Inside The Hills of California: meet the theatrical sisterhood of Jez Butterworth’s new play

The play, the playwright and the director

London-born and Cambridge-educated, Butterworth burst on to the theatre scene with gangster comedy Mojo in 1995, then followed it up with 2002’s The Night Heron, 2006’s The Winterling and 2008’s Parlour Song. Recently, he has worked predominantly in film – he co-wrote the Tom Cruise-starring Edge of Tomorrow, Bond film Spectre, Ford v Ferrari and the latest Indiana Jones – but he is still best known for Jerusalem and The Ferryman.

The former opened at London’s Royal Court in 2009 and became an instant hit, transferring to the West End and then to Broadway. Its depiction of hedonism in rural Wiltshire – embodied by Mark Rylance’s remarkable Rooster Byron – was seen by some as a paean to a vanishing, mythological, Englishness. It, and Rylance, returned to the West End in 2022 and the play was as lauded again as it had been more than a decade earlier. In 2017 came The Ferryman, its portrait of a sprawling Northern Irish family struggling to survive against a backdrop of the Troubles seen as a commentary on cyclical violence. As with Jerusalem, it opened at the Royal Court before moving to the West End and Broadway, winning Oliviers and Tonys on its way.

Conversely, The Hills of California will be the first of Butterworth’s plays to open directly in the West End. If its cast is not willing to say much about the plot of the play, perhaps Donnelly, Best, Lovibond and Wilson might discuss the themes with which Butterworth wrestles this time around. What, for example, is the significance of the play’s location: Blackpool, during the dry summer of 1976?

‘I was expecting Sam Mendes to be brilliant. But I wasn’t expecting his brilliance to be matched by his empathy’ – Leanne Best

“Well, Englishness, mythology and cyclical violence are definitely all in there,” answers Wilson. “The magic of Blackpool is in there, too. Blackpool in 1976 was wilting, but it was still a genuinely magical place. Aretha Franklin and the Jackson Five played there. Jez is definitely exploring that magic.”

For Lovibond, Butterworth is more interested in the difficult relationships that define families, in the slipperiness of memories, and – “if it doesn’t sound too wanky” – the nature of truth.

“I would say that the play is about the burden of hope a parent places on their child and, however well-meaning that might be, how the weight of that hope can irrevocably shape someone’s life,” she says. “I think it is also about stories. The stories we tell ourselves. The stories that exist within families and how you might all have witnessed the same thing but remember it differently.”

For Best, meanwhile, The Hills of California is about all of that – family, memory, truth – and more. “What I think happened is what happened for me,” she explains. “That’s my truth. What you think happened is what happened to you. That’s your truth. We take steps further away from each other when we can’t hear someone else’s truth. We take steps closer together when we can hear that truth. The aim is to discard truth and exist in a space together with compassion.”

“Everything is everything,” Best laughs. “That’s what the play is about. Basically, it’s a play about a guesthouse in Blackpool in 1976. But it’s also a play about the entirety of human experience.”

An insight into the process

Donnelly has more insight into Butterworth’s brain than most. The pair met when she starred in his play The River, Upstairs at the Royal Court in 2012, and became a couple. They now have two children and split their time between London and Devon. Donnelly also starred, to Olivier-winning effect, in The Ferryman – the play was inspired by the murder of her uncle Eugene in Northern Ireland in 1981 – and the character of Veronica here was written for her, too.

“Jez likes to talk,” says Donnelly. “He likes to discuss his work while he is writing. Whether or not anything I say back is any use to him, I don’t know, but he does like to bounce ideas off me.”

“This play started coming together a few years ago,” she continues. “He sat down to write in early 2023. A lot of it was written in Devon. He has a writing cabin at the end of the garden where he works. He will drift in and out for tea breaks and lunch. We chat about it then. He usually finishes at about six o’clock. We will put the kids to bed and then we will chat about it in the evening, too.”

Butterworth never sets out to write about a particular theme, despite the various labels critics have slapped on his successive plays, Donnelly explains. His process is less schematic and more organic than that.

“Jez doesn’t aim to cover themes like that,” she says. “There was never any part of him that meant to write about England with Jerusalem, and there was certainly no part of him that wanted to write about Northern Ireland with The Ferryman. Things just come together. He writes a play about relationships, then sees how that locks in with more exterior elements. He aims to write about human experience. He aims for people to come together to witness a communal experience that speaks to them and their lives. Otherwise, he might as well just be writing a newspaper article.”

The hype around The Hills of California is not just because the play has been written by Butterworth, though. It is also because it reunites the writer with director Sam Mendes, who won both the Olivier award and Tony award for best director for his production of The Ferryman. Mendes’ CV contains several of the most acclaimed films and stage productions of the past three decades, from Oscar-winning movie American Beauty to last year’s National Theatre staging of Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue, currently running in the West End. There are a couple of Bond movies, too.

‘Jez aims for people to come together to witness a communal experience that speaks to them and their lives’ – Laura Donnelly

Donnelly worked with Mendes on The Ferryman, so knew what to expect from him. For Best, Lovibond and Wilson, though, this is their first time. All three were surprised by the experience.

“This is going to sound like such a head girl thing to say, but I was expecting Sam Mendes to be brilliant,” says Best. “I wasn’t expecting his brilliance to be matched by his empathy, though.”

“He is a very good actor, actually,” adds Wilson. “And he is very trusting. He is specific about the bricks and mortar, the furniture and the props. Within that, though, he gives you a lot of leeway. It is like he gives you clear slalom posts and lets you ski between them. He feels his way in, too. And he is up on stage a lot, which is cool. He is in the trenches with us.”

“Right at the beginning, when Sam offered me the part, he said he thought I would find it creatively fulfilling.” Lovibond says. “He was right. Being in the room, watching these brilliantly talented actors bring these rich characters to life and seeing how creatively fulfilled they are is amazing. It bounces back on you. You just feel really lucky to go into work every day.”

The three women also concur that The Hills of California is one of the biggest – if not the biggest – jobs they will ever take on. That is true in terms of time – the play runs in the West End for a whopping five months until mid-June – but also in terms of professional prestige.  

Meet the cast

Best, 43, grew up in Liverpool – she still has a thick Scouse accent – alongside her identical twin sister Sarah. She danced as a child – “everyone in Liverpool loves a boogie, but I was truly, truly awful,” she says – but took a roundabout route into acting, signing up for a Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts summer school in her early 20s during a break between backpacking trips, having a “mildly transcendental experience” playing Abigail in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and deciding to spend the next three years training there instead of travelling around the world again.

After graduating in 2002, Best spent several years working at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse – “the joke was that I was the rep, because I was always rehearsing in one venue while I was performing in the other,” she says – before reluctantly moving to London. Over the past decade, she has straddled stage and screen, landing roles in the series Ripper Street, Cold Feet and Line of Duty, and the plays Damned by Despair at the National Theatre and Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse.

“I never thought I would feel at home working in London,” she says. “The truth is that I feel very fortunate to have ended up in this room, working with these people. It’s mad. Sam Mendes has become Sam. Jez Butterworth has become Jez. Laura Donnelly has become Laura. And I really dig these people and I really dig this thing we are trying to make. It feels really important to me.” 

Lovibond, 37, grew up in Hammersmith’s Queen Caroline estate, fell in love with acting at a drama club at Riverside Studios as a 10-year-old and started performing professionally at the age of 12. Her career has largely been spent on screen – regular roles in the series W1A, Elementary and This England, plus parts in the films Guardians of the Galaxy and Rocketman – and she only made her stage debut in 2015 with a revival of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect.

“I’d already been acting in film and TV for something like 19 years by the time I did my first play,” she says. “I kind of did it the other way around, but it has worked out fine. I’m a jack of all trades. I have focused more on screen stuff recently because of the pandemic, but I was craving theatre. I thought that the next play I did would have to be really special. Then this came along.”

‘This is my biggest job so far. And it is lovely having Laura, Leanne and Ophelia with me. What an amazing team of theatrical big sisters to have’ – Helena Wilson

At 28, Wilson is the baby of the play’s central cast. She grew up in Cambridge, discovered a passion for devised theatre through the work of companies such as Gecko and Complicité, then found a love of text-based theatre while studying English at Oxford University, where she threw herself into student drama. In 2014, she starred in a student production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

“I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted to be an actor, but somehow an agent was there at Sweeney Todd, and that’s how everything started,” Wilson says. “After I graduated, I did a play at London’s Old Vic, then three plays at the Donmar. I think of those plays as my training, in a way.”

That work – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Old Vic with the “incredibly conscientious, incredibly respectful” Daniel Radcliffe, then The Lady from the Sea, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Measure for Measure at the Donmar – led on to more roles at the Bridge Theatre, the National and the Hampstead Theatre. She is, she says, “a theatre animal”.

“This is the biggest job of my career so far, 100%,” she adds. “It’s huge. I’m trying not to think about it but I am aware that this is a moment for me. And it is lovely having Laura and Leanne and Ophelia there with me. What an amazing team of theatrical big sisters to have.”

Like Best, Donnelly fell in love with theatre through dance. “From the age of about eight or nine, I got to leave school early to go and be in these amateur productions put on by my Irish dancing teacher,” Donnelly remembers. “I loved the excitement and the magic of those shows. We did them once or twice a year, and it was all I wanted to be doing. For a kid in 1980s Belfast, there was an aspect of magic to theatre that didn’t exist anywhere else.”

‘I’d already been acting for 19 years by the time I did my first play. I thought that the next play I did would have to be really special. Then this came along’ – Ophelia Lovibond

She moved to Glasgow to train at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama – now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – then to London to pursue a career that has seen her traverse television and theatre. On screen, she appeared in the series Outlander, Britannia and The Nevers, while on stage she is best known for her Olivier-winning, Tony-nominated role in The Ferryman. It was appearing in Butterworth’s earlier play The River, though, that totally changed her life.

“It was just a regular audition,” Donnelly says. “It was for a job Upstairs at the Royal Court. Eighty-five people were going to see it for three weeks, and that was it. Of course, doing it changed my personal life entirely, which is wonderful, but on a professional level, it was the first time I really got to do what I had always wanted to do. Up to that point, I had always tried to be a bit cool and not take myself too seriously. The River changed that. It gave me permission to take this seriously.”

When The Ferryman premiered a few years later, Butterworth and Donnelly had a child together. By the time it transferred, a second was on its way. Both starred in the show, too, after a fashion. “My daughter was five months old when we started rehearsals,” Donnelly remembers. 
“There was a baby in the play, so we practised with her. When we went into the West End, I was expecting my second daughter, so she was on stage with me every night, just in a different way.”

“The Ferryman was personally important to me, too,” Donnelly continues. “It meant a lot to tell a story about Northern Ireland on a big stage. I had such a brilliant time with that company. My abiding memory is of the audience’s reaction to our first preview. It was extraordinary. I remember being surprised when they leapt to their feet. It sounds strange, but it really was a surprise.”

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