Marisa Abela on Back To Black, playing Amy Winehouse and learning to sing professionally

How do you manage to play someone as unique as Amy Winehouse? For Marisa Abela, the 27-year-old British actress who director Sam Taylor-Johnson hired to play the singer in her upcoming biopic, that meant studying Winehouse's musical tastes, watching hours of footage and studying her mannerisms. But if Abela were to actually sing, she would have to do something that Winehouse – who was rarely photographed without a cigarette – would not have approved of. “I actually stopped smoking,” Abela recalls over tea in London. “My singing teacher was happy because you need a sound instrument, but other people in the production were like, 'What did you do?' Just before you play who?'”

It remains to be seen whether this will be seen as a statement of craftsmanship or a betrayal of authenticity by fans and the media, who have been obsessed with Abela's transformation into Winehouse since images of her in costume were released in early 2023. Winehouse was widely revered – George Michael called her “the most soulful singer Britain has ever seen” – and when she died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, aged 27, there was immense sadness. “Dear God, have mercy!!!” Rihanna tweeted from her Blackberry. “This is one of the saddest days of my life,” wrote Winehouse producer Mark Ronson.

The singer-songwriter released two acclaimed studio albums in her short career. The second, Back to black (from which the film takes its title) won a then-record five Grammys at the 2008 awards ceremony. Winehouse's talent and untimely death were celebrated in an Oscar-winning documentary, a statue in her home borough of Camden Town and an exhibition at London's Design Museum. Still, many fans think it's still too early for a biopic.

Abela is compassionate. “These songs accompany you through important moments in your life, and who am I to someone who went through heartbreak with Amy Winehouse?” she says. During the making of the film, Abela struggled with the force of some fans' objections to her. “It was confusing trying to separate my own nervousness and anxiety about being on set from Amy's real vulnerability,” she says. “I had never been so exposed as a person. I felt rough.” Ultimately, she decided to just move on. “You put your work on display and it’s not up to you what people think about it. As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons, you’re on the right path.”

Back to black is Abela's first time wearing a film (she had previously starred in the hit HBO series). Industry and had a small part in it Barbie Film like “Teen Talk Barbie”), but it is the fulfillment of a long-held dream. She grew up near the seaside town of Brighton, England, in a creative family – her father, Angelo Abela, is a director, and her mother, Caroline Gruber, is an actress – and graduated from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. (She now lives in London with her boyfriend Jamie Bogyo, an actor who appears frequently in the West End.) However, this role is her first time singing professionally. By Abela's own admission, her previous singing work largely involved “karaoke night after a few drinks,” but she still impressed Taylor-Johnson with her dedication. “At the audition, she said she couldn’t sing very well,” the director remembers. “The most surprising thing – both for her and for me – was that she ended up singing the entire film. She simply improved and trained tirelessly. I always had the thought in my head that I could dub her with Amy's voice if she couldn't do it, but one day she was singing for music producer Giles Martin and me and I said to him, “I think she can do it.” Do it. I think she can sing the whole movie.' It was amazing.”

Winehouse saw herself as a jazz musician rather than a pop star, so Abela spent two hours a day, four days a week singing Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington – the references that shaped Winehouse's sound. “I never wanted the performance to feel like an imitation,” she says. “I wanted it to feel like I was in touch with her soul. At the beginning I was singing Ella and heard Amy coming. That was really exciting.”

It must have been a reassuring discovery because when they first met Abela, no one thought of the singer. Where Winehouse was irreverent and outspoken, Abela is articulate and composed. She dresses simply for our interview – jeans, a powder blue mohair sweater, a pink manicure and no jewelry – and there's no trace of the distinctive pin-up look that Winehouse made her own. “All the other girls at the casting came in with a certain Amy Winehouse look,” Taylor-Johnson recalls. “Marisa appeared as herself and was just sweet and talkative. There was no cat-eye makeup, headscarf or big earrings. Then I turned the camera on and she said, “Can I have a minute to get ready?” and she sat there quietly. She looked into the lens and in that one moment it was Amy. Immediately, without saying anything, she conveyed Amy's exact mood. It completely shocked me – she didn’t embody them, she embodied them.”

The film meets Winehouse at the age of 19successful and shortly before their debut album, Frankwith the Ivor Novello Award-winning single “Stronger Than Me.” At 22, she fell in love with Blake Fielder-Civil. Their relationship and subsequent marriage were volatile; She drank heavily and followed him into heroin use, which was shockingly documented by the media. Since Fielder-Civil is largely despised by Winehouse's fans – and by her father Mitch, who warned him during their relationship, “Leave my daughter alone, you're killing my daughter” – it was important that the film show why they appeal is for him. He is played with enormous charisma by Jack O'Connell, with whom Abela has a palpable chemistry on screen. “I think part of the reason the dynamic worked between us is because this is a huge job for me – definitely the biggest platform I've ever been on – while Jack is a more established actor,” she says. “Just as Amy looked up at Blake, I was kind of in awe of Jack, and I think we both knew that would be helpful. Plus, he's just really fun. I think he’s just as fun as Amy Blake found.”

This was just one of the ways Abela found to connect to Winehouse's story. “My father left when I was little, like Amy's father, because he had another woman, and I think that has something to do with you – you push against your mother and you want your father's attention, but you're resentful “also about yourself and your parents for it,” she says. She also found a lot of admiration in Winehouse himself. “Amy was a young, proud Jewish woman, which is so cool. I grew up in a village called Rottingdean and was the only Jew in the area, so I wasn’t particularly proud,” she says. “Amy wore this bloody big Star of David in her cleavage – I thought it was sick.”

As Abela watched footage of the singer, she realized that even her mannerisms told a story. “At first she was rambunctious and unafraid to gesture and take up space, but her body language became smaller later in life. I could really imagine: OK, if this is July 2003, she's going to look like this, move like this, feel like this.” To represent the more unhappy moments in the singer's life, Abela lost weight under the supervision of a nutritionist and hormone specialist. “I had three months to get to this point, and then we shot the story almost in reverse chronological order so I could gain the weight back,” she says. “You could have lost a lot during filming. The fact that Amy lived in this body for a significant amount of time says so much about what she went through – a dangerously small body feels very different from being healthy and full of life.”

Creating an authentic appearance for the fans Pressure is enough, but Abela also had to fight with the singer's parents. Mitch and Janis Winehouse are passionate defenders of their daughter's legacy, and their permission was required to use the music, although “there was no permission at all,” says Abela. That may come as a relief to some fans who believe that Winehouse's father exploited her talent for his own gain – in 2005, he dismissed suggestions that she seek treatment for her alcohol addiction, which Winehouse discussed in “Rehab.” Lyrics “Rehab” famously sang: “My dad thinks I’m fine.” Abela isn’t attracted to this dynamic. “We weren’t there to judge the relationships that were most important to Amy,” she says. “We wanted to show life through her eyes, and she loved her father very much.”

Mitch and Janis sometimes visited the set when Abela sang – a complicated experience for the actor who played her daughter. “No matter how much you want to do your job, your primary intention at this point must be to check that they are OK. “It felt strange, but they were very generous.” She pauses. “It made her emotional. I remember Janis once saying, 'I can't believe all these people are here because of my naughty Amy.'” That's unbearably sad. “I know,” says Abela. “But actually it was good to be reminded of the human person, the girl.”

Winehouse's untimely death means she is forever trapped in her childhood. She would have turned 40 in September 2023, and while an early biopic has its critics, it offers a new generation the chance to discover what Winehouse cared most about: music. “With the tragedy involved, it’s easy to remember Amy,” Abela says. “But I hope people go home, put on her albums and remember how good she was – this little girl from Camden with a big voice and a tremendous ability to feel and experience life.”

Top photo credit: Prada coat

Photographs by Luc Coiffait

Styling by Aimee Croysdill

Hair: Anastasia Stylianou

Make-up: Neil Young

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