Some people avoid difficult conversations. Theos Director Elizabeth Oldfield seeks them out with her podcast, The Sacred. My introduction to it was at a live event held last week in Bloomsbury, in which Elizabeth interviewed married actors Richard Ayoade and Lydia Fox.

I did not know what to expect. I knew Elizabeth only through a few brief emails, Richard through a fraction of his television work, and Lydia not at all. If I’d had to guess, I would have thought it might be something like Krista Tippett’s long-running American radio program, On Being, a warm, profound conversation about all things faith.

What I got was something quite different, and I’ll admit I was left disappointed, at first. They made a glamorous trio — Lydia in a loose dress, Richard a slim suit, and Elizabeth with perfect red lipstick — but it was not an altogether smooth performance. There were nerves, some long questions, a few halting responses. What was discussed included values, childhoods, how Lydia and Richard met, life in and around the film industry. I kept waiting for the questions and answers to gather momentum into full-blown conversation, a gangly bird stumbling aloft. They never did.

Instead, I was kept on the edge of discomfort throughout, as the interview hopped from stone to stone. After the hour concluded, I was left asking myself, what just happened?

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My first question was: what, if anything, did any of this have to do with the sacred? There was the first question, of course, the one Elizabeth said she always opens with: what is your sacred value? Lydia said love, especially Christian love. Richard said it used to be truth, but now he’s not sure — in fact, he is suspicious of any words he might use to describe a sacred value, suggesting the only way to really know what he or anyone else values is to observe their actions. Not what they say; what they do.

After that, it appeared we were mostly done with the sacred. On to Lydia’s evangelical upbringing in a family of seven (the evangelical part of that very lightly touched). On to Richard’s Norwegian and Nigerian parents and his attendance at a Catholic school. On to how they met at a Cambridge theatre performance (Lydia in the audience, Richard onstage). On to careers, professional choices, the industry. I felt misled. This could have been any celebrity interview. Nothing much about the sacred here at all.

Unless. What is the sacred, anyway? I mean getting beyond the conventional sacred/secular binary, the way we’re supposed to use the terms. I mean the colloquial sacred, as it actually operates in our daily lives in early 21st century Britain. Maybe, with her questions, Elizabeth was getting at something obliquely: that what is sacred are the choices and preoccupations and relationships that shape our lives. That what we do and who we love and the lives we create for ourselves demonstrate most clearly of all what any of us truly holds dear. Underlining Richard’s opening point: that it is our actions that show what we value most. What is sacred are the things we put our heart into.

Maybe that explained Elizabeth’s, to me, surprising focus on Lydia’s acting and Richard’s writing and directing — on pushing them on why they do it, how it feels to be entangled with the film industry in these moments of MeToo and racial reckoning. Because discussing what matters to people, and why, and how, is the revolving door back into and back into that opening question of sacred values.

But that title — The Sacred — was an inescapable presence, no matter how benign some of the questions seemed. It hung over the interview, and I don’t think the conversation ever escaped its shadow. I mean literally — it flickered across the screen behind them throughout — but mostly figuratively. I see it like the Hollywood sign in a haunted house font: big, creaky letters casting long shadows down. That’s a lot of pressure.

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My second thought, after chewing on the question of the sacred for a while, was how unpolished Lydia’s and Richard’s answers were. I do not mean that as a criticism, but as a statement of fact I believe they would agree with. Apparently Lydia rarely gives interviews, apparently Richard is known (at least to himself) as a notably awkward interview, and apparently the two of them had never given a joint interview before.

All reasonable explanations for the lack of polish, which, as I reflected on it, I realised I had found delightful. Not delightful in the sense of being entertaining, but in the sense of being precious. You got the feeling that Lydia and Richard were unused to airing their marriage in public. That their answers to questions of how they met, when they fell for each other, were accustomed to the dimmed pendulum and dancing candles of a dinner party, but not to the spotlights of a theatre. There was a clear sense of how much do we say, how frank can we be, are we here to entertain, are we selling ourselves out somehow, wait, why are we here again?

There is a fear of diluting love by talking about it, of cheapening commitment by going on about it, that I know well from my own marriage, and I think I recognized that here. And in the context of the larger conversation, it left me thinking that may have been one of the most significant things revealed: the sacredness of their marriage, and their esteem for each other. Richard said that Lydia is the reader in his head for every single thing he writes. Lydia, rightfully, went on the attack when an audience member asked if Richard had ever considered becoming a Christian. How do you know he’s not? she asked. Even a wife doesn’t know everything that’s in her partner’s mind and heart.

How do you convey, to a crowd of strangers, while being recorded, on stage, that what you hold most sacred are the things you keep most private?

We are accustomed to thinking of difficult conversations as ones in which the participants will disagree. A Brexiteer and a Remainer. A guy in a MAGA hat and a woman in a Bernie! t-shirt. A reproductive rights activist and an anti-abortion stalwart. Indeed, “difficult conversation” is more often than not a euphemism for “argument,” for those exercises in frustration in which participants just become more and more entrenched in their starting points.

This was a different kind of difficult conversation, one in which the context blurred the already fuzzy line between personal and performative, and the presumed meta-subjects (Religion! Faith! Belief!) clouded each foray into the subjects at hand. It is hard to talk about one’s marriage, family, art. It should be hard. I was wrong to expect polish, the practiced anecdotes shined up for television outings and radio interviews. I should not have been searching for sound bytes. This was different.

It hit me, really, afterward, at the reception, seeing Lydia as a sister and daughter, seeing Richard as an artist carrying the weight of celebrity. I wasn’t planning to write this, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. They were brave. They were honest. They were unstudied. These things so rare they surprised me.

Dr. Laura Premack, formerly Lecturer in Global Religion & Politics at Lancaster University, is working on a collection called Essays Between Belief and Doubt.