Born to Cuban parents in France in 1903, Nin was a prolific diarist from childhood, her journals detailing her marriages, friendships and many affairs with literary figures from the period, including psychoanalyst and Sigmund Freud collaborator Otto Frank and American writer Henry Miller. It’s the same sensual world of silks, scents and secrets that Nin conjured up in her erotic writing. The exquisite set design, in carefully curated shades of sunset and Mediterranean turquoise, makes it feel like a stay at the kind of five-star establishment where every detail is taken care of.
We’ve all been reliant on television to provide an escape lately, and if TV shows were travel agents, Little Birds would be at the luxury end of the market. Photograph: Dean Rodgers/Warp Films/Sky UK Products of a confused time … Hugh Skinner as Hugo and Juno Temple as Lucy in Little Birds. “I think it would be a hell of a good time.” “I would definitely want to go and spend a week in the Tangier that we created,” says Temple. They look relaxed and tanned – as if they’ve just come back from an extended break in Morocco, in fact.
Skinner, at home in London, is serving us mid-period Hugh Grant with a romcom-ready fringe Temple, from her Los Angeles porch, is a naturally curly hippy chick with multiple necklaces and a ciggie on the go.
There’s also no need to ask if they’re more laid-back than their well-starched characters it’s all in the hair. “No, we hung out the entire time!” confirms Skinner merrily. Did they try to go method by avoiding contact with each other? “Are you kidding?” cackles Temple. When we connect over Zoom to discuss the show, Temple and Skinner chime in on each others’ anecdotes and enjoy making each other laugh. The actors, by contrast, get along swimmingly. Both of them, in other words, are the repressed products of a confused time. Wedded bliss, and even the marriage’s consummation, will have to wait, however, because Lucy is a naively virginal American debutante and Hugo is a closeted English lord involved in a dangerous romantic entanglement with an Anglo-Egyptian man. I n Little Birds, Sky Atlantic’s sultry new Anaïs Nin-inspired drama series, Juno Temple and Hugh Skinner play Lucy Savage and Hugo Cavendish-Smyth, newlyweds who met in the cultural maelstrom of 1950s Tangier.