The many emotions of Juno Temple

Working on Venom: The Last Dance, then, necessitated a hefty dose of imagination — something Temple isn’t lacking. “It’s like this ode to a child’s imagination, which I very much still have a lot of,” she says. “It felt like it was feeding into my childhood, where I would imagine things all the time — you know, fairies or invisible giants or whatever.” Not far removed from that world of mythological creatures is the alien-inhabited reality in which the Venom trilogy takes place. Many will be familiar with the overlapping identities of the franchise’s protagonists, Eddie and Venom, who mostly share the same body and can communicate telepathically — and it’s mention of this that prompts our conversation to turn to internal monologues, giving Temple pause for thought. “We can get really pissed off with our inner monologues,” she says, “because they are normally our harshest critic. And understanding that those monologues can be a place where you laugh with yourself, or get a compliment from yourself — which is definitely a hard one for me — can allow you to have a sort of a sweetness with yourself.”

Between talk of childlike imagination and inner monologues, our discussion winds up somewhere between the two. “I’m very much in touch with my inner child, so I can get quite lost in my emotions,” Temple offers. “But sometimes I forget that having a childlike quality can be quite invasive.” I ask what she means by this. “I’m very curious about people,” she clarifies. “But I never seek to judge people — I hate being judged. I think it’s a properly disgusting feeling.”

Accompanying these traits, for Temple, comes a heavy dose of empathy. Perhaps even to her own detriment on occasion. “Being in touch with my emotions on a day-to-day basis can sometimes be a whirlwind,” she says. “Sometimes I can get very overwhelmed by things. I suffer from pretty bad panic attacks, actually.” Whether it surfaces while struggling to pack yet another suitcase to travel for work — “I revert to being 14, it’s really embarrassing” — or getting nervous about a role, profound emotion is something of a trope for the actor, and is probably one of the reasons Temple is so good at her job. “I don’t want to disappoint people. And I don’t want to disappoint myself,” she says. “I think being an emotional person really helps with research when it comes to being an actress — going down avenues that you explore on an emotional level. That makes a character really feel whole to me.”

Emotion may guide her research, but it’s also something that, from time to time, follows Temple onto set. “In Fargo,” she says, “there was a whole idea from the creator, Noah Hawley, where my character was allowed to show proper tears. I had a moment where I was inhabiting Dot and I found it really hard to not cry. And there were a couple of scenes where I was like, ‘Sorry, we have to reset,’ because I knew I wasn’t allowed to break yet.”

While Temple emphasises how grateful she is to be in her profession, she admits that one component of it is not knowing when the emotion will hit. “I’ve been surprised by things sometimes,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Wow, I can’t bear to walk into this space right now.’”

Equally, Temple can’t always avoid taking these characters home with her. “I can’t help but let it inhabit my life when I’m going through it,” she says. “You get home sometimes and your body can’t help but feel what you’ve been through in a weird way.” This isn’t to say that Temple would ever conflate acting out an experience with going through it in real life — she knows the difference. “You don’t want to ever pretend that someone else’s story is yours,” she says. “But sometimes you have to process things when you’re like, ‘I can’t believe that actually happens.’” Temple cites a sequence in Fargo involving domestic violence, where her stunt double had to wear a crash helmet under her wig. “There was this moment,” she says, “where I was like, ‘Wow, in real life women don’t get crash helmets.’ I have a very real adoration for women and I really care about playing characters that open a conversation in a way that doesn’t create new trauma. So there’ll be things like that that genuinely affect you and you can’t help it.”

For Temple, working through this fact is as much a visceral experience as a mental one. “I’m a big believer in therapy and stuff,” she says. “And I think it’s really important to allow your body to process that, whether that means talking or having your body vibrate for a minute and sort of shaking it out. Or if you have to have a laugh or watch a movie that makes you feel back in your own body again — or get in the bath with the person you love.”

It’s small moments like this that help Temple to be present in her own reality — something that she admits to struggling with sometimes. “I think the things that give you an injection of reality — and make you present — are really important, because I’m not always good at that,” she says, recalling a moment while filming Fargo when she saw the northern lights above her rented house in Calgary. “It blew my mind,” Temple says. “I forgot who I was, who I was playing, why I was there. It was this moment of complete stillness, where you’re just taking in something that is so much bigger and so much older than you can comprehend.”

More recently (specifically, while filming Gore Verbinski’s upcoming Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die in South Africa) the actor had a similarly grounding experience while on safari. “I’d done a week and a half of shooting my character’s backstory, which was amazing, but I definitely felt like I’d wrung myself dry with it. And then seeing something so beautiful as a herd of elephants come so close to you that you could wipe away one of their tears — it was really humbling and also made me so happy that I was alive in the real world.”