There’s a thick pool of shiny yellow goo on the ground outside Jane Goldman’s Camden office, as if an alien has been sick. She answers the door and has a look herself, perplexed.

A cynical person might suspect she set this up, this otherworldly substance on an unassuming side street. Since her screenwriting debut with 2007’s fairytale romp Stardust she has written films about the fantastical meeting the ordinary: Kick-Ass (kid with no powers becomes superhero), The Woman in Black (man gets haunted by a vengeful spirit), Kingsman: The Secret Service (petty criminal becomes superspy), Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children (kid meets paranormal prodigies).

She doesn’t know what the golden goo is, and, besides, it’s not really her office. She usually writes in the one at the end of her garden, but that’s being renovated, so she’s here for a bit, at the modest headquarters of a production company. She has made it her own though – a games console lies on the carpet, and there are books on The Walking Dead and World Of Warcraft, as well as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography.

She loves Ackroyd’s work, and her new film, The Limehouse Golem, is an adaptation of his Victorian thriller Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem, another story about a distorted reality, featuring a series of grisly murders attributed to a supernatural beast. Goldman has made a central character of John Kildare (Bill Nighy), a detective mentioned only briefly in the novel, but it’s really about Lizzie Cree (Olivia Cooke), a complex, multifaceted music-hall performer who suffered an abusive upbringing and is accused of murdering her husband, despite an eclectic array of suspects on the loose (including, bizarrely, Karl Marx).

Goldman’s 2016 film, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Photograph: FOX/PR

The screenplay “wasn’t meant to be a gender-political statement,” says Goldman, vaping away on the sofa, but such issues bubbled under – in that era, women had no power, with men deciding what was best for them. In her final draft, she found herself bringing the theme to the fore.

“Weirdly, I think I’d evolved as a person,” she says. “I had, I think quite deliberately, evaded that [subject] when I first wrote it. And then a couple of years passed and my two daughters both came of age, they became extremely passionate feminists. And that aspect became more interesting to me to explore, and really important.”

Had she developed more of a feeling of social responsibility? “Yeah, absolutely. Women who grew up in my generation [Goldman was born in 1970] were conditioned to look back at things that were bad and say: ‘Well, it was a different time.’ Often, when my daughters expressed outrage about things that had happened in the past, I’d go: ‘Well, it was a different time, not that it’s OK, it’s terrible.’ But seeing things through the eyes of their generation, it’s like, no, you know what? A lot of the reason why things continued being not great for women were because we were all conditioned to say: ‘Ah well, shit happens.’ I had anecdotes that I thought were funny, about stuff that had happened to me, but my daughters responded to them by saying: ‘What, you mean you were sexually assaulted?’ I’d be like, wow, I had always told that as a funny story about the time some guy stuck his hand down my dress while I was waiting for a taxi. Mainly, because the guy in question was out of -” She names the band that included the man who molested her, then suggests we don’t print it. The point, though, is that the band lent the incident a sort of absurdity that lead her to recount it humorously. Not any more. “I thought: ‘No, hang on; I should be as outraged as [my daughters] are.’”

Janet McTeer and Daniel Radcliffe in Goldman’s 2012 movie The Woman In Black. Photograph: Productio/Kobal/REX

We talk about recontextualising such experiences – it took her a while, she says – but now she has done so, it’s feeding into her work. “Because actually, in a society where a 16-year-old getting groped by a dude, while she’s waiting for a taxi, is considered a funny anecdote, I’m contributing by telling it like that. I suddenly realised, actually I do have a part to play.”

Her new perspective influenced The Limehouse Golem, in how she portrays Lizzie and the male characters, whether ghoulish or good. And other social politics were at play, too. In the book, there is a passing mention of Kildare’s homosexuality, and Goldman included it in the script, deeming it to be important – maybe, she thinks, Kildare relates to Lizzie because he knows how it feels to be judged by society.



Originally, Alan Rickman was cast as Kildare, and during a meeting with Goldman he gave her “a really useful contribution” regarding a moment in which the character’s sexuality is brought up, making the scene less confrontational, more sympathetic. Yet some suggested it needn’t be mentioned at all. Goldman fought for it.

“Everyone was going: ‘But how does it affect the plot?’ I said: ‘I’m sorry, why does who he wants to sleep with have to affect the plot?’ The more people asked why he had to be gay, the more I was like: ‘Why the fuck shouldn’t he be?’”

Even when Rickman became ill, he was still determined to do the film, but his condition steadily worsened and it became impossible. “It was just heartbreaking,” says Goldman. “Quite apart from the film – it’s just a film – but the loss of a lovely man.” Rickman was pleased that Nighy, whom he knew well, was stepping in. The film is dedicated to Rickman, and his spirit is there in Kildare, says Goldman.

Such character notes are essential for her – she says she wouldn’t have done the Kingsman sequel, which she has co-written with director Matthew Vaughn, without new themes to explore. The first film was about hoodlum-turned-gent Eggsy trying to fit in; this one has him struggling to balance his life with the demands of the job, potentially sacrificing relationships for the colder reality he thought he wanted.

Hit-Girl, the 11-year-old potty-mouthed heroine in Kick-Ass. Photograph: c.Lions Gate/Everett / Rex Features

But, Goldman says she needs that hook. She’s not interested in writing another film about Hit-Girl, Kick-Ass’s 11-year-old potty-mouthed heroine. In lieu of a third Kick-Ass film, after the second failed to inspire a trilogy, there has been talk of a solo Hit-Girl outing instead. “In terms of exploring a young woman who’s really great at fighting, that’s not particularly my thing,” she says. “The thing that felt to me subversive and original and incredible about Hit-Girl was to be able to have a physical female lead who was great at fighting, but it wasn’t sexualised. It says a lot of tragic things about our society that the only way she could be not sexualised was by being 11. But that’s the grim reality, folks.”

Goldman does hope, however, that her adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca will be made – she loved the book growing up, and has been attached to a new production for a few years. She is drawn to the story’s moral ambiguity. “And actually,” she says, “it would be an interesting challenge to make it right now, because I think we’re still at that stage with female characters where they’re not really allowed to be flawed.”

There are myriad exceptions, she says – she loves Alice Lowe’s work – but generally she thinks that writers, trying to improve on the work of previous generations, are inclined to make female characters “physically powerful, utterly moral, heroic. They can be sneaky, but only in the cause of absolute righteousness. And I like the complexity of the second Mrs De Winter,” she says of Rebecca’s female lead. “Your feelings towards her change the whole time. And when you root for her you feel slightly dirty. You really question yourself afterwards.”

She’s visibly excited. It’s contagious.

• The Limehouse Golem is in cinemas on 1 September; Kingsman: The Golden Circle is in cinemas 20 September