Claire Foy never saw Sugapuff coming.
How could she have? The British actress — who won an Emmy for her brilliantly contained and internal portrayal of young Queen Elizabeth II sublimating her every desire and dream for her duty in The Crown Season 2 — was finishing up the Q&A after her late Thursday keynote talk at SXSW London when an ebullient man in the audience cried out for the microphone.
“I’m here!”
Foy, who’d been a delightful sport all night, brimming with laughter and self-deprecating British humor, gestured for the usher bearing the mic to hand it over.
“Yeah?” she asked, smiling expectantly.
“Claire Foy, it’s so beautiful to see your natural self and not acting,” said the man, who I’d later learn is Sugapuff, a pop culture presenter from East London. “You have such a beautiful soul and I really like your vibe.”
Foy let out a cackle, or more like a “caw-caw!” sound of surprise and amazement that has rarely, if ever, been emitted from a human — more like a crow who’s just found a trove of garbage to munch on and wants to broadcast it to the world.
“This is what I mean, your beauty is just confusing me at this point!” said Sugapuff, who wore his name on a rhinestone grill around his neck and was simultaneously filming while firing out seemingly whatever question he could think of to keep the interaction going.
“So, what are the everyday things that you still do, like now that you’re a superstar?” he said, also throwing in a compliment about the two giant, dangling rhinestone brooches affixed to her tuxedo jacket and calling her “a very stylish woman.”
Foy, a pro, endeavored to keep up, responding to the compliments, and saying she does all the things that ordinary people do, just before Sugapuff threw out another query, about what her guilty pleasures are and what she likes to buy in “the cheaper part of things,” like Tesco supermarkets.
“I know what goes on there and I don’t shop there anymore,” said Foy with a wink. (She used to be a Tesco cashier.)
An usher had crouched down next to Sugapuff gently hinting it was time to hand over the mic, but Sugapuff was not done. He wanted to know her favorite packed lunch on set.
Foy never once made it seem like she couldn’t handle the barrage. “I have so many snacks. I eat only 100 percent dark chocolate, which most people find really gross,” she said.
“No, you need to be healthy!” said Sugapuff, as if they were the only people in this makeshift lecture hall inside a church. Foy agreed that she needs to be healthy. “You look good!” Sugapuff continued. “And it’s so worth it, because your skin is TEA!”
Foy demurred that she had tons of makeup on and changed the subject, recommending that everyone get into gardening. And then maybe she got a little too into talking about gardening, explaining that she started using MiracleGrow, as Sugapuff peppered her with more questions about her summer plans.
“Nobody cares about this!” said Foy, dissolving in laughter. “I’m feeding my plants for the first time ever and it makes me feel like an adult, I think. And I talk to them.”
By this point, the usher was practically trying to wrestle the mic away, as moderator Clarisse Loughrey, film critic for The Independent, simultaneously tried to end the talk — but Sugapuff would not be deterred.
“Well, Claire Foy, my name is Sugapuff, and I’m adding love to pop culture because a lot of entertainers are depressed and I believe it’s time that we show artists like you love and we see your personality, because you are a true star, Claire Foy!”
She laughed again, amazed — probably thinking it was over.
But it was not!
“And before I go, I’m going to sing something for you because I must go. I’m getting late!” Sugapuff announced.
Foy’s jaw dropped in disbelief, but she just went with it.
“Never mind, I’ll find someone like you,” Sugapuff began, sort of in tune to the Adele hit “Someone Like You” and at such a surprisingly loud volume that Foy, like the rest of the audience, practically fell out of her chair laughing.
“I wish nothing but the best, for youuuuuuuu, toooooooo!”
Foy clapped and swayed as Sugapuff made his way down the aisle toward the stage, as the security guards and ushers who’d been standing on the outskirts of the room suddenly sprang into action. “‘Don’t forget me!’ I beg / I remember you said…”
All he wanted to do was to get Foy to join in the duet, which she did because, well, when at SXSW London, right?
“Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I …. Something else instead?” the Emmy-winner sang with some timidity, artfully allowing the moment to wind down.
And just as suddenly — or maybe it was because the guards and ushers were about to pounce — Sugapuff declared that he had to run and get his Uber, racing down the aisle and out of the church. (The Hollywood Reporter later confirmed that SXSW got the microphone back, and that Sugapuff was telling the truth — within minutes, he had jumped into an Uber.)
“With AI taking over and less humanism being encouraged, I believe it important to see the personalities and celebrate stars for who they are and how they are,” Sugapuff later told THR by email. “I’m disappointed by the amount of Film PRs in the UK [who] are anti-fun!”
Throughout her talk, though, Foy had proven herself the opposite of anti-fun, often getting huge laughs from the audience.
She’s here at SXSW London to premiere Savage House, an 18th century dark satire co-starring Richard E. Grant about a family of social climbers. Comedy is more scary than drama, she said, because you have no idea if anyone’s going to find it funny until they watch it. “So, It’s made me feel a bit more vulnerable, actually, weirdly, doing things that are supposed to be funny, because what if they’re… not?!” she said, to big laughs.
She also gamely talked about The Crown, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year. What did Foy think defined Queen Elizabeth II? The actress pointed to her “simplicity,” adding, “I don’t think she was a very complicated woman. I think she had an incredibly complicated existence.”
Meaning? “I think that she wasn’t expecting to be queen, and when she became queen, it coincided with the fact that her father died,” said Foy. “That does something to someone, when you have that sort of bereavement and then the biggest responsibility you could ever possibly imagine.” If young Elizabeth had her way, she would have spent all her time outdoors with her dogs and horses.
“Stephen Daldry once said something about the fact that she was an ordinary woman who became extraordinary because of all the ideas that people projected onto her,” said Foy. The most important thing, she added, was to never lose sight of the queen as being “ordinary.”
The talk covered her entire career, including All of Us Strangers, the ghost story starring Andrew Scott. “Of all things I’d done, that’s the thing that moves people the most,” she said.
And she revealed a bit of news about Danny Boyle’s upcoming Ink, a feature about the rise of the Murdoch empire, starring Guy Pearce as Rupert and Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb, the editor he tapped in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to revamp The Sun and turn it into a tabloid.
Foy plays Jules, a composite character written for the movie “because there were no women!” Foy joked, then corrected herself.
“No, women existed in 1969, but they just didn’t have very powerful jobs,” she said. The actress said she read tons of books about female journalists who didn’t get recognition, but who “fought their way into the kind of boys’ club that was the newspaper business.” The film, she added, “would have suffered if it didn’t have a sort of homage to those women and a representation of the significance of that impact on Fleet Street on the news that we can see today.”
And soon after that, she was fielding a question about her sky-high Louboutin platform boots, which, it’s true, were impossible to ignore.
The red-soled boots had been provided by her stylist. “I’m too short for all clothes. This isn’t necessarily a choice; it’s more of a need,” Foy said, laughing. “The trousers might look good if I have longer legs.”
Would she be able to walk off the stage in them? Foy said it would be anyone’s guess. But as soon as she sang her duet with Sugapuff, she was on her feet and practically sprinting back to her car.
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