direct the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass. Still performing alongside Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, and Anne Hathaway, the sequel was a box-office disappointment, losing the studio an estimated $70million as a now 22-year-old Alice was thrown back into the magical underworld.
In normal circumstances, it should’ve been a hit. But, as we’ve now learnt from Carter’s wisdom, “There is no normalcy in life.”
