We are at my home because Bonham Carter wanted to meet somewhere we could sit outside for the sake of social distancing, but not a park, as it was predicted to rain. Bonham Carter loves dogs, because of course she does – what posh English woman doesn’t? She has two herself, and once she puts mine back down, gets out her phone to photograph him: “I have to send a photo to Tim – he’ll love him,” she says, referring to Tim Burton, her ex-partner and the father of her two children. Then it becomes a shriek: “Oh my God, your dog is ridiculous!” she cries, spotting my terrier, and promptly scooping him up. Her tone alternates between old-fashioned posh and a gentle millennial uptick, as if she were both a dowager from a bygone age and a sardonic modern teenager, often in the same sentence. It really does! I later see the photos and think, what was I thinking?” she says. “I know, but I promise you, even when I think I’m being normal, somehow it comes out wrong. But a corset, as punishing as it is, does sort out your posture I look the same in every period drama, with mad curly hair. Does she ever think, “I’ll dress normcore today – that’ll throw off the paps”? Her fashion sense – invariably described as quirky (“God, quirky,” she says, as if repeating a doctor’s fatal diagnosis) – has made her a favourite of the paparazzi, and photos of her mooching around London in her distinctive outfits have been a staple of the tabloids for several decades. But it’s an illusion, because then the Daily Mail photographs you, and you see it and think, that wasn’t what I meant at all,” she says as we walk into my kitchen and I compliment her outfit. “I love dressing up and creating myself, as it were, according to the day and the mood. In her stompy, clumpy boots and dark floral ruffled dress, curls piled on top of her head, she looks so exactly herself – which is to say, like a Victorian goth drawn in charcoal – that she could be an actor playing a character playing Helena Bonham Carter. And look who’s standing on my rain-sodden doorstep, it’s Helena Bonham Carter.
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