Ever wondered what would happen if the patriarchy was flipped on its head?
Brand new TV series The Power – adapted from Naomi Alderman’s bestselling novel of the same name – looks at just this concept.
Both the book and TV show tell the story through the eyes of women around the world who have developed the ability to emit electrical currents from their hands, disrupting and reversing the power dynamics between men and women.
Starring Toni Collette as a politician who becomes entrenched in the dystopian matriarchy that follows, The Power may be a slight departure from reality, but it draws on some all-too-real issues when it comes to misogyny and the policing of women’s bodies.
Ria Dmitrowicz plays Roxy, a tough-but-tortured woman who discovers her “power” in a time of intense rage and grief. The star is no stranger to telling complex stories from a female perspective, having starred in ITV’s Three Girls back in 2017 – a TV series based on true events. She played a young woman, Amber, who has been sex trafficked and has to relive her ordeal in a courtroom.
According to Ria, the central message of The Power is that “power itself corrupts, regardless of gender”. She sat down with GLAMOUR to talk working alongside some of the best female directors in the business, the empathy and “shorthand” that was created on set and the catharsis she felt playing such a powerful, complicated character.
What do you think sets The Power apart from other TV series about women, what attracted you to it?
I think the show is very humanising for women, because it’s showing them as just as complicated and complex as men. Anything else is infantilising to women. We’ve got really complex female characters – Roxy does do questionable things, but you can’t help but root for her.
Your character Roxy is an absolute force, but at her centre there’s so much grief and anger to contend with. What was that like to play? Was it easy to access those kinds of emotions?
It was amazing to jump into those emotional depths – and I didn’t do it alone. We we had an all-female directing team, and I think that brought a level of authenticity and detail to the work.
We filmed during Covid, so we worked with one director in the morning and one in the afternoon. So it was like an acting bootcamp – you had to go really quickly from the rhythms of one director to the rhythms of another. Working with Shannon Murphy [an Emmy award-winning director who worked on Killing Eve] was amazing, she really helped me to find this feral energy that Roxy has.
I also worked a lot on the inner kind of psychological stuff that she’s going through with a different director – hopefully it makes for a more like nuanced kind of performance because we’re jumping in with very different styles from directors.