Claire Foy calls out ‘pressure’ to be solely-positive mother to her daughter

Claire Foy has explained how she shuns the “pressure” to be seen as a solely-positive mother who plays with her child for “24 hours a day”.

The Emmy Award winner, who played Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of The Crown, has a six-year-old daughter, named ivy Rose, with her ex-husband, the actor Stephen Cambell Moore.

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK, Foy, 37, pointed out her issues with the concept of being an ideal version of a mother.

“There’s this pressure to be this cake-baking, fun, playing 24-hours-a-day mother – being some sort of vehicle for entertainment, love and food,” she said.

“I’m just prepared to apologise for who I am: ‘I am so sorry, but you’re lumped with me. This is the hand you’ve been dealt, let’s try to make the best of it’.”

Elsewhere, Foy, who will be awarded at Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year awards ceremony on Tuesday (2 November), criticised the notion that playing a supporting wife or mother in films or TV shows does women a disservice.

“It’s to underestimate the fact that women have, for centuries, been wives and mothers, and still are,” she said. “That’s denying our entire history of what it means to be a woman.”

Foy, who played Janet Armstrong, the wife of astronaut Neil, in 2018 film First Man, added: “I’m interested in what she’s doing, what she thinks, what she believes. I don’t ever want to say I’m never playing a part that is supporting, or someone’s wife, because they exist.

“If you can give them a voice, you should, instead of just making all these female characters that are basically just men but look like women – the superhero women who can fly, punch men in the face, that sort of stuff.”