Joanna Lumley dishes on Ghost Story for Christmas: “I’m not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories”

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When TopMob came to the set of the Christmas ghost story, ‘The Room in the Tower,’ Dame Joanna Lumley was filming a key scene, and looked completely different thanks to amazing makeup.

Only when the cameras stopped rolling could you tell it was really her, thanks to her rich, distinctive voice, even with all the makeup on.

She admitted she enjoys a good scare, but isn’t a fan of excessive gore. She really loves stories that are genuinely frightening.

Perhaps it’s fitting, considering her experience with horror films. In the 1973 Hammer horror movie The Satanic Rites of Dracula, where Christopher Lee played Dracula and schemed to wipe out mankind, Lumley portrayed Jessica Van Helsing, who frequently screamed as the count pursued her.

This year, she played Morticia’s mother, Hester, in the Netflix series Wednesday, and also reprised her role as the delightfully outrageous Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous. Joanna Lumley jokes that Patsy is indestructible, surviving on a diet of air, alcohol, cigarettes, and whatever else she can find.

She’s now added another chilling story to her collection: an adaptation of an EF Benson tale by Mark Gatiss, the writer known for his Sherlock series. This is Gatiss’s eighth festive ghost story. Tobias Menzies stars as a man plagued by a repeating dream of a terrifying house, and Penelope Lumley plays the house’s unsettling owner.

She’s a spiritual person, believing in God or a higher power. She loves classical music and feels fortunate to be married to a musician, Stephen Barlow, as she constantly learns from him. She believes in a kind of creative inspiration she calls ‘the divine spark’.

She continued with passion, explaining that Mozart composed his music with almost no mistakes. It was like he was a channel for something truly special. The same was true of Haydn. When you listen to their music, you can feel that powerful inspiration. These great artists all believed in a higher power, a sense of spirituality, and she feels that losing that connection today is a real loss.

We’ve become excessively self-absorbed and harmful, and we seem unable to control our destructive tendencies. If another species were to record our history, we’d likely be seen as a devastating infestation – constantly multiplying, consuming resources, and never giving back.

We’re not a great group of people, honestly. That’s why we need to work hard to be better, to fix the harm humans have caused to each other and to the Earth.

That leads us to the topic of Christmas. Joanna Lumley enjoys the holiday season, but she dislikes how early the celebrations begin. She jokes that if she were in charge, she’d make everyone wait until mid-December to start Christmas festivities!

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2025-11-25 15:06