“Did people call you Peakey at school?” Maxine Peake asks me, her coincidental namesake. She then wonders whether we are related. (We’re not.) “I used to get Peakey all the time. Or Peakster.”
The three times Bafta-nominated actress, writer and bonafide national treasure says at school, she “wasn’t this talented kid. I was always told I wasn’t a very good actor,” she says.
Peake grew up in Bolton, Greater Manchester, to a working-class family. Her dad was a lorry driver and her mum worked in a cake factory. They divorced when she was eight, and a part of her teenage years were spent in an all-female household with her mum and sister.
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Peake didn’t know anyone could just “become an actor”. But from a young age, something itched away at her. “When I look back, I think I must have been mad. It’s not that I thought I was any good. I just thought, I’ve got to do this,” she says. “I was a really strange little thing.”
As she approached her late teens, her mum became concerned about her ambitions. “She never stopped me, but she wasn’t ambitious for me. I never discussed my career with her. I definitely never did with my dad. They just expected me to get a job that could pay the rent. I suppose that anxiety, even when I started working, was always there. They were always thinking: she’s got a job, but will she get another one?”
She did, and quickly. Peake’s breakout role came at just 23, after bagging a role as Twinkle in Dinnerladies. The BBC sitcom was written by (and starred) Victoria Wood, who warned her that if she didn’t lose weight, the industry would typecast her as the fat, northern, blonde one. She quickly joined WeightWatchers and lost five stone. She lost weight so quickly that in season two, she was forced to wear a fat suit. “I thought after Dinnerladies, hopefully I’m up and running now. But it took me nine months to get another job after that,” she says. “I was just sitting around.”
Maxine Peake, left, with the cast of Dinnerladies (Photo: Richard Kendal/BBC Picture Archives)She insists, still, that she has never had a “made it” moment. “Even when I left Rada, I still wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to be an actor. I’m surprised they let me in,” she says. “I just bumbled through drama school. When I look at young actors now, they are really focused. They know the market. They know where they want to go and the way they want to be. I just wanted to be Julie Walters.”
It would be an understatement to say that jobs come more easily now, but even as a household name at 50, she is anxious. When we speak, Peake is in LA for the Peabody Awards, nominated for her role in the FX TV drama Say Nothing.
“LA is not a regular haunt for me. This is a new thing. This is the first time I’ve worked for an American production company, and I’m middle-aged,” she laughs. “It’s a whole new world. I’m having a nice time, though. I have seen quite a lot of Brits while I’ve been here. I saw Stephen Graham last night. We were going: ‘Look at us! Look at us!”
Whether playing the Gallaghers’ next-door neighbour, Veronica Ball, in Shameless or QC Martha Costello in Silk, Peake brings a certain mettle to her characters. On screen, she is a steely fighter, but the woman in front of me is soft, charming, and self-effacing.
She still worries about money. “I still think: could this be it? You never stop. You never become complacent.” She looks around at her friends, and the money worries increase. “I think most people think if you’ve got a job in television, you’re earning loads and loads of money. But there’s a big disparity between what big stars are earning and what others are.
“Friends my age who are mainly theatre actors, but do a bit of guest telly too, have said to me: ‘I don’t know that I can keep doing this.’”
This anxiety means Peake is always busy and always on. She is embarrassed when she is called several times during our interview, apologising profusely. “I just always worry, have I had my time now?” she repeats.
“I remember a few years ago [in 2022] when I did a few TV series in a row – the drama Anne and then Rules of the Game – and I got a lot of criticism. ‘Oh, Maxine’s always working, she’s always on the telly!’ A glimmer of annoyance ripples in her voice. “At that point, it had been four years since I had [filmed] a telly job.
“It’s interesting being out in LA, though,” she pauses. “I have had a few general meetings with casting people. They know who I am now.”
As well as juggling her own theatre company and a podcast, this June, she stars in Words of War, a biographical film in which she plays the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose investigations brought her to the attention of the state, and who was assassinated in 2006.
She is also set to play the lead in The Last Stand of Mrs Whitehouse in September, a play about the infamous pearl-clutching Mary Whitehouse, who campaigned against what she perceived to be excessive violence, sex and blasphemy on the BBC in the 60s.
As a child, Peake caught the tail end of Whitehouse. “I thought she was just a figure of fun; this slightly dotty old lady who is offended by everything,” she says. “But she was really quite dangerous.”
It is a very modern story; a culture war campaigner who consumes the headlines. “There is so much relevance today, with public figures who have very strong, divisive, hateful views. I see a lot of parallels in the trans question and the abuse directed at the trans community.
“We’re all entitled to an opinion,” she adds. “I respect that. But when you take your opinion to extremes and it starts impacting people’s lives, then you gather an army behind you, it can snowball into something problematic.”
She doesn’t name names, and for good reason. Five years ago, Peake’s outspokenness caused a chasm within the Labour Party. Following an interview in The Independent, Peake was accused of antisemitism after claiming the US police learnt the tactic of “neck-kneeling” from the Israeli secret service. Peake’s statement was denounced by Labour leader Keir Starmer and the Jewish Labour Movement as an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”. The then-shadow education secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who defended Peake, was sacked from the shadow cabinet.
“I am petrified that Reform is going to come in through the back door”, says Peake (Photo: Nick Warner)But being outspoken is nothing new to Peake. When she was 15, her mum moved out of Bolton to live with her new boyfriend. Peake decided to live with her proudly communist grandad instead, who helped form the left-wing values she still holds. As a teenager, she was an active member of the Communist Party, and in 2014, Peake won the first Bolton Socialist Club Outstanding Contribution to Socialism Award for using her platform to oppose the government’s “crippling austerity measures”.
Eleven years later, and even with a Labour Government, Peake is still nervous. “I am petrified that Reform is going to come in through the back door at the next election, if we’re not careful,” she says. “Just look at America. We said Trump would never get in again. We took our eye off the ball. We’re all complicit.
“You can’t just blame the people who voted. Why did they vote that way? Were we trying to stop that from happening? We get very cosy in our lives. We move in our circles, and we think everyone thinks the same. We’ve got to keep looking out for the rest of society. What lies are being sold and taught? What position of fear are they in that they feel this is an option?
“People have disgusting views,” she adds. “I’m not making excuses for bigotry, but I know that from within communities, there is a sense of fear. That fear is generated by those up high.”
When we touch on world politics, Peake is just as fretful. “More than ever, who would ever have thought that we would be in the situation we are?” she says, referring to freedom of speech. “[Last year] was the worst year to be a journalist. The conflict in Gaza has obviously impacted those numbers,” she adds, noting that hundreds of journalists (by some estimates) have been killed during Israel’s military conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “And the idea of truth is getting more precarious in America. We are now in a battle about the truth. It’s crazy, madness.”
But there are glimmers of hope. The recent Netflix series Adolescence, starring Stephen Graham, about a teenage boy who is accused of murder, left her in awe. “Adolescence has changed the face of television,” she says. “It’s extraordinary. Stephen [Graham] said they weren’t trying to make a change, but start a conversation. And that’s what they did.”
Peake knows this is rare. “We’re slightly losing the art of debate, because everything has become so black and white. I’m just hoping that with Adolescence, and shows like Mr Bates vs The Post Office, we can impact society and make a change. ”
Throughout her long career, Peake has worked on manifold projects that shine a light on class inequality and injustice, from Three Girls (about Rochdale’s grooming scandal) to her more recent podcast In It Together, which scrutinises the baffling law of joint enterprise, whereby multiple individuals can be held liable for a crime, even if they didn’t directly commit it.
Over the years, she has learnt that creating social change takes more than just a powerful story. It is part of the reason she co-founded her own theatre company, Maat (Music, Art, Activism and Theatre), in 2023. “We need more investment in arts and culture,” she says. “I really miss the arts programmes, especially on television. They used to give the general public a window into a world that not everyone can afford. They were magazine programmes that showed different arts from around the country; bits of theatre, bits of film. We just don’t celebrate art like that any more. If that doesn’t come to young people’s living rooms, how can they see that it’s a possibility?
“We have to get them young, to get them interested in the business, but reaching children before secondary school is pretty impossible now. The cost of living is off the scale. It means people from low-income backgrounds have absolutely no chance of getting in.”
Even Peake feels uncertain about her career. “I’m definitely in a period where I’m going: Gosh, what’s next?” she says. “I’m 50 now. Who knows what’s around the corner?” She pauses. “If there is anything?”
However, she has no plan to retire quietly in her Herefordshire home with her husband, art director Pawlo Wintoniuk. “When I’m old, I want to be wheeled out now and again for some film. It’s not a job,” she says. “It’s an itch that needs constantly scratching.”
‘Words of War’ is available on digital platforms from 30 June
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