Ruth Wilson hitches the skin by her ears to demonstrate how she’d look if she had “those little wires” sewn into her face, by which she means a thread lift. “Just that would make the world of difference,” she says. She is 41 and “everyone” around her talks about Botox “and what to fill their face with”. This is not in response to any question of mine. This is Ruth Wilson freewheeling on how confusing she finds the notion of “female empowerment” in 2023. “As an actress, everyone does it. Very few resist. I haven’t done anything – yet. But it’s in my head as like, ‘Well, do you decide not to and therefore potentially look older than your peers? Or do you just give in?’” Yesterday she read in the New York Times that people should get Botox in their 20s to stop wrinkles forming. “I mean, are they joking? I find it so … ” she emits a plosive exhale of despair. “It’s mad! It’s massive violence.” Why can’t a woman age on screen? Or age, full stop?

But this is nothing new, she says. She sits back against the banquette of the cafe in the photographic studio where we’ve met. Women don’t help ourselves; never have. She plucks examples – Tudor fashion, she says, pretending to cinch her waist with a corset. “Like, humpf.” Or Elizabethans painting their faces with lead-based ceruse that ate their skin and made their hair fall out. “We’re like, ‘Wow’, today. But in 200 years, they’ll be looking back at images of women now going, ‘What were they doing?’ ‘What is that? You’re blowing your face and lips up.’ Yet it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. And women are part of that industry, perpetuating this ‘empowerment’.” Later, she will apply the same charm and forthright common sense to torpedo Hollywood.

I should say Botox is usually a no-go area in interviews. Best case, it’s tiptoed around. After all, what film star wants to discuss having “work”? Or, come to think of it, late-stage capitalism and the female form – a subject Wilson has already torn through at 8.30am on this otherwise sluggish Friday. But then, Wilson likes to march into no-go areas. Often with a placard. She took a stand on equal pay before it was fashionable. Ditto exploitation around sex scenes, the reason – allegedly – for her abrupt departure from Showtime’s The Affair (starring alongside Dominic West), of which more later. Wilson is not just brave, she’s heat-seeking. Her mother frequently reminds her that she was always looking for something to fight for. “At university, I was going, ‘Guys, shouldn’t we be protesting?’ But it was 20 years ago, there was nothing going on. Fees, maybe. That was it.” Her favourite piece of life advice? “When everyone goes right, go left.”

You could argue daring and adventurousness are visible streaks through the characters she picks. She stormed into our consciousness as Alice Morgan, the psychopath in Luther (“A role I’d never seen on screen before. I mean, you had to go back 50 years”). There was Mrs Coulter, the merciless antagonist in His Dark Materials (“The best pieces are when you don’t quite know why she’s doing what she’s doing”). On stage she has tackled roles that go to the edge of the abyss: Hedda Gabler, King Lear, The Human Voice.

She is drawn to parts that explore how women think, she says. “What’s this person like in their own head, in their own idea of themselves?” To that end, she played her real-life grandmother in the BBC’s Mrs Wilson (a woman unaware of her husband’s three other wives and five other children). Then there was True Things (2021), which she both produced and starred in as Kate, a woman confusing limerence with love, madly projecting on to an iffy, impulsive ex-con she meets when he goes to the benefits office where she works.

Her next role is in The Second Woman at the Young Vic, a gruelling 24-hour performance that consists of a single scene repeated 100 times on a loop, 4pm until 4pm. While Wilson stays in the role of Virginia, successive actors – old, young, professional, amateur – will play her long-term lover Marty as he is breaking up with her. The scene is lifted from the fictional play in the John Cassavetes film Opening Night (1977) and takes place in Virginia’s sitting room, Marty arriving and apologising for “being so crude”. He carries a takeaway. He fixes them drinks. They sit down to eat. “You don’t think I’m capable,” Virginia says. “And that’s what I want to be; I want to be capable.”

Wilson has not rehearsed with or even met any of the actors (screened and auditioned by the theatre), which is the whole point, she says, because how the scene unfolds over seven or so minutes hangs on each Marty’s interpretation of the script. “The result is far from simple,” the Guardian’s reviewer said when The Second Woman was first performed by its creators Anna Breckon and Nat Randall in Sydney in 2017: “[It is] a stunning exposure of gendered power relations and emotional coercion.”

One Australian Marty upturned furniture. One grabbed Virginia’s face – that Virginia was played by Randall in a Kinskiesque blond wig and red dress – forcing her to look at him. The audience gasped. “It really shows how different men interpret masculinity and how they feel they need to perform their masculinity,” another Marty said afterwards. Alongside the stage, cameras are used to project closeups on screen, allowing the audience in real time to read even micro-flickers of emotion in the actors’ expressions; what Cassavetes termed “the small feelings”.

I ask Wilson how the hell she’s going to stay up for more than 24 hours. “Literally, I have no idea. I’ve done it before enhanced by something – you know, when I was young – but,” she shrugs. “Anna and Nat said, ‘Red Bull for the last six hours.’” Adrenaline will do the rest. But, “It’s in extreme situations that you [usually] stay up all night, and what tiredness does to you is interesting.” It’s raw at 3am when the words mean nothing any more, and she hopes the artifice of performance will crumble away and create “surprise moments of truth, or spontaneity. Something that feels ‘real’ in the exchange. The men will always come on, and I will not know what they’ll bring.” The audience have the option of going in for a few scenes, for a few hours, or staying all night. Wilson gets a loo break every couple of hours. “It’s not just me, the audience are getting a really weird experience, too. It’s like a gallery experience.”

Wilson is nothing if not ambitious for her audience. She wants them challenged, not pandered to or spoon-fed. “Discomfort is important in art,” she argues. She’ll never forget her own epiphany watching the Caryl Churchill play Here We Go at the National. “It was about death. I couldn’t breathe, it was so suffocating to watch. It was extraordinary, and it’s never left me. Yet it got one or two stars and people walked out. I think back: brilliant, you made people so uncomfortable they had to leave. I think it’s important to face things you don’t want to see. Because only then will you grow. Only then will you live properly.”

At heart, this is everything Wilson believes: art should change the way you think. Art should change your life. Art can save you. Wilson wants her work to be art.

* * *

Ruth Wilson grew up in Shepperton, Surrey, with three brothers and a black labrador called Seb, who was so loved that Wilson’s mother, Mary, mused that he might one day be stuffed and mounted on the kitchen wall. Wilson’s father, Nigel, worked in the City and, later, when the children were older, Mary trained as a probation officer. Wilson was a sporty tomboy, always speaking up. Aged 11 she took her Usborne Facts of Life book to her all-girls Catholic school and informed the nuns that pupils needed sex education. She was, she admits, “quite annoying”: frequently pestering, arguing, demanding to know why certain things could not be discussed. Always, “I spoke my mind”, she says. At the same time, she acknowledges with the tired sigh of a veteran looking back across a battle-scarred field, that to be like this, “means that you’ll always slightly rub people up the wrong way. Or slightly be an outsider.”

Her “go left” approach meant that as a teenager she never had her ears pierced – “definitely a stand against what every one of my friends was doing”. Rather than take the bus or be driven by parents, she rode a moped to school. A distinct memory, she told one newspaper, was the sudden awareness of being gawped at by boys and her “burgeoning sexuality”. In one short year between 15 and 16, she went from wearing hot pants to baggy jeans and big T-shirts. “I didn’t know how to negotiate it, so I started dressing like a boy. I felt like it was a way of disappearing slightly, to avoid that gaze.”

She studied first at Nottingham, where she read history, and then at drama school. She was six months out of Lamda when she landed Jane Eyre in the BBC adaptation (and was subsequently nominated for a Bafta and Golden Globe). From there, her career soared. There was a chain of Hollywood movies, stage in London and New York. She won Oliviers for Anna Christie and her portrayal of Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and with the accolades the scrutiny returned. It wasn’t enough that she was a great actor. Or even that she was very pretty. Her looks were picked apart. She’d been teased about her Jack Nicholson eyebrows since school. Now she read that her lips were a result of too much collagen, and was stunned. She was forced to defend herself. They are au naturel, a family trait, her cousin has the same. I ask if it’s true she rarely looks in the mirror. “Well, I do,” she says, “but briefly. I don’t think it’s because I’m self-conscious or disappointed by it, but more that for some reason I don’t take the face into consideration. Before I leave the house, I look at my outfit, my body, see if it all works but I often forget to check my face and hair. I am not sure what the psychology of that is.”

Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the idea of preening on social media makes her physically recoil. In some respects, Instagram would be useful – somewhere her fanbase could find her smaller projects, for instance. But the very idea fills her with dread. She dramatises an imaginary feed: “Oh, heyyy guys. It’s Ruth Wilson herrre.” Then shudders. “The self is so important on social media, it’s created a very narcissistic society. Everyone is their own famous person; everyone can be the centre of their own world.” She jabs a finger at her phone. “But it isn’t human. It’s a constructed world. It lacks actual connection or feeling.”

What’s more, she’s watched friends become “obsessed. You can’t have a conversation because they’re looking for the next shot. Everything is, ‘What can I put out there?’ When they don’t get hits, they feel low, not validated.” She clicks her tongue at the performative feminism, the performative activism; the fact that everyone rushes to post on national whatever-whatever day. “Nothing is real. I don’t believe any of it. No one has real or strong beliefs. They are just dictated to.”

Quite apart from anything, being a slave to her phone would intrude on the things she loves best – “thinking. Just thinking” is one. She has a “restless mind”. Also, reading. Her mother sends book recommendations, as does Ryan Selzer, her producing partner (who discovered the book on which they based True Things). Most mornings she blasts through the news feeds – FT, New York Times, the New Yorker, Guardian, Daily Mail. “I’ll look at everything.”

She has talked about her loft-style flat in Bermondsey, south London, and how she loves the proximity to theatres, but also running along the river, enjoying Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben. The only complication is that her boyfriend lives in New York. “He writes novels, TV and film,” she says, adding that that is all I’m allowed to know. “I don’t say his name,” she explains. “He’s anonymous.” Yes, she’s happy to take flak for this insistence on privacy and jokes: “People think he doesn’t exist.” She’s talked about marriage – she’s not a fan. And about wanting children and freezing her eggs. “But I want to keep some part of me for my loved ones and for me.”

A glance at press reports from across the length of her career reveal constant speculation over her romantic life, including just about every actor she’s worked with – Jake Gyllenhaal, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Joshua Jackson. It’s all rubbish, she has said. She appeared in The Lone Ranger (2013) with Depp but barely had a scene with him. She tells me now: “I knew his security dudes better than I knew him.”

Another subject that still nettles is The Affair. She won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Alison Bailey, a grieving mother who embarks on an affair with West’s Noah Solloway, a married father of four. Wilson has always been frank about her feelings about the shagathon storyline. To the Evening Standard, she said: “Dom and I had to do so many sex scenes and I decided at one point I wasn’t going to show my nipples any more”; to the Sun: “Why have I always got to do the orgasm face? There should be a male orgasm face.” But she also said – and maintains to this day – that she couldn’t discuss her departure in any way, shape or form.

Then in late 2019 an exposé in the Hollywood Reporter said what Wilson had been prevented from saying anything by a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA (essentially gagging orders, which seek to restrict the publication of certain information). The Reporter alleged that the set was “a hostile work environment” and that her complaints at the regularity and unnecessary nature of the naked scenes meant that she was branded “difficult”. The paper reported that, during season two, “Wilson declined to shoot an aggressive sex scene that involved her being pushed up against a tree at a yoga retreat by co-star Dominic West. ‘It was rapey,’ a source told the Reporter. ‘Ruth was very unamused by it.’” According to the article, some of the greatest pressure to perform these scenes allegedly came from another woman, the series showrunner, Sarah Treem.

They quote insiders with “first-hand knowledge of production” accused Treem of “tone-deafness” when it came to “recognising the position she was putting actors in”. The source said: “Over and over again, I witnessed Sarah Treem try to cajole actors to get naked even if they were uncomfortable or not contractually obligated to.” Pressure came in the form of repeated coaxing: “Everyone is waiting for you”; “You look beautiful”, (to allay potential shyness). “It’s things you would think would be coming out of a man’s mouth from the 1950s,” the source said. “The environment was very toxic.” Treem responded that she’d done “everything I could think of to make [Wilson] feel comfortable with these scenes”. She also said: “I would never say those things to an actor. That’s not who I am. I am not a manipulative person, and I’ve always been a feminist.”

Is there ever a place for an NDA? “No,” Wilson says. “I don’t think there should be any NDAs. If there’s a problem, there’s a problem. It needs to be dealt with, not put under NDA so you can’t speak about it.” She reminds me they were the go-to weapon of the Harvey Weinstein era. “It was a given that you had to sign those things … Even if you were like, ‘What? Really?’ They were like, ‘That’s the way it works.’” Ten years ago, the whole industry “was complicit – agents, producers, PR people – in protecting the powerful. #MeToo was significant because it was unravelling that.”

Standing on that hinge between pre- and post-#MeToo was, Wilson says, “extraordinary. To actually witness Hollywood” – she makes a whistling sound – “shift like that.” The most disappointing aspect was the volte-face hypocrisy. “To see the survival instinct. You realise how fickle that industry is. There’s no moral backbone.” Attitudes, habits, the way people spoke changed, yes – but only out of fear of being caught. “People were like, ‘We’re going to have a meeting about how badly we’ve behaved and then we’ll all be fine.’ It blew my mind.

“It made me understand a whole swathe of human behaviour. So many people don’t really believe anything – only what makes them money.” Weinstein knew “how to get people Oscars”, so his behaviour was ignored. “They’re opportunists. You see that. But it makes you sage about what you want, what’s important. Do you want to live in that world? Or would you prefer to be doing something else, like this weird 24-hour play, where you can explore things in a safe environment?”

Today, Wilson says she is resigned to the capricious nature of the sisterhood. Her argument is that women are people and therefore no more or less likely to be supportive of each other. “To expect them all to be supporting each other is kind of unrealistic.” Part of the reason she is perplexed by cosmetic surgery is that it’s a mixed message: “selling empowerment” by telling women to change themselves. So, no, she doesn’t like it. But the cycle of ingrained misogyny repeats partly because women are “trained to judge. Trained to be in groups. I’m amazed how, as we grow up and go into adult environments, so much of it still feels like a school playground with the popular group or whatever.”

Two days after our interview, I watch Wilson on stage at the Southbank Centre. She’s one of three actors performing a reading from the writer Max Porter’s latest work, Shy. It’s interesting, not least because Shy is a 16-year-old boy living in 1995 and the book is written in the 167bpm rhythm of a drum’n’bass track. Afterwards, in an animated interview – the two are friends – Wilson asks Porter: “When are you going to write a fucked-up female?” It’s an exchange of weighty ideas about form, stretching language and energising storytelling, and also light teasing (Porter reveals that Wilson recorded a chunk of her Audible of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the loo).

This is her safe environment, among artists who challenge. I’m not surprised that Katharine Hepburn – who won Oscars, but “paid no heed to the awards system” – is one of Wilson’s heroines. “I love her. What a legend.” She didn’t play the Hollywood game? “No. And I’m useless at playing the game. I don’t want to play the game. Like, what game? What does that even mean? That’s my answer. I can’t. I physically can’t.”

• The Second Woman is at the Young Vic, London, co-produced with LIFT, on Friday 19 May, at 4pm. Tickets are available on the door only.