Lyndsey Marshal on intense nightmare neighbour film Restless

Lyndsey Marshal with Aston McAuley in Restless.

As the famous Australian soap theme goes, everybody needs good neighbours. But what happens when they make life a nightmare, and stretch patience to the limit?

The dilemma is at the heart of Restless, which has its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival next week and sees Lyndsey Marshal star as empty nester and tired-out carer Nicky.

She’s driven to madness and forced to extreme measures just to have a decent night’s sleep when noisy party animal Deano (Aston McAuley) moves in next door. He begins a campaign of torment when she dares to ask if he can turn the racket down.

Restless’ nightmare neighbours

“Everyone has an awful neighbour at some point,” The Hours star Lyndsey said. “It affects day-to-day living and your mental health because your home is supposed to be your place of refuge and comfort.

“If that’s disrupted by something you can’t control, it’s incredibly unsettling. It only takes about four nights of not getting sleep for things to start falling apart.”

Not only is her character disturbed by the pounding music, she’s overstretched at work and barely coping with her son moving away for university and the recent loss of her parents, who lived in the house Deano now inhabits.

All she has to comfort her are classical music and her beloved cat Reggie – until he goes missing.

“You root for Nicky and can’t help but put yourself in that position,” Lyndsey, 46, said.

“Going home to no one is a massive wake-up call, as well as dealing with the magnitude of grief. Her comfort is in her cat. When that’s taken away, everything completely spirals out.”

Strangely enough, Lyndsey’s theories on whether she’d go to the same lengths as her character for her own cat were tested just after filming.

“Pingu went missing for 10 days,” she explained. “I was going into neighbours’ sheds without asking them because they were away, climbing over huge walls into people’s gardens…

“I kept saying: ‘It’s the kids, the boys are so upset.’ They were actually all right. I’d gone mad!

“He did come home at 3am after 10 nights on the lash, living his best cat life and walking past posters of himself going: ‘Oh, and now I’m famous!’”

‘Intense’ filming

Music is a large part of Restless, the film’s soundscape contrasting the respite Nicky takes in classical music with the drum and bass from next door.

She would get director Jed Hart to play pounding dance tunes to rile her up for scenes, and her performance of descending into furious madness is closer to reality than you’d think.

“We had two semi-detacheds in Dagenham for a fortnight, so it was quite intense,” she said. “I got flu and, by the end of it, I did feel like I’d gone mad!

“As an actor it’s great to get a job with a friend or someone to chat away with but, for quite a lot of the film, I was in the house on my own for long days. It was an odd experience.”

Fortunately, Lyndsey could channel it all into the film’s crescendo as Nicky succumbs to her rage.

“She’s the underdog, you celebrate her. I got to have a whole emotional range in this film, which was so exciting to do – there’s not that many films with women over 40 as a lead where you get to do that.”

Lyndsey can’t wait to come to Glasgow to showcase Restless, having spent several years filming period drama Garrow’s Law along the road in Dumbarton.

“I loved it there,” she said. “We filmed over the summer, it was still always raining but, because it was period drama, I wasn’t allowed to get suntanned so that worked well!

“At weekends I’d hire cars and just drive out, it was beautiful.”

Lyndsey’s career

Lyndsey started filming with Scots star Peter Capaldi last week for the second series of Criminal Record.

It’s the latest role in a prolific career that includes Three Days Of Rain with close friend James McAvoy and playing Cleopatra in BBC blockbuster series Rome, which paved the way for the likes of Game Of Thrones.

“It was amazing to be part of,” she recalled. “It was the first of its kind, a major collaboration between the UK and America. Everybody wanted to be in it because it was exciting.”

As well as the big budgets, at the time it was one of the most violent and sexually explicit programmes to be shown on the BBC.

“I look back and think about some of the things we did and were asked to do,” Lyndsey added. “It was a different time to be doing those kind of shows with those kind of scenes.

“I’m glad for younger actresses, in fact all actresses and actors now, that an intimacy co-ordinator is a key on-set person.”

Lyndsey Marshal on stage in 2009 in Three Days Of Rain with James McAvoy.

Lyndsey was later directed by screen legend Clint Eastwood in 2010 film Hereafter.

“He’s an actor so he understands how actors want to work,” she said. “We didn’t do 50 takes, he was respectful. When he’d got it, he’d got it.

“It is quite odd at first because it’s Clint Eastwood. It’s like being directed by Elvis Presley. Quite quickly you realise that you’re doing a job, you need direction and you need to ask him about things. You have to work. There’s nothing more grounding.

“That’s even more so in plays. You have people from all different walks of life, classes, generations, all working together on telling a story.

“I just hope there are more working-class actors who can actually get to drama schools to be able to do it.”

Restless premieres at the Glasgow Film Festival, Wednesday at 8.40pm